III:Text IRL

I just got back from 4 days in the desert. It was equal parts exhilarating and exhausting. We had some spectacular down time of food and fellowship mixed in with around 15 hours of intense conversation over two days. Some recap mixed with some new and stretching material. Myself and a few of my friends convened in Anthem, Arizona to finish up our Fall '07 semester of III:Text. I really had little idea of how the IRL ("in real life") was going to go. This is the second go around for us on this "online learning community" experiment that we are all struggling to describe to our friends and family. III:Text (pronounced "three text") is the brainchild of one Dr. Ron Martoia, Transformational Architect.

What is III:Text? It is a great question. One that, frankly, we are all having some difficulty "defining". First and foremost for me, it is a God thing. Does that mean that we spent the last 4 months online and all 15 hours of our IRL studying scripture? No. One of the things that we who are taking part have in common is that we all see the need for doing ministry differently. That can mean a lot of different things to different people. Speaking of different people, we had 20 to 30 that signed up for this go around and 10 of us were blessed to be able to attend the IRL. We are from diverse Christian backgrounds: Methodist, Assembly of God, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, and Non denominational just to name the ones I can think of. Back to my thought about doing ministry differently. To many of us, it just isn't enough to "tweak and adjust" the same model that has led us to a place where the top words used to describe Christians by 16 to 29 year olds are "anti-homosexual", "judgmental" and "hypocritical".

We have committed to engaging three different texts: the Biblical text, the context and the human text. Dr. Martoia usually pairs 2 books at a time that we read and discuss online. This is the aspect that we (right now) are calling the "resource" part of the equation. The result of our reading/discussion many times is a disruption of our mental models. That is the aspect that makes us question how we are currently doing things and points out (unfortunately) many times that we are doing things that are more based on comfort levels or familiarity than on true Godly or scriptural principles.

The second aspect we have identified we are (right now) calling "container". This is the environment that is created when everyone comes together with the intent to contribute to the conversation. No one has all the answers but we value everyone's input equally. This creates an environment of trust. We know that we will not be judged but accepted by others. The bottom line is always to have the freedom to question (who, what, where, when and why) the things we are believing and doing. Not change for the sake of change but change for the sake of leading effectively.

The third and final aspect we continue to experience and believe is the aspect of the God in us. We are all doing our best to live out our faith in our own context and trust that God is leading us in His way. We continue to experience God's grace and trust Him to lead us as we discuss His truths. We experienced an amazing portion of God's grace in our IRL. He brought together a group of 10 people from different backgrounds and allowed us to experience a level of grace, cooperation and love that most of us could have never expected.

Thanks to everyone that was involved. Thanks to Ron for being our fearless leader and continuing to stretch us to be all that we were created to be. Thanks to Ted, John and the rest of the Fellowship Anthem crew for hosting us and doing an amazing job of helping create the "container" that led to such great conversation. Thanks to Nancy for all of her hard work in administrating III:Text and continuing to bug the crap out of all of us who need it. Thanks to everyone who took part in the conversation....it was amazing and truly profitable! And a special thanks to "Super" Dave Wahlstedt for allowing me to back out of our golf game on Tuesday without saying a negative word to anyone about it:)

Much Love,

Paul Baird