Evangelism in the Inventive Age
by Doug Pagitt
Sparkhouse, Minneapolis. 114 pages
reviewed by LEIGH B. GILLIS
This is Doug Pagitt’s latest in the “Inventive Age” series, which includes “Church in Community” and “Preaching in the Inventive Age.”
There is no doubt “the church” is at a crossroads. But, rather than a clearly marked intersection, where we are and where we are headed seem like a tangled mass of wires no one could hope to unwind. Things change so rapidly that your new computer is obsolete before you leave the store. This has been called a “watershed moment,” a “pivotal age” or even a “tsunami time.” Established programs no longer work, and we don’t know what WILL work now. Pagitt calls this “the Inventive Age, … in which inclusion, participation, collaboration and beauty are essential values. The values of the previous ages still exist, but in different … roles.” This has been going on for at least several decades. Two decades ago, Easum and Bandy told us about “dancing with dinosaurs.” Now, we see some of what was forecast come to pass, and more change and forced adaptation on the horizon.
What is going on? In “The Great Emergence,” Phyllis Tickle writes, “every 500 years the church has a giant rummage sale.” Peter Steinke says this is an era of great opportunity, in “A Door Set Open.” Landon Whitsitt tells us in “Open Source Church” that it’s about “making sure people can do the things they think they need to do to make church work for them.” This is Pagitt’s point in “The Inventive Age.” If inclusion, participation and collaboration are essential, what can make us, or how can we make ourselves, feel included? Traditional evangelism doesn’t do this. That’s an important point here. What we call evangelism “rarely feels like sharing something good … it feels like an effort to make a person change.” Often, evangelism is a “call to conformity springing from fear.”
Pagitt’s approach is based on the Enneagram spiritual temperament tool, with nine categories for classifying individuals’ wants and needs, or “passions.” Persons act out of a unique blend of passions, which propel their behaviors in engaging with other people and with God. Pagitt explores the driving emotions of various Enneagram types and biblical tie-ins to the nature of God and humanity. For those encountering Enneagrams for the first time, the charts provided, of these nine passions, fears, and how God’s love, in its myriad forms, can overcome these fears, can be very helpful. Pagitt also connects these with the “blesseds” of the Beatitudes.
For some readers, the text may lack specific steps to using these types. Different parts of the book are interesting, but may not quite hold together. Others, more used to Pagitt’s writing or talk radio style, may follow his thoughts more easily. Section Five, the most biblically based section, builds on the foundation laid before, and reads the Book of Acts through the eyes of welcoming, inclusive, inviting evangelism that is “connecting the story that was to what is and will be.” I hear the last section of the book saying, “Go to the ends of the earth (in new ways — or whatever ways work)!” That’s inventive evangelism.
LEIGH B. GILLIS is associate executive presbyter for congregational vitality, Heartland Presbytery.
