Replies

Please pardon the typos I missed!

Joel,

Thanks for sharing both your experience and your “thought experiment” for ways to practice process thought in Youth Ministry. From my own ancient experience in Youth and Family Ministry and my other work and involvement over the decades with many different Christian denominations and other movements within Western Christianity in the United States, I’ve gradually come to a conclusion that, far too often, even within more “liberal” or “progressive” churches, there is a strong tendency toward “dogmatic thinking and the continuation of that type of thinking” when it comes to reaching out to youth and structuring Youth Ministry programs.

What you offer in terms of a general framework for Youth Ministry, “crafting a community of individuals who grow in concern and love for self, others, and God.” is quite significant, in my opinion. I suspect that, at present, it is quite rare to find a Christian church in which one might be able to expand far beyond focusing on instilling “the process values of mutual becoming, interconnectedness, and intrinsic value.”

In truth, focusing around these values is no small thing for Youth Ministry or for other types of ministry. They are hugely important with young people as well as adults of all ages, so please don’t sell yourself short!

While those of us engaged with Christianity in whatever contexts might want to see an increase in faith communities that transcend these core process values in practice, the reality for many churches at present seems to be that Youth Ministry errs toward the conservative and traditional far too often to explore many of the more intensive elements of process thought. While this may be true, at least for the time being, the religious landscape is quickly changing in the United States, as elsewhere, as many Christian churches, denominations, and movements struggle to maintain relevancy in the twenty-first century. In the not-too-distant future, I suspect that more and more leaders like you will find more and more ways to usher in more involved aspects of Process Thought out of necessity, especially as our youth are exposed to elements of Process Thought in other context, including education, entertainment, and ecology, and as we all struggle to address many troubling aspects of human life in the twenty-first century, including climate change, increased political tensions, and the rise of racism, xenophobia, and hate in many other contexts. Your response to the lure to reach youth is very significant. It sounds like you might be the one of the very types of leaders we need for such times as these.

Wow! Thank you so much, Evan, for your beautiful and insightful post and for your subsequent responses. I am quite the novice with regard to Whitehead’s thought, not to mention indigenous, Taoist, Buddhist, and other non-Western thought systems and worldviews. That said, I have read from and about these and other non-Western/traditions through the past three and a half decades. While my level of understanding and my ability to expound on Whitehead and some of these other traditions doesn’t come close to that of many of the other participants here, time and again, I have drawn what I could understand and what I most related to into my worldview, as I have found limits in my Western understanding of reality.

Evan, I appreciate all three of your questions. Honestly, I don’t have an answer to any of them. I have thoughts that are moving toward answering the first and the third. Perhaps these are questions that we can never fully answer because we are always in the process of becoming in ways that create novel answers to each question.

I have never really thought much about the difference between interconnectedness and interrelatedness. I have tended, since my late twenties (I’ll be 61 this month), when I first started exploring outside the realm of conservative evangelical Christian thought, to think of interconnectedness and interrelatedness as similar. However, I do feel that, through the decades, my understanding of interrelatedness has expanded in ways very similar to what you describe in the concept behind “Mitákuye Oyás’iŋ.” For me, interconnectedness can be synonymous with interrelatedness, but it can also be viewed as an aspect of interrelatedness that implies a connecting or linking together, as the threads of a spider web are connected one to another, but I envision interconnectedness in a way in which all threads are multidimensionally connected to each other in ways we perhaps cannot envision in four dimensions alone.

I appreciate the insightful responses of everyone to Evan’s post. I certainly relate to Kathleen’s response when she says “I have been drawn to Buddhism and Indigenous understandings that have nourished me when frustrated with my inherited tradition, Christianity, especially with regard the disdain of the body, the oppression of other’s faiths/cultures, and creation of insiders and outsiders.” For me this comment touches on what I sense we all are noticing. While some are becoming more and more entrenched in rigid Western, tribalist ways of thinking and being, at the same time it seems that there are growing numbers of people globally who are growing frustrated with and/or weary from/of the Western worldview’s responses on many issues. It seems to me that what Process thought as well as indigenous and non-Western traditions offer is critical to continued survival of life of many species on this planet.

I can’t figure out any way to edit my postings once they are posted, so I am adding a postscript. I just caught an autocorrect(?) or human (i.e.: mine!) error in my posting above. Paragraph four, sentence two reads as follows:

“In one sense, I feel that I through out the baby with the bathwater for a while.”

Obviously, it should have read as follows:

“In one sense, I feel that I threw out the baby with the bathwater for a while.”

Perhaps this is where prepositions move toward becoming propositions, to add some poor Whiteheadian humor to the situation. Please pardon my error.

This poem certainly captures the nature of the riddle. I like it and it indeed captures the nature of the realities that Bruce describes. I look forward to looking for Nan Shepherd’s book.

I think that the understanding that Christian proposes makes a lot of sense, but I might be misunderstanding the Whitehead statement as well.