Growing Edge
January 1, 2000
Lyle Schaller wrote in The Change Agent: "Anyone seriously interested in planned social change would be well advised to recognize two facts of life. First, despite the claims of many, relatively little is known about how to achieve predictable change. Second, much of what is known will not work."
That was 27 years ago. He's still at it—quixotically tilting the windmill of change, and obviously enjoying it, too, in his latest book, Discontinuity and Hope: Radical Change and the Path to the Future (Abingdon, 1999).
Society, history, and church life have changed, not in a predictable, orderly, continuous way, but in rapid, disconcerting, discontinuous ways—more like a quantum leap than a logical next step.
That's the discontinuity from the title. The church leader averse to change will see this discontinuity as a tidal wave crashing over the church and long for the good old days of simplicity and predictability.
Schaller, on the other hand, experienced enough to be a crusty curmudgeon of yesteryear, instead grabs his surfboard, yells to the rest of us "surf's up!" and paddles out for the ride of his life on the mammoth wave of change. His knowledge of the wave is encyclopedic, his relish for it contagious, and his analysis optimistic. That's the hope.
Shall we Schaller?
In a style absolutely characteristic of himself, Schaller writes a book of meticulous, long lists, with branching sublists, and sublists of the sublists. Maybe the book should be delivered poster-style as an elaborate outline—a tree on its side, with limbs and branches, each with bulleted points like clusters of fruit.
One could never accuse Schaller of not being thorough. Where many experts could devise six, eight, even ten characteristics of some ...
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