I have been trying to weave some thoughts from various sources together over the past few weeks. I doubt this will make any sense to any one but I wanted to get it out of my head somehow. Several years ago while I was working with my first church plant I had the opportunity to meet one of my favorite ecclesial dreamers, Jeff Reed (from BILD). At that time he was discussing the changes that moved into the vocational world at the end of the industrial revolution. We talked about the creation of the thing we call a “job” which was a new way of packaging work. We talked about the shift of agricultural family units working to provide the needs of the family (think Little House on the Prairie) to the concept of the “head of household” working for someone else to bring home money to purchase the needs for the family. This was no small change.
In the late 1800’s there were many people who were talking and writing about people going to work at factories and other institutions for a certain number of hours in exchange for pay. This idea was met with some resistance. Many saw it as a form of volitional slavery and wondered why anyone would want to do it. Some thought the idea would never take hold. But it did take hold. As more and more people began to move into urbanized areas and the types of jobs became more plentiful the idea of any other type of work became unthinkable. In just a little over a hundred years we went from not wanting “jobs” to fear of losing our “jobs.” The job package seems here to stay. But is it?
More recently I have been reading through Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Scott let me borrow this book because I think he has a sense of what is going on in my head and thought this would spark my thinking. He hit the nail on the head and drove it. In the chapter titled Anomaly and the Emergence of Scientific Discoveries, Kuhn discusses the relationship between anomaly and paradigms. It is a great chapter with way too much to share here (in other words, read this book!!!). One thing he illustrates is how the paradigms that shape us determine what we can see. He tells the story of the many people involved in the “discovery” of oxygen and how the competing paradigms allowed some scientists to “see” it while others could not. Joseph Priestly conducted numerous experiments on gases that fellow scientist, Lavoisier, used to refine his own experiments. Lavoisier saw many problems (anomalies) in the reigning paradigm of the science of gases which caused him to look for solutions where Priestly did not even know there was a problem. Kuhn summarizes this way:
bq. What the work on oxygen did was to give much additional form and structure to Lavoisier’s earlier sense that something was amiss. It told him a thing he was already prepared to discover—the nature of a substance that combustion removes from the atmosphere. That advance awareness of difficulties must be a significant part of what enabled Lavoisier to see in experiments like Priestly’s a gas that Priestly had been unable to see there himself. Conversely, the fact that a major paradigm revision was needed to see what Lavoisier saw must be the principal reason why Priestly was, to the end of his long life, unable to see it. (Later in the chapter he illustrates the same point more fully by describing an experiment that was done with playing cards that is very enlightening.)
I sense that there is a connection between the current paradigm of the vocational concept of “having a job” and the problems I have articulating and putting shape to my ecclesial dream. But as this post is getting long I will flesh that out more fully in a future post.
