Faith, Leadership and Public Life. Preston Manning

Faith, Leadership and Public Life - Preston Manning


Скачать книгу
spiritual life and death, spiritual and temporal authority, the meaning of truth, spiritual work, self-sacrificial love, spiritual unity, eternal life, the person and work of the spirit of God—the list goes on and on, concepts and truths of a high level of abstraction, seemingly intangible and for the most part beyond the ability of ordinary folk to feel, grasp, and embrace.

      Also note the nature of the venues where he met and encountered people: yes, sometimes in a synagogue or formal place of learning, but more often on a hill beside a lake, in a small boat pushed off from the shore, in a disciple’s house, at a party with tax collectors and prostitutes, in the marketplace, at a wedding feast, at religious feasts, in a garden, on the road, at a well, and in dozens of other places where he was accessible to sick people, poor people, inquirers, skeptics, critics, lawyers, scribes, priests, soldiers, tax collectors, women, and children.

      This is incarnational communication, with three distinctive characteristics: (1) The communicator literally embodies and personifies the truths to be communicated. (2) The communicator has so immersed himself or herself in the community that he or she is an integral part of it, not distant from it. (3) The communication is expressed as much as possible within the conceptual frameworks and in the vocabulary not of the communicator but of the community to be influenced. It is today what communications consultants would call receiver-oriented communication.

      Source-Oriented Versus

      Receiver-Oriented Communication

      There is an old and simple model, originating with electronic engineers, of how communication works that I have found most helpful in framing my own communication efforts on both political and religious subjects. It conceptualizes communication as originating with a source who wishes to generate a response from a receiver through the transmission of information (messages) via a medium. The communication occurs in a context that significantly influences it and is complicated by the existence of noise—competing information and messages.

      The communication is further complicated by the fact that messages from the source and responses from the receiver both pass through the respective communication grids of each—defining aspects of their respective cultures, conceptual frameworks, thought patterns, and vocabularies that shape the formation and reception of the messages and feedback. When the source’s grid is significantly different than the receiver’s grid, we encounter all the challenges of cross-cultural communication, such as when oil companies communicate with Indigenous peoples, scientists communicate with politicians, or believers communicate with non-believers on spiritual topics.

      Source-oriented communicators express their ideas in the way those ideas came to them (the source), in the words and phrases of the source’s vocabulary and conceptual framework, and in venues and through media with which the source is most familiar and comfortable. Such communicators often live and operate at considerable psychological, social, and physical distance from the rank and file of the public. They put much of the onus of understanding what is being communicated on the audience rather than assuming that burden themselves.

      Implications for Us

      As previously mentioned, if we believe in the providential placement of ourselves as human beings in particular places and times in order to participate in achieving God’s purposes in the world, the first challenge for us is to discern those purposes and to live and act in the light of them, just as Jesus did.


Скачать книгу