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Designs for Groups
These designs for groups, entitled Possible World Workbooks, are made available through JEM's collaboration with the authors. The goal is transformative change, moving ourselves and our institutions into sustainable practices. Each group session combines brief readings, journaling questions, active listening to one another's stories and thoughts, shaping new awareness through group learning, and short rituals. Participants help one another make new choices toward sustainable lifestyles. These designs can be used in various settings, including campuses, businesses, congregations, other nonprofits — wherever there is a yearning to co-create the changes now underway in our world.
Of the following three designs, the first two are ready for use now; the third is in preparation and will be ready by fall 2008.
Shift Happens: Journey to Sustainable Behavior
JEM is pleased to announce a new partnership with authors/trainers Lee Van Ham and  David Miller that makes available a new program about the metanoia process, Shift Happens: Journey to Sustainable Behavior. In these times of rapid and disturbing economic and ecological change, the material looks at how each of us goes through the very personal experience of adopting a new world view, examines how the experience can disrupt all we have assumed in the past, and then guides participants on to making new personal choices and to helping change the institutions in which they have a role.
There is a movement building. The magnitude of this movement challenges us all to enact deep and lasting change. The need for this movement confronts us like never before. Our work is healing our planet and ourselves, moving into an era of cooperation with all of creation.
Our work needs to impact long-term structural change. The process for such change calls on us to discover our deepest values, applying them in our households, our organizations, and our communities.
Our work, then, is shifting our consciousness; shifting the world to operate from a different paradigm. We call the processes of such shifting "Metanoia," the Greek word for changing how we perceive things, our world view, and our resulting actions.
The following is from the introduction to the workbook:
"What shapes our lives? Listen to the stories that we tell, the symbols that attract us, and the metaphors we speak. All of these make the texture and weave of the paradigm that holds and guides our lives. A paradigm is like a set of eye-glasses, lenses through which we view our experiences in the world. We tell our stories from that perspective or paradigm whether we are conscious of our paradigm or not. But we know ourselves better, and we are more aware of why we do what we do when our paradigm is known to us and we use it with consciousness.
"Much of the power of paradigms comes from the way they function below the surface of our lives. We don't see them directly, which gives them all the more power over us. But the more attentive we become to the metaphors, symbols, and stories we use, the better we can come to know our paradigm. Knowing our paradigm can help us change to a different one as needed."
Training sessions for organizations, congregations, and college campuses are available by contacting the JEM office. The program is presented in ten 2-hour sessions. David and Lee will be ready to offer half-day workshops by the summer of 2008.
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Reading the Bible Economically
Even though money and economic decisions drive our lives, reading the bible economically remains rare among people of faith. In this discussion series we'll take down the wall between economics and the bible. Stories will release new power for living. The bible's alternatives to empire economics will help reframe how we live amid a culture where we "follow the money."
Topics include:
- From Economic Innocence to Consciousness: Reframing Eden
- How Much Is Enough?
- Release from Debt in a Debt Economy
- Ongoing Redistribution of Wealth (Land, Property)
- Gift Economy and the Artist's Imagination
- Co-creating the Commons
- Investing: Giving and Withholding Consent
- The Rich-Poor Gap
- Crash! When Empire Economics Fail
- East of Eden: Living the Paradigm of God's Commonwealth
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What We Eat and Drink Changes the World, using The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan.
This Workbook shows how our eating and drinking are about much more than satisfying our hunger pangs and quenching our thirst. Thorough use of this Workbook will show how our eating and drinking choices ripple out in astonishing ways. What we choose to eat and drink changes the world either toward sustainability and healing, or not. Such a statement sounds grandiose until we connect the dots and learn the true stories of our food and drink. Only then do we feel the power of our eating and drinking decisions.
Topics include:
- Shopping Locally
- Buying Organic
- Meat?
- Eating in Season
- Justice for Animals
- Processed Foods
- Fast Food Dilemma
- Water Issues
- Community Gardens
- Institutional Food Policies
- Thinking Paradigm
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