This evening I’m meeting up with Thomas aka Headphonaught for a chat about Tribes (book or audio), the new book by Seth Godin.
Our chat is being recorded as part of the Something Beautiful podcasts so I’ll try to speak clearly and even make sense. All I’ll say for now is that I liked the audio book and it resonates with lots of the things I’ve written about and spoken about over the past few years so expect lots of soapbox rants!
been thinking bit about tribes (bearing in mind only 1/3 of teh way thru the audiobook)….if the tribe leader faciliates the tribe and the group make their decisions, what happens when the tribe decide to stop and go no further? Say a church tribe for example whose practices, rites and rituals haven’t changed in 60 yrs. Would it not be better in that situation for the tribe leader to make the decisions and the group to follow? Rather than tribe stopping and dying? (I think there are clear parallels with community workers – facilitate the group to make their own decisions or drag the group into 21st century). In the ideal world it would be a process – leader empowering the group bit by bit – but also know that the church for example has become
stationary
What’s wrong with a group dying? Many groups, particularly community groups, are set up for a task. They achieve that task and then people discover that they miss the people so the group continues.
Tribes are tempory. That’s part of the challenge for the church I think. How do we get over our need to keep a church going just because it has been going for 400 years? The other big question is how willing is the church to let heretics go and do new things? Not very I suspect because that breaks the rules. That upsets the status quo.
Rob Bell talks about the same thing at the beginning of Velvet Elvis. People get a leader. They listen to the leader and then the leader dies and they think there is nothing more to be said. That’s like saying that God has done nothing in the world since Jesus died or since Paul wrote his last letter.
We need new leaders and new tribes. Keep listening and let me know what you think.