A Pattern Language for Perfecting the Saints

Pattern languages (see the Pattern Language Page at the C2 Wiki) are an idea that came out of the work of Architect Christopher Alexander and have found homes in a number of other disciplines. Pattern languages are collections of patterns which describe recurring problems within a domain and provide a template for deling with them. Each pattern is described in four parts:

Pattern Name - a handle for identifying the pattern.

Problem - a description of when the pattern applies.

Solution - the elements that make up the pattern.

Consequences - the results and trade-offs of applying the pattern.

So, why is all of this important? I've been thinking about the roll of local church leaders in perfecting the saints (see Retrenchment and Reaching Out), and I'm starting to boil my ideas down into a catalog of patterns in a pattern language for perfecting the saints.

Here are the patterns I've been thinking about so far. I'm going to try to write about one each week, I'd appreciate any comments to help improve the patterns I describe or to add others that I've missed.

Perfecting the Saints: Pattern Catalog

• Agents of Change
• Families on the Edges
• Focus Families
• Focused Effort
• Follow the Spirit
• Home Teaching is the Key
• Not Just Once a Month
• The Rising Tide
• A Six Month Window
• Teaching Teams
• To Serve and Protect
• Touching Everyone
• The Transition

it's nice to see a response

In response to my letter (and post) about the new deseretbook blogs, Michael Cleverly responded that they've enabled RSS feeds to both blogs! I think that this is a good sign, I'm looking forward to their continued work.

I've already subscribed to their feeds with my bloglines account.

-pate

New blogs at Deseret Book

Deseret Book is starting to host a couple of blogs; John Bytheway and Michael Mclean. It looks like they might begin to offer more as well. I've written a note to Matthew McBride (their contact for the Internet Division) and Jeanne Crippen (their Marketing Division contact). Here's what I wrote:

Matthew,
I love the fact that Deseret Book is making a leap into blogging. I think
you've made some good decisions in having Michael McLean and John Bytheway
as your first two bloggers. I'm anxious to see who else ends up blogging
for you. I have a couple of concerns though:

1) Bloggers for hire don't seem to have the voice or the passion that
most bloggers do. I'll be anxious to see how this works out. For
example, neither of Michael nor John has posted any replies to the
comments on their blog entries -- blogs work best when they are a vehicle
for conversations.

2) You don't provide an rss feed for the blogs. this makes them almost
useless for me. I use an aggragator to browse blogs I'm interested in,
then jump to the blog to read the entries that catch my attention. I
think you'll find that this will become the way almost everyone reads
blogs -- please don't paint yourself out of that picture.

There are a number of interesting, strongly written LDS blogs out
there. I hope to see good things from Deseret Book's bloggers as well.

-pate

lack of posts (sorry)

It's been a while since I've taken the time to post anything here. I've been rather busy with class, work, and church related responsibilities. Hopefully I can get back on track.

Another article on Alma the Younger

A while agao, I posted about an article on Alma the Younger on Meridian Magazine's website. They've recently added another article in the series.

By Study and Also By Faith: Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom

Just seen on By Study and Also By Faith, a cool new blog by Tyro, By Study and Also By Faith: Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of Tyro's thoughts.

Alma's poetic genius (from Meridian Magazine)

I just noticed this: The Poetic Genius of Alma the Younger.

I'm a sucker for information about Alma the Younger, so I was pretty jazzed. This article is a nice introduction, and it really whetted my appetite for more.

Thanks for writing it Br. Talley. When is the next articles due out?

Retrenchment and Reaching out

Over on his blog, grasshopper recently posted about Church Activity (a topic near and dear to my heart). He pointed out that latter-day saints tend to have higher levels of public activity than other christian denominations, but that those publicly active members are less likely to be privately active. (Something that I view as a measure of conversion -- a topic for a later post.)

I pointed out that you could combine these statistics to get a rough measure of private activity among all memebers. Doing so indicates that general LDS and non-LDS private activity rates are about the same.

Dave then pointed out that there are two possible explanations: 1) the church encourages public acts over private ones, or 2) the church is able to encourage public acts even among those who are not privately active. While I don't have any real evidence, I lean to the second view Dave mentioned. While it's dangerous to speculate from an unsupported base, I wonder if there are lessons to be learned here.

Last night I attended a meeting about Home Teaching, inactivity, and missionary work. In our stake we're home teaching about 40%, inactivity levels are pretty high (we have over 450 propective elders), and convert baptisms have dropped to less that 50% of last year's rates. We've obviously got some work to do. The question is: Where do we apply our limited resources?

One school of thought would be that we should focus on those who are not publicly active, encouraging them to attend church meetings and fellowship with their fellow saints. Hopefully as some of them respond to this invitation and become publicly active, some of those will become more privately active as well.

Another tack would be to focus on the publicly active but privately inactive members first, encouraging them to become more devoted, more deeply converted. As these members begin to exercise greater faith, they will be better able to reach out to those that are not publicly active. I think this was the idea behind the 'retrenchment' movements of the 19th century.

Do we need to retrench before we can reach out?

Feelings, imagination, and promptings of the Spirit

Is my testimony of the restored gospel just some wistful imagining?

In his essay "Is Theology Poetry", C.S. Lewis refactors the title into "Does Christian Theology owe its attraction to its power of arousing and satisfying our imaginations?" which reminded me of Jeff Lindsay's recent post The Anti-Mormon Plea: PLEASE Don't Pray about the Book of Mormon. We are often accused of letting our feelings or our imaginations take the place of "real inspiration" when we ask people to pray about the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon or when we bear testimony of our experiences after having done so ourselves.

In another essay, "Transposition", Lewis gives a good model for dealing with this. He describes transposition as the representation of a richer reality in a poorer medium. Believing that it is better to blame ignorance than malice, I believe that this concept applies very well to spiritual experiences like praying about the Book of Mormon. Those who have not experienced spiritual promtings (viewing the transposition from beneath in Lewis' words) have no basis for knowing that the Spirit does testify in repsonse to prayerful seeking, and will deride our testimony as the effects of imagination. Those who have had this experience (seeing the transposition from above), can see and respond to the fuller picture.

In answer to his reworked question, Lewis answers that true Christianity does not appeal to our imaginations, but to something higher. It makes unpleasant (from a natural perspective) demands on us which only make sense after we have undertaken to answer them. When we are able to view the transposition of our faith from above, then we find that it appeals to our Spirit. When we act on the word, we find that we are drawn closer to God. When we pray in faith to know that the gospel has been restored in these latter days, we hear the Spirit's whispered response.


Let us pray

---

After I started thinking about this, but before I posted it, I saw a pair of posts related to this grouping of ideas over on Ebenezer Orthodoxy — A Second Witness and On the Authentication of Scripture.

catastrophe, eucatastrophe, and a little parable

Over on his blog, Ebenezer presents a post on judging catastrophe and eucatastrophe as an answer to Brother Deneyer's comments about following spiritual promptings into catastrophe. (Eucatastrophe is a joyful antithesis of catastrophe, the term was coined by J.R.R. Tolkien, see this page for more details.)

I think Ebenezer is dead on. We often forget that God has a different perspective than our own, "my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord" (Isaiah 55:8). A couple of years ago, I had an experience that became a parable in our family (we collect a lot of these, I don't know why.)

As a family, we were staying in a hotel on a Sunday. As we were trying to get ready for church, my daughter couldn't find her dress shoes. She and I were standing on opposite ends of a largish closet. We had both partially opened the sliding door from our end (creating an open space, then the overlapping doors, then another open space) and were looking into the closet when she asked if I knew where her shoes were. I glanced down at the floor of the closet and saw them sitting there.

When I told her where they were, she said she couldn't see them. I told her just to trust me and reach into the closet. I had a perspective that let me see the shoes that she couldn't. As we drove to church, we talked about what had happened and realized that it was a nice little illustration of how we sometimes need to let go of our point of view and trust the Lord to achieve the end He has in mind.

A walk through the Bloggernacle

I'm reading some additional blogs these days, and thought they would be worth sharing with those of you who haven't seen them yet.

Ebenezer Orthodoxy

a bird's eye view

To Speak of Many Things

Nine Moons

I hope you enjoy them as much as I have been.

-pate

A new stake presidency, part 0 -- the prelude

We're supposed to have a general authority at our Stake conference next month. Because our stake presidency has been serving in their positions for quite a while, this led to the recurring rumour that the stake presidency would be reorgainized. It got bad enough that people were approaching members of the presidency to ask them to confirm the rumours. It seems that they've decided to clarify things. We've been asked to tell all of the families we're assigned to Home Teach that the presidency will be reorganized, and to ask them all to come to conference to be part of the occasion.

I'll be sorry to see the current presidency disbanded. They're all great men, and have done a wonderful job in their callings. I have faith that the new presidency will be every bit as inspired (and inspiring). Succession happens, I can deal with that.

I'm saddened that we (as a stake, as a people ...) are so prone to speculating over who will fill new positions that the rumour mill kicked into high enough gear that the current presidency felt a need to counteract it by announcing the upcoming change.

But the kicker, at least to me, is that we care so little about stake conference (or general conference for that matter) that we need to tell people that there's a special occasion so that they'll come. It almost seems that some people feel conference is a week off from church.

Lehi's Dream and the Parable of the Sower

Over on Meg's Book of Mormon Thoughts, she talks about Lehi's Dream in her Aug 22nd post. In it, she talks about the four groups of people from that vision.

I enjoy the resonance between this vision and the Savior's Parable of the Sower. Both discuss the same four kinds of people:

1) Those that hear the message, but don't do anything about it. In the parable, they are desribed as falling by the wayside and being eaten by fowls. In Lehi's dream, he says that multitudes felt their way toward the great and spacious building (apparently ignoring the rod and the path to the tree altogether.)

2) Those that hear the message and start to obey, but fall away quickly. The Savior says that these fell into stony places and sprung up, but having no root withered in the sun. In the dream, these would be those that started along the path to the tree but lost their way in the mist.

3) Those that hear and accept the message, but are lost to the world. The parable describes these as falling among thorns which choked them. In Lehi's dream, these are the multitude who make it to the tree and partake of the fruit only to hear the scoffing of those in the great and spacious building and become ashamed, falling away.

4) The last group are those that hear and accept the message and then endure to the end. The Savior describes them as falling into good soil and bringing forth good fruit. Lehi says that "other multitudes" pressed forward, holding to the rod, and partook of the fruit of the tree.

A timeline for Alma(1) and Alma(2)

The following is a rough timeline for the lives of Alma the Elder and Alma the Younger. Some of the dates are approximations based on other events, some are guesses from clues in the Book of Mormon. I'd love to hear what people think.

Without further ado, the timeline:

Date	Event
173 BC	Alma(1) born in Nephi-Lehi
151 BC	Mosiah(2) born in Zarahemla
150-148 BC	Abinadi teaches in Lehi-Nephi, and is martyred
145-120 BC	Alma(1) leads people in Helam
147 BC	Alma(1) teaches at the Waters of Mormon
c. 130 BC	Alma(2) born in Helam (see Alma 5:5)
124 BC	Mosiah(2) begins to reign
120 BC	Mosiah(2) authorizes Alma(1) to organize the church
100 - 92 BC	conversion of Alma(2)
91 BC	Alma(1) dies at 82 years old, Alma(2) becomes the High Priest Mosiah(2) dies at 63 years old, Alma(2) becomes Chief Judge
87 BC	Alma(2) wounded in battle
86-85 BC	Alma(2) baptizes thousands
83 BC	Alma(2) gives up judgement seat Alma(2) preaches in Zarahemla and Gideon
82 BC	Alma(2) preaches in Melek and Ammoniha (with Amulek)
81 BC	Prison in Amonihah cast down Alma(2) and Amulek preach in Sidon and return to Zarahemla
81-77 BC	Alma(2) reunited with Sons of Mosiah
74 BC	Alma(2) gives "Oh that I were an Angel" sermon Dispute with Korihor Alma(2) leads mission to Antionum (Zoramites) with sons Shiblon and Corianton
73 BC	Alma(2) instructs Helaman(1), Shiblon, and Corianton Alma(2) teaches Helaman(1) again Alma(2) is translated Helaman(1) becomes High Priest

A nice post in a nice series from meridian magazine

I've noticed that Meridian Magazine seems to have a bad reputation among some of the bloggernacle as being too "molly-mormon". While I don't like everything they've published, I do enjoy some of their articles.

I've enjoyed Daniel Peterson and William Hamblin's articles in Ideas & Society for quite a while. Their recent piece on Najaf is a good example. It provides a brief, "tour stop"-like introduction to why Najaf is important in Shi'ite (and Sunni) Islam. There was enough meat to make it fun for me to read, but approachable enough for me to point it out to my teenager. The only thing I'd like to see is a pointer to further information.

Thanks for the work Brothers Peterson and Hamblin.

Modern Patrilogia

Hall described 4 key characteristics of the Fathers; 1) their antiquity, 2) the holiness (or zealousness) of their life, 3) their orthodoxy, and 4) ecclesiastical approval of their teachings. With the exception of the first point, I think these also apply quite well to our latter-day prophets and apostles.

In fact, their proximity to us even brings an added benefit. While they might not provide the same kind of insights into the scriptures that the early fathers do, their modern focus can apply more directly to our own light. Our shared context can also make their exigesis more approachable to us.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll try to post some entries about conference talks from the past.

Looking at patterns in the Book of Mormon

Over on Mormanity in Jeff's post on Alma 36 and chiasmus (see also his follow-up) I asked about finding a community for discussing potential chiasms. In one of my comments, I promised to post something, and here it is.

In Alma 26:6-8 there are what I think are some interesting parallelistic patterns, an extended parallel, a simple parallel, and a chiasm. Here's my attempt at laying them out:

A   Yea, they shall not be beaten down by the
    storm at the last day;
B   yea, neither shall they be harrowed up by
     the whirlwinds;
          but when the storm cometh
 C   they shall be gathered together in
      their place,
A   that the storm cannot penetrate to
    them;
B   yea, neither shall they be driven with
     fierce winds
 C   whithersoever the enemy listeth to
      carry them.

   But behold,
a   they are in the hands of the Lord of the
    harvest, and
a   they are his;


A   and he will raise them up at the last day.
B   Blessed be the name of our God;
 C   let us sing to his praise, yea,
 C   let us give thanks
B   to his holy name,
A   for he doth work righteousness forever.

So, what do you think?

Oh That I Were Quoted in Context

Alma 29:1

O THAT I were an angel, and could have the wish of mine heart, that I might go forth and speak with the trump of God, with a voice to shake the earth, and cry repentance unto every people!

This scripture is quoted frequently by members of the LDS church to help instill a desire to do missionary work. It seems to capture the drive to bear testimony and share the gospel very well. For me though, it has begun to take on a second meaning -- a warning about taking scriptures out of context.

In Alma 29, Alma the Younger begins with this heartfelt exclamation, but over the next few verses repents and recants his wish (see vv 3, 6-7, and 8).

In fact, Alma 29 becomes a great example of how seeing hebreaisms can help clarify scriptures. Alma 29 is composed of two large chiasms (vv1-7 and 8-17) which encapsulate at least 6 smaller parallel patterns (vv 2, 4-5, 9, 9-10, 11-13, and 15-16) (See Donald Parry. TheBook of Mormon Text Reformatted According to Parallelistic Patterns. 1992. pp 260-1.) Looked at through this view, you can still see the powerful message about missionary work as well as awarning against aspiring to roles outside your stewardship -- and the desire to pull a verse out of context is harder to justify.

The Pivot Pattern, and a mental lightbulb

I'm not done putting my thoughts about Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers into a readable state, but I thought I'd better try to get a couple of more things written in the meantime.

While reading Jeff Lindsay'spage on "Bicola, Tricola, Paired Tricola, and Isaiah Variants in 2 Nephi 12 of the Book of Mormon: Authentic Hebrew Poetry?", I got interested in Bicola and Tricola. I went hunting and found The Pivot Pattern in Biblical Hebrew as another reference. It wasn't about the same thing. Rather, a specific kind of tricola in which the 2nd colon "belongs semantically to the first and third cola alike." (Wilfred G. E. Watson) -- for example:

   Hearken unto the voice of my cry,
          my King, and my God,
       for unto the will I pray.

(Psalm 5:2)

I was pretty excited as I read the paper, and went to look at the examples that they listed. Then, I hit a problem:

citation	example translation	KJV translation
Joel 4:20 (Joel 3:20)	So Judah forever is inhabited and Jerusalem from generation to generation.	But Judah shall dwell for ever, and Jerusalem from generation to generation.
Genesis 4:24	If seven times Cain is avenged then Lamech seventy-seven	If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold, truly Lamech seventy and sevenfold

The pivot pattern shows up well in a very literal translations, but not so well in the KJV. This presents a problem, the Book of Mormon is closer in style to the KJV than the literal translations used in the paper. So it looks like I'm going to need to try to get a bette rhandle on deconstructing the Book of Mormon text to get at the original (Hebrew) structure to see the pivot patterns that I believe are there.

Any thoughts?

Really Understanding the Scriptures

When I wrote "Scriptural exegesis can really only be performed by individuals in a ministerial role -- anyone else lacks the context to really understand how the scriptures should apply to our lives." in Reading Scripture with the Church Fathers, I had misremembered Hall's comments and inadvertently combined two points. He didn't claim that the fathers believed that you must be a practicing minister to be a successful exegete, but that you needed to be a practicing Christian and that their ministerial role added a dimension of practicality to their understanding of the scriptures. Neither of these ideas is new. In them, I hear echoes from conference talks and lesson manuals.

Developing a love of the scriptures should be more than an act of Christian duty, is should be a Christian activity (as opposed to an academic exercise). The scriptures were written under the influenceof the Holy Ghost and are more effectively read under the same influence. Prayer, pondering, keeping the commandments, and living up to the covenants we've entered into keep us attuned to the voice of the Spirit and will help open our minds to the scriptures.

Serving in a ministerial capacity helps focus our attention in scripture study on those practical matters pertaining to our stewardship. Our service provides a laboratory for working out the real world application of the lessons we learn. The insights that we gain as we pray, ponder, and study the scriptures, while seeking the Lord's help in our callings, will cast new light on the scriptures. (I see this as one of the blessings of magnifying a calling.)