Last week, one of the books I read used the analogy of a children's dot-to-dot puzzle to describe the process of writing history. The historian or researcher the 'dots' - in various quantities and of various intensities - and then deduces how they might be joined up to furm a picture. Unlike most dot-to-dot puzzles, these 'dots' aren't numbered so the historian/researcher has to use some imagination or make some guesses to find a picture from them. Inevitably, different people may make different connections and end up with different pictures.
In theology and missiology (and no doubt everywhere else) there seems to bne a lot of talk about 'joined-up thinking' but what does that really mean? Do we assme that there is one right way of joining up thinking, one obvious (if only we could find it!) answer, or is it actually like doing the puzzle when the printer forgot to put on the numbers? Sometimes I feel as if we think it means there is one answer to be found, when perhaps it offers something a little less concrete and more 'playful' (my word of the moment!) - that there are many fine images to be found if only we are willing to seek them. This doesn't mean that all are equally valid, just that there isn't always one 'right' answer.
A few years back the in phrase in management speak was 'thinking outside the dots' - that in order to join them up subject to some weird and wonderful set of rules you needed to take your lines past the limits of what you had. Again, something about using imagination as well as intellect (and I'm not about to get into the which of those comes first debate!).
So what has all this to do with the price of fish?
I have recently been shocked - there is no other word for it - by the inability of people I perceive as reasonably intelligent to make connections between ideas, and specifically to extrapolate general principles from specific examples. It is almost as if people have become so adept at mechanisatically joining a defined set of numbered dots to make a certain picture that they are totally flummoxed if presented with anything different.
This troubles me greatly, partly in relation to my research work which is predicated on the assumption that people can extrapolate from 'a' to 'b' if only by analogy, that there are general principles that can be read across from century to century. It worries me more for the health of the church, perhaps especially for those churches that are smaller, older and more set in their ways, but also in general terms. Maybe I'm am particularly blessed that I find it quite easy to spot connections between ideas from seemingly disparate fields. Maybe part of my task is to take several steps back and help people to begin to learn to make conections (how?).
In the mean time, just in case you really do have nothing better to do, here's a little dot-to-dot puzzle to amuse you! What credible designs can you make from it?! (A little imagination definitely permitted)
O
O O
O O
