creative thinking

Alan Hirsch, in The Forgotten Ways, refers to Edward de Bono, who is a leading specialist in creative thinking. I have never heard of him before... anyone read any of his stuff?

Alan writes that de Bono asks

how are we ever to find a better cure if at each critical moment we always opt for the traditional treatment?

Then Alan adapts the question fit the context:

Do we notconstantly default to previous patterns and ways of tackling issues of theology, spirituality, and church?

He also quotes the other Bono

we are "stuck in a moment and now [we] can't get out of it"

Good questions.

I think in many places the church is stuck. Stuck in / with ways of "doing church" [whatever that means] that no longer work. Stuck because we don't want to mess with our presuppostions. I wonder, if the high view of scripture that evangelicals hold to, has spilled over into some faulty thinking. Because we believe that the Bible is the Word of God and does not change, we have assumed that so should our theology be unchanging. That, I believe, is a very dangerous assumption. Theology changes as our understanding and experience of God changes. To say our theology should never change is to say that we have God all figured out.

I firmly believe that God never changes in his character, in who he is, but as Graham Cooke says:

...you always know where you are with God...
...you never know what he's going to do next.

To say that our understanding of theology, spirituality and church is static, is to be arrogant, to say we have got it all figured out. God is the God of the new thing, the new day.