Can't We Be Relational?

I'm still stuck on this idea of questionnaires . . . which I think Paul would hate. He seemed to despise "letters of recommendation" and prefered the personal ties to be sufficient.

He vouched for Phoebe, which is a long way from filling out a multi-part critique of her various skills so it can be cross-referenced with a matrix of suitablility scores (gleaned from surveys received from 25,342 ministry and para-church workers, along with ordained clergy, from 46 states and analyzed by a Sun-Micro systems super computer on a proprietary program which generated a .46 correlation - quite good actually) which compares giftedness with task and role criteria to produce a "fitness rating" so we can find out if statisitically she is likely to perform well, under the Spirit's leading, of course, in the position for which she is applying. All of this was developed by Spiritual Analytical Ministries of Boise, Idaho - a thriving company dedicated to producing scientific instruments to decipher the Spirit's working (none of that wind blowing where it wills stuff) since 1987. The company's current work is on a spiritual prognosticator, which rather than measuring what the Spirit is doing right now in any given disciple, is intended to predict what the Spirit will do - all to develop more efficiency in plugging believers into the right ministry. Fitness, you know.

I read Post-Rapture Radio on the trip to my father's funeral (another subject entirely, which I will blog about . . . I think) so that might explain my sarcasm in the previous paragraph. But I'm not far off . . . am I?

If we are more relational, less focused on "is this person going to be able to contribute like we want" - if we had less of an agenda of what we want to do and were more focused on who others are, leaving the "what to do" more up to God, then we might act differently.

Or not.