Wisdom in a World That Has Lost Its Mind

What a Fool Believes – Part 1

“Pastor Michael, what wisdom did you inherit from your mother?” The question caught me off guard. At Family Table, a meal-based church, someone from our team tells a story or asks a question. People discuss at their tables, and then we pass the mic. The Wednesday preceding Mother’s Day, the question was, “What wisdom or spiritual gems were passed down from your mother—or for those of us who didn’t have a mom, a mother figure?”

My role was to run around with the hot mic and let the spokespeople share what emerged at their tables. In Fresh Expressions, we moved away from a sage on a stage delivering a monologue, to creating dialogues through which we harvest the collective wisdom of the group. But… I wasn’t expecting to share myself. I was stumped.

I grew up in a house that was a wisdom desert. My mother, self-medicating her own traumatic childhood, was not around. My biological father was unknown. My brother McKinley and I ran wild in the streets, scraping by, surviving as best we could. We stayed with my grandma for a while. A widowed, traumatized, cigarette-smoking saint of a woman, who started each day with opening her Bible, then firing up a GPC 100 (that’s a long, cheap, smoke).

Grandma did the best she could. I know she loved me. And she left this world too soon. By the time I was a teenager, I was a 9^th grade dropout, raised in juvenile detention and residential programs for youthful offenders.

As I stood stunned with a microphone, I couldn’t recall a single gem passed down by my grandma. Not saying she never delivered them. Maybe I can’t remember. Or I was just too stoned all the time. Memory is unreliable anyway. But in a flash of Holy Spirit inspiration I said, “My grandma dragged me to this church every time the doors were open. I inherited my faith from her. That is the most priceless gift I’ve ever received.”

The crowd responded with sporadic golf clapping and a collective, “thanks for sharing.”

Congregational Wisdom

Here was this little church, this scrappy, imperfect, beautiful congregation, that became my spiritual orphanage. They didn’t have fancy programs or a shiny building. They had a potluck table and a Bible. And they had wisdom. Not necessarily the kind you read in books or learn in seminary. They had the kind of wisdom that can only form in the context of community. A collective wisdom passed down generationally. The kind that emerges when we decide to love people we disagree with and commit to a bigger vision than our own self-absorbed interests. The kind you cultivate by living through hell while holding onto Jesus. A way of being that elder brother James described as, “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger” (James 1:19).

A wisdom that Uncle Paul once described like this,

“If, then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:1-5).

This “mind of Christ” is nothing less than the embodiment of a distinct kind of wisdom. It’s countercultural. Upside down. Rare. Maybe even going extinct in the United States amid a sociopolitical situation in which we have likely lost our minds and unequivocally lost the “mind of Christ” as Paul describes it.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized how much their simple faith, their embodied wisdom, had shaped me. They were living out what Jesus meant when he said, “Be wise as serpents and innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). That’s a strange pairing, isn’t it? Serpents are shrewd, calculated, and alert. Doves are gentle, trusting, pure. Jesus didn’t say pick one. He said be both. That’s the tension of true wisdom: the blending of keen discernment, self-aware reflective capacity, and tender-hearted compassion. And that is what we call… Congregational Wisdom.

Foolishness to the Greeks

The New Testament has multiple words for wisdom. There’s sophia—that broad, encompassing wisdom, the skillful application of knowledge. Phronesis—practical wisdom, the ability to make sound judgments (the “serpent” streetwise kind mentioned above). Epignosis—deep, relational knowledge. But here comes Uncle Paul flipping the whole thing on its head, ^“but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks,” … “For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:23 & 25).

That’s what I’ve been learning in this journey of following Jesus, cultivating Fresh Expressions, walking alongside addicts and skeptics, creating spiritual community in tattoo parlors and burrito shops and state rehabs: real wisdom doesn’t make sense in our inherited logic models. It’s foolishness to the institutional powers and principalities that measure success by numbers, buildings, and budgets.

Wisdom often emerges from the margins. It can flow through contextual, movemental, incarnational, lay-led forms of church. Tragically, top-down pyramidal organizational structures often fail to harvest the learning that’s emerging from the bottom-up. The kind of wisdom you find in a small rural church providing faithful funerals for grieving families. Or in a tattoo parlor when a person opens up about their recent suicide attempt, as they share their first Jesus story. Or among the senior saints in an assisted living facility, who gather weekly for prayer, support, and to plot “holy mischief.” Different kinds of wisdom manifest there than in boardrooms. And none of this shows up on our current “vitality” reports. It’s messy. It’s raw. It smells like cigarette smoke and potluck casseroles. But it’s where the Spirit is moving.

What a Fool Believes

And that brings me to the Doobie Brothers. You know the hook…

“What a fool believes, he sees / No wise man has the power to reason away... ”

Every Yacht Rock connoisseur knows the hook, but have you ever really discerned the lyrics? I had no idea what the rest of the words meant, until I looked them up. It’s a song about a man who clings to a love that never truly was, convinced it’s real, while the rest of the world shakes their head in pity.

Isn’t that the story of the church in so many ways? We hold onto an idealized version of what we think church is supposed to be, while the real thing—the messy, Spirit-breathed, incarnational life of Jesus—is often happening outside the walls, in the streets, in the margins, in the places that look like foolishness to the world.

It takes wisdom to hear what’s really being said beneath the surface noise. It takes wisdom to see where God is at work in the unexpected places.

This series is based on my ongoing research in the department of sociology at the University of Florida. I want to understand what makes congregations wise… and unwise. I want to know what role they play in the intergenerational transmission of wisdom. I want to understand if there is a relationship between the collapse of wisdom in the U.S., a society that has lost its mind, and the decline of religious affiliation. And most importantly (and practically measurable), I want to know if wise congregations, through the cultivation and transmission of wisdom, positively influence their members’ flourishing and overall well-being.

I’m conducting an analysis of the prevailing vitality metrics, wise leadership, and the surprising ways wisdom emerges in unlikely places. The study employs a mixed-methods design that includes content analysis of existing denominational indicators, stakeholder focus groups, interviews, and case studies of real-world wisdom outliers.

I’m gathering insights from laity, clergy, developers, and leaders in the Fresh Expressions movement across the country. And I’m asking you to help me by forming a “Congregational Wisdom Circle.” I’m asking you to share with me everything you know about congregational wisdom, and every person I should talk to about it. My hope is that this series will be less monologue, and more dialogue. That you, my Substack community, will talk to me in the comments section below, and share thoughts and resources in the Facebook Group.

In the weeks ahead, I’ll be sharing key findings from Mapping the Metrics, a denominational report prepared from the first wave of research. Alongside the data I’ll include reflections from my own journey, Scripture, and what my team calls Street Divinity. Together, we’ll wrestle with the prevalent falsities, the stuff “fools believe” and the foolishness of God that turns the institutional logic and metric paradigm upside down.

This is a roll call for holy fools. The kind who believe in a God who takes death and turns it into resurrection. The kind who plant seeds in the desert, trusting they’ll bloom. The kind who sees wisdom where others see folly, and folly that some assume is wisdom.

Because what a fool believes... might help heal a lonely world.

---

Learn more and get registered for #FXUM26 right here…

---

Learn more about Street Divinity…

---