Good Christians Chickens With Our Heads Down.

"Gordon McKenzie, in his creative book on organizations, Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool’s Guide to Surviving with Grace, describes a story from his childhood where he and his cousin learned to “mesmerize” chickens on his uncle’s farm. They did so by capturing a chicken and holding its beak down to a white line of chalk until it became spellbound. The chickens would remain frozen in this position until the boy’s uncle would come along and give them a kick in the backside to wake them up from their hypnotic stupor. McKenzie tells the story because he notes that organizations, like the white line of chalk in his story, can have a mesmerizing effect on people in their orbit. They create a culture of conformity that requires docility and dull obedience from their members. This stifles appropriate dissent and puts a lid on imagination and innovation. Unfortunately, churches can also tend to have the same effect on their leaders as well as on community members. Something in our traditions, theology, or inherited methodology tends to keep our collective noses down on the line. We rarely break free to do something genuinely imaginative, something adventurous, or something that challenges the status quo. Like it or not, we behave like a group of mesmerized chickens. And, like them, every now and again we need God to give us a proverbial kick in the backside to break our inertia and get us moving again." (Alan Hirsch & David Ferguson. "On The Verge")