Navigating Cape Horn and an Ecclesiogenic Church
One of the new forces impacting society is the unpredictable outcomes that events take. It wasn't always that way. Why? If you've read The Millennium Matrix you will have a good idea. Cape Horn provides a natural parallel for the current cultural upheavals we are entering into. We now live in a world with cascading unintended consequences (positive and negative).
Unpredictability: consequences are often counter-intuitive in this new environment. Not only are they unpredictable when using linear thought actions often create unintended and opposite results. Institutions we set up to help create more harm, new laws exacerbate the problem, solving a problem in one area creates five more in other places, new innovations bring with them a whole list of side-effects.
Navigating change at this time is like navigating the collision between to great oceans of change. Cape Horn provides and example of two great oceans colliding and the normal rules of the sea don’t apply and in fact can lead to destruction.
Cape Horn is located at the southern most tip of South America connecting the South Atlantic and South Pacific oceans. Frequent storms, strong currents, and icebergs make passage around the cape extremely hazardous. Hundreds of vessels have wrecked while "rounding the horn."
The area is dominated by an air-stream that is unmodified by any land to the west and the easterly moving depressions that spawn in the Southern Ocean any where south of 50 degrees will have gathered full steam by the time they strike the Southern Andes. The Drake Passage drowns and separates those mountains from their natural counterparts 500 miles further south which surface like a dragons spine to form the Antarctic Peninsula. In summer, these lows usually track through the Drake south of Cape Horn subjugating the region with a strong westerly flow having a northerly bias at the onset of low pressure. The southwesterly cold fronts that follow can be savage and sailing through heavy snow squalls.
Then there are those famous katabatic winds or "williwaws," which can wreak havoc in short order. If you feel sudden rises in temperature - beware. This is an air parcel coming down from the mountains and is in compression. In its most violent manifestation (a williwaw) it can dump over high land spilling out onto the water at well over 120 knots whipping up the water into a white frenzy. Sails must be lowered at the first sign if underway and it is a good habit to hoist your dinghy on deck at night while at anchor and lash it down - we know, as our, a 4.0 meter inflatable with a 25 hp outboard, usually taking six strong people to get up a beach, was flipped into the air like a child’s toy and landed face down in the cockpit!
Let me take a moment to discuss the phenomenon of opposite results. This is becoming a growing symptom of the breakdown of our current systems. The world of medicine, for example, is grappling with a growing number of cases where the cure is worse than the cause. There is even a term for this – Iatrogenic – meaning doctor generated sickness. Larry Crabb provides a similar perspective for psychological care in his book “Connected.” We certainly don’t have to stop with medicine just because they recognize the systemic problem and have come up with a name for it. Similar critiques of our educational system, judicial system, welfare system and other areas are governed by a rational, bureaucratic institutional approach.
If I dare apply this same line of thought to the church what would we have - Ecclesiogenic? Is it time to consider the current effect of our rational, bureaucratic religious institutions? Do we have systemic problems? I just opened a can of worms because our systemic sins are broadcast weekly in the secular press. I don’t intend to chronicle the stories of financial abuse, abuse of power, vicious politics, racial bigotry, violence and pedophilia that plague the Church. These are some of the symptoms of the collision of two oceans time. I will say, however, that Jesus warned the religious practitioners of His day that they were making followers more fit for Hell than they themselves. There is something about dying paradigms that turn our wisdom into foolishness and our best intentions into curses.
Just like Cape Horn, our violent period of transition is subject to great fluctuations. The lessons of navigation we learned apply to stable systems or paradigms, even violent ones. We are not prepared for colliding systems. Without a different orientation we could easily be heading into our own “Perfect Storm.”
Excerpted from “CAPE HORN” by SKIP NOVAK - http://www.pelagic.co.uk/capeart.html
A point that David Schwartz drives home in his book entitled “Who Cares?” This is a book about the inherent problems in our bureaucratic elder care system.
Unpredictability: consequences are often counter-intuitive in this new environment. Not only are they unpredictable when using linear thought actions often create unintended and opposite results. Institutions we set up to help create more harm, new laws exacerbate the problem, solving a problem in one area creates five more in other places, new innovations bring with them a whole list of side-effects.
Navigating change at this time is like navigating the collision between to great oceans of change. Cape Horn provides and example of two great oceans colliding and the normal rules of the sea don’t apply and in fact can lead to destruction.
Cape Horn is located at the southern most tip of South America connecting the South Atlantic and South Pacific oceans. Frequent storms, strong currents, and icebergs make passage around the cape extremely hazardous. Hundreds of vessels have wrecked while "rounding the horn."
The area is dominated by an air-stream that is unmodified by any land to the west and the easterly moving depressions that spawn in the Southern Ocean any where south of 50 degrees will have gathered full steam by the time they strike the Southern Andes. The Drake Passage drowns and separates those mountains from their natural counterparts 500 miles further south which surface like a dragons spine to form the Antarctic Peninsula. In summer, these lows usually track through the Drake south of Cape Horn subjugating the region with a strong westerly flow having a northerly bias at the onset of low pressure. The southwesterly cold fronts that follow can be savage and sailing through heavy snow squalls.
Then there are those famous katabatic winds or "williwaws," which can wreak havoc in short order. If you feel sudden rises in temperature - beware. This is an air parcel coming down from the mountains and is in compression. In its most violent manifestation (a williwaw) it can dump over high land spilling out onto the water at well over 120 knots whipping up the water into a white frenzy. Sails must be lowered at the first sign if underway and it is a good habit to hoist your dinghy on deck at night while at anchor and lash it down - we know, as our, a 4.0 meter inflatable with a 25 hp outboard, usually taking six strong people to get up a beach, was flipped into the air like a child’s toy and landed face down in the cockpit!
Let me take a moment to discuss the phenomenon of opposite results. This is becoming a growing symptom of the breakdown of our current systems. The world of medicine, for example, is grappling with a growing number of cases where the cure is worse than the cause. There is even a term for this – Iatrogenic – meaning doctor generated sickness. Larry Crabb provides a similar perspective for psychological care in his book “Connected.” We certainly don’t have to stop with medicine just because they recognize the systemic problem and have come up with a name for it. Similar critiques of our educational system, judicial system, welfare system and other areas are governed by a rational, bureaucratic institutional approach.
If I dare apply this same line of thought to the church what would we have - Ecclesiogenic? Is it time to consider the current effect of our rational, bureaucratic religious institutions? Do we have systemic problems? I just opened a can of worms because our systemic sins are broadcast weekly in the secular press. I don’t intend to chronicle the stories of financial abuse, abuse of power, vicious politics, racial bigotry, violence and pedophilia that plague the Church. These are some of the symptoms of the collision of two oceans time. I will say, however, that Jesus warned the religious practitioners of His day that they were making followers more fit for Hell than they themselves. There is something about dying paradigms that turn our wisdom into foolishness and our best intentions into curses.
Just like Cape Horn, our violent period of transition is subject to great fluctuations. The lessons of navigation we learned apply to stable systems or paradigms, even violent ones. We are not prepared for colliding systems. Without a different orientation we could easily be heading into our own “Perfect Storm.”
Excerpted from “CAPE HORN” by SKIP NOVAK - http://www.pelagic.co.uk/capeart.html
A point that David Schwartz drives home in his book entitled “Who Cares?” This is a book about the inherent problems in our bureaucratic elder care system.