Barnabas File

You can do a Google search on this quote, but the results on its origin are ambiguous.  Most likely, it is a Native American tribal saying popularized by leadership gurus like Peter Drucker.  The meaning, of course, is clear.  When something no longer work, it is time to move on. This is easier said than done.  In business and industry, abandoning a project may mean the loss of jobs and capital investment.  In education, old approaches must be unlearned and new ways learned.  In the church, there may be some fear that we are giving up part of what makes us faithful when we end a program, ministry, worship service, or building.  It is not only about change, but loss as well. R. Buckminster Fuller   said, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality.  To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”  So what do you do when the existin...

The man who came to my office was a retired moderate Baptist pastor who had moved to Tennessee recently.  He came to talk to me about ministry opportunities in the immediate area.  I expressed appreciation for his interest, asked him some questions about himself, told him a little bit about the nature of progressive Baptist life, promised to share his resume as opportunity presented itself, and suggested that he might want to expand his search to some other denominations in middle Tennessee.  He finally said to me, “I come in here asking for your help and all you can tell me is that I might have to seek a place in another denomination?  That’s not very helpful!” Helpful or not, I had defined reality from my experience.  He had the choice to accept it or not. In this case, he did not.  The late Max DePree wrote, “The first responsibility of a leader is to define reality.  The last is to say thank you.” When we go to someone asking for insig...

"You never change things by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new reality that makes the existing reality obsolete."--R. Buckminster Fuller Reality is a funny thing.  If the two of us look at the same picture, read the same article, or observe the same interactions between two or more people, each of us might well come away with very different conclusions.  This is because everyone brings his or her own perspective to the situation.  The perspective we carry with us has been developed over many years through various life experiences.   Sometimes our perspective on reality is what keeps us sane.  At the same time, having a certain perspective on reality does not make one’s viewpoint “right.” For example, I had a conversation with someone after the Presidential election and commented, “I think many people voted based on their fears.”  My friend responded, “No, this was all about power and keeping certai...

Christians in the United States sometimes talk in rather exaggerated terms of being “persecuted.”   What would life be like for us if we actually lived in a totalitarian state without basic civil rights?   The Man in the High Castle , an alternative history series on Amazon, gives us some ideas. The series is loosely based Philip K. Dick's classic award-winning novel.   In adapting the story for television, creator Frank Spotniz has taken great liberties with the original source.   Spotniz, who was associated with The X Files , freely exercises some of the political and social satire of the former series in showing a United States of America in 1960 where the Allies lost World War Two.    In this version of history, the United States has been divided into three parts: the Japanese Pacific States in the west, the Greater Nazi Reich in the east and the Rocky Mountain States (or the Neutral Zone ) in the middle.   Hitler is still alive,...