My dog, Snuggles, communicates very effectively. When she’s out of water, she paws relentlessly at her water bowl and whines as if she hasn’t had a drink in a week. When she needs to go outside, she scratches the door as if to say, “Is anyone listening? This is getting serious!” She can communicate what appears to be happiness and has an uncanny way of “lying low” when she’s done something wrong. No doubt about it: Snuggles can communicate.
There is also no doubt that I’ve never once had a creative conversation with Snuggles—one that would lead to new vistas of creativity or vision. Not once have we together questioned our callings or wrestled with destiny. We can’t share a longing for a deeper experience of reality or a transformation of our current situations. She just can’t go there. Communicate? Yes. Dialogue? Hardly.
As human beings we’ve been given the gift of dialogue. This gift goes beyond the simple communication level of Snuggles and enables us to create something of meaning and purpose through conversation. Yet this gift has been largely ignored in recent years, especially in the church. It’s as if we’ve settled for the communication level of Snuggles, when so much more is possible.
Too many church communities and leadership teams are stuck in cyclical chats that rehash yesterday’s news or rehearse tomorrow’s troubles. But deep down, we’re all weary of these chats, and we’re hungry for something more. The aim of this book is to reignite the gift of dialogue, which by God’s grace will open you and your community to God’s possibilities for your church. My desire is to equip you with the skills you will need to turn this kind of creative communication into a reliable and trustworthy practice.
Although this book is about dialogue, it’s far more than a collection of communication “tips and techniques.” It’s also a book that invites leaders and members of churches to reconsider how vision is discovered and expressed. A lot of noise has been made in recent years about the postmodern transition afoot in our culture and about how the vision of churches must change in response to that transition. But most of this noise has not yet translated into much tangible transformation. The ideas in this book will help you move from noise to implementation.
Getting the Most Out of This Book
Some books are best read in community. This is that kind of book. To read this book alone is to miss the underlying idea conveyed in its pages. From cover to cover, the clarion call is an invitation to dialogue. But it’s more. Discovering Your Church’s Future Through Dynamic Dialogue is designed to enable teams and other groups of people in your church to explore and discover vision through the doorway of conversation. The first four chapters will help you understand and apply the concepts of dynamic dialogue, while the second half of the book walks you through five critical issues all churches must converse about if they are to thrive: mission, ministry, motion, money, and method.
A book on dialogue wouldn’t be complete without offering significant
and specific means by which to enter the conversation. Woven into each chapter are two ways to ignite real conversation: conversation starters and “experiencercises.”
Conversation starters are designed to get the energy of your team or community moving toward dialogue. Don’t feel that you have to answer every question I’ve provided. Think of the questions as on-ramps to ideas and concepts that are important to your team or community. The conversation starters are meant to help you, not box you in, so
use them as you see fit. However, I would not recommend skipping them altogether. This book is meant to encourage conversation and help it to flourish. And the questions are designed to assist in this process. Use them as you see fit—but use them.
Experiencercises are group exercises designed to instigate creative conversation. Each exercise is intended to create a dynamic experience within the group, which is the starting point of dialogue. The experience that each exercise generates will inform the group about its strengths and weaknesses as a team of creative conversationalists.
The experiences that emerge from the exercises will be different for each group. Like the conversation starters, the exercises are only on-ramps to the experience. The experiencercises are critical to this book because they help groups understand how to take conversation beyond talk and make it an emergent experience in itself. (An emergent experience is one that may unfold within certain “planned perimeters,” but it always yields unexpected ideas, principles, and wisdom.)
Each chapter will include experiencercises that bring the content of the chapter home in a unique way. I encourage you to take the experiencercises seriously (and have fun with them) and to be very intentional about including them in your group’s time together. Each experiencercise can expand or contract in length depending on how much time you have. Don’t eliminate the experiencercise because of time; simply reduce the amount of time you give it. Some of the experiencercises will require a facilitator. When that is the case, I will provide a few thoughts for facilitation.
My hope is that together we will discover authentic dialogue at every level of our church communities: between leaders and members, leaders and other leaders, unpaid leaders and staff leaders, and so on. The gift of dialogue is yours; unwrap it, and discover the treasure that awaits you inside.