My Expert Answer: “I Don’t Know” (an excerpt from Intuitive Leadership)

Tim Keel, author of the upcoming book from emersion: Intuitive Leadership (Available Oct. 2007), is a pastor of a growing
church in Kansas City, Missouri, called Jacob’s Well. A frequent speaker, Tim is a
leading voice in the emerging church conversation and a founding member of the
Emergent Village. He has contributed to several books and magazines.

My Expert Answer: “I Don’t Know” (an excerpt from Intuitive Leadership)

Speaking on this topic at an event for evangelical denominational leaders, one pastor raised his hand to ask me a question. He said he was a pastor of a 75-year-old church in the Pacific Northwest. As he introduced himself and described his community’s context, I knew what his question was going to be before he asked it. He listened to me describe the context of a “post” world, the necessity of engaging incarnationally in contexts of specificity, and how we work within systems and structures that either inhibit or empower such engagements. He wanted to know how what I was saying applied to him in his context, an aging denominational church, as compared to Jacob’s Well, a first-generation independent Christian community. It is a great question, and it is one that I hear all the time.

The first answer I always give is simple: I don’t know how to answer that question, at least not in the way it is often asked. It is often asked as if I can reduce these complex realities down to simple, acontextual answers that will apply in that pastor’s context the way that they have in my own. But I cannot deliver a step-by-step implementation manual because a manual assumes the transferability of a model. I have been trying to deconstruct this approach throughout the entire book. If I could be said to have a model, then it would be a model that is radically localized – in fact, so localized that the only way to come up with an implementation manual would be to write one for each community – and to write it after the fact and with an open ending that allows for the possibility of additional chapters. Thus my answer, if it is to have any integrity with the rest of what I have written so far, must be “I don’t know.” The second part of my answer is not any idea or application but the community itself. This community, Jacob’s Well, is how we have responded to the “post” world. And this book is in many ways my attempt to articulate and describe the context and the community that has developed over the last several years in this place as our faithful attempt to answer the question, “How are we to be the people of God here and now?”

Comments

[Tim Keel]

Hi Scott - welcome to the conversation. I am glad you are engaging these questions in the midst of your ministry. It sounds like you are using wisdom and discernment to do so. I think that that will serve you and your broader community very well. Blessings.

[Scott]

Hey Tim, I don't know you beyond this blog and I'm new (maybe a year into emergent), but I appreciate your words here. As someone who is currently struggling to bring about the emergent conversation in an established denomination, the question quickly has become not how, but should. Should we try to reinvent an existing group and in the process alientate the modern believers? Not that it would be on purpose or with the intent of abolishing their traditions, but it would happen just the same. Their culture would suffer just as the culture around them suffers from not being approached from a "post" perspective. An enigma to be sure, but I have never had more faith in God's working and have confidence he will lead ALL of us to His keep. Thanks again!

[Andrew]

Your call for leaders to learn the art/skill of contextualization is much needed I think. Tim, I really hear you calling for an "un" model. The whole framework of "models" that are transferable from one context to the next is unworkable for the "post" world. Keep preaching it Tim! Leaders desperately need to get this.

[Tim Keel]

Hi All,

Thanks for the feedback on this excerpt.

Tony, it is not that I, or anyone that I know, is saying that there are no answers. At least in the context of this excerpt I am saying I don't know because I know of no way of answering a question like the one this man asked without doing greater damage. I believe it would be the height of presumption to try and tell this pastor what I think he ought to do in the form of an answer without first having had opportunity to get to know him, his church, and their context. Part of the problem that my book seeks to address is the phenomenon of acontextual experts unloading "one size fits all" approaches to leadership and ministry. Many of us in church leadership have been fed this approach for a long time and have found it to be not only ineffective, but also damaging.

What I am seeking to suggest in this book is that leaders, rather than depending on other people "out there" to tell them what to do, need to learn how to respond to God, their people, and the context where live in ways that are faithful to the calling they have. Toward that end, I suggest not answers, but postures that help us to attend to those things.

I hope this helps to clarify what I mean when I write "I don't know." And like Carla, writes, sometimes the first step in engaging in healthy ways is to ask a well-formed question, not offer a glib answer.

[carla]

Well said Tim. The emergent conversation is as much about asking new questions as it is about offering new answers. For people like Tony (above) who are frustrated by this conversation, there are lots of new questions to be asked--Tim offers a fantastic example at the end of this post.

[Tony]

"I don't know" is the answer get for a majority of the questions that I have in this emergent conversation. When there is no truth, "I don't know" is all that's left.

Kickin' post, dude!

[Sivin]

finally a book by Tim Keel. I'm looking forward to get a copy. And I like the honesty and humility of "I don't know" as the place to start.