1000 Word Excerpt and TOC

1000-WORD EXCERPT
Earl Creps
Off-Road Disciplines: Spiritual Adventures of Missional Leaders (Jossey-Bass/Leadership Network, 2006)
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Nuclear War and Other Problems: The Cultural Paradigm Crashes

I learned early in life that the world is a very serious place. My parents seemed more worried than normal, not surprising given the news reports about the Soviets having positioned nuclear missiles in Cuba for a sneak attack on the United States. Later I would learn to call this episode the “Cuban Missile Crisis”—just one of many crises in my Cold War childhood. In school, we pored over creased copies of Life magazine searching the photographs and drawings for clues that might explain why the end of the world was at hand. Living in Pittsburgh, the home of the American steel industry at the time, we knew that somewhere on a wall in the Kremlin there hung a map with a red bull’s-eye printed on our zip code. Of course, a sixth grader doesn’t really possess the coping skills for an apocalypse, so our elementary school tried to ease the stress with a strategy something like a nuclear fire drill. Under our teacher’s direction, we filed out of our home room into the long linoleum corridor. Our defensive doctrine required the student body to be formed into a human phalanx by lining up half a dozen twelve-year-olds so close to the wall that their foreheads touched the cool beige tile. The rest of us each put a forearm across the shoulders of one of these anchor students, and then rested our forehead on it. This process continued until every student’s forehead-on-forearm combination connected to the shoulder blades of another student to form a rough square about five sixth graders on a side. Oliver, Jeff, Wendy, and the others practiced the atomic phalanx with me over and over, until forming a bomb shelter made of flesh required little effort. To add emphasis to our training, we froze for a moment in the forehead-on-forearm position, as if bowing our heads together in a moment of mass prayer, last rites for the atomic age. The idea behind the phalanx seemed simple: if enough sixth graders assembled, a few of us in the middle of the formation might survive the blast and heat produced by the first shower of ICBMs. After that, I guess we were all on our own. Eventually, our bomb-shelter-made-of-skin exercise started to get to me. Even as a twelve-year-old, I knew too much—too much Life magazine. Everything ended after a full-scale nuclear exchange. It was flash—agony—darkness. In fact, the temporary survivors inherited the worst of it, so why rehearse fantasy defensive scenarios? If the Nike missiles and Delta fighters that guarded the skies over our city missed even one inbound Soviet weapon, our pitiful student formations only rearranged the casualties. The truth arrived, like a sneak attack, several years later: somewhere, someone with authority believed that, if the worst happened, sixth graders should at least be melted into the linoleum in perfectly straight lines. Proper “deportment,” as our teachers called good conduct in those days, demanded compliance to the very end. Like Dorothy and her friends in the Wizard of Oz, my glimpse of the man behind the curtain changed everything. The people I trusted (parents, teachers, presidents) asked us to face Armageddon wearing armor with only two layers, polyester and skin, while they hid like Dr. Strangelove in bunkers beneath mountain ranges. From their hideouts, in a fit of rage or a moment of miscalculation, they might even end the world I counted on them to maintain. The phalanx exercises served to keep us all distracted and deceived, preempting any questioning of their motives or their right to lead. The madness of it all began my personal postmodern turn, otherwise known as the sixties. The trauma of the human bomb shelter concealed a gift. The society I knew as the ground of all being looked different to me now, filled with contradictions, flaws, and corruptions. Blind devotion to the values of conservative, modern, Anglo suburbia began to feel like dedication to the idea of a flat earth. Ironically, Christians question me at times about the danger of the Church being corrupted by twenty-first-century culture, fearing dilution of the gospel and erosion of our values. The human bomb shelter experience tells me that our culture of origin (COO for short) already grips our lives in ways so subtle that Christians may actually embrace them as part of the gospel itself. However, attempting to exorcise the influence of our COO means either trying to live as something we are not (I am a suburban, Anglo male, and always will be) or using the look of another culture as the wardrobe for the same heart. This kind of superficial rebadging shows up at every conference I attend in the form of older leaders in buzz cuts and tattoos. Whenever you catch yourself wincing you’re probably looking at one of them. By contrast, missional leaders understand that their COO is only one way of being among many others, with both positive and negative elements; they know that our real “citizenship is in heaven.”3 The pain of realization shows me the shortcomings and sins of my culture, revealing it as constructed on earth and not received from heaven. This truth allows me to love culture without being owned by it, to say with Paul that, “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”4 A missional life, then, means living as an inside-outsider, “not of the world any more than He /Jesus/ is of the world.”5 Although the traumas that challenge our cultural paradigms vary greatly, each one affords an opportunity to bring my COO to the cross, revealing its true nature and creating the opportunity for God to renew me by making it more difficult to confuse my culture with his mission.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: Off-Road Disciplines

Part 1 – Personal Disciplines

Chapter 1 Death: The Discipline of Personal Transformation
Chapter 2 Truth: The Discipline of Sacred Realism
Chapter 3 Perspective: The Discipline of POV
Chapter 4 Learning: The Discipline of Reverse Mentoring
Chapter 5 Witness: The Discipline of Spiritual Friendship
Chapter 6 Humility: The Discipline of Decreasing

Part 2 – Orgnaizational Disciplines

Chapter 7 Assessment: The Discipline of Missional Efficiency
Chapter 8 Harmony: The Discipline of Blending Differences
Chapter 9 Reflection: The Discipline of Discernment
Chapter 10 Opportunity: The Discipline of Making Room
Chapter 11 Sacrifice: The Discipline of Surrendering Preferences
Chapter 12 Legacy: The Discipline of Passing the Baton

Epilogue: Three Coffee Houses

[Download the Introduction, TOC, and cover at: http://www.leadnet.org/DownloadFile.asp?ID=397&Type=Books]