Having written the book that is now in your possession, I would like to say a number of things by way of a preamble to what you are about to read. When the idea for this book was first conceived, it was born out of a simple desire to help reframe the Good News of the gospel of Jesus Christ for those who, having become disillusioned with their faith , had found their way to The Grace Project. It was intended for a limited audience. It was for those of us who, in the words of Thomas Carlyle, knew that the ideal is in thyself; the impediment, too, is in thyself but for whom the reconciliation of the paradox seemed beyond them.

 The Grace Project was a work started by an idealistic dreamer (i.e. the author) who, having felt the sharp edges of performance-based Christianity, felt prompted to begin a work inspired by the desire to see men and women set free from the misery which comes from not truly understanding one s identity. We came to The Grace Project to be healed and be made whole and to our delight, this has been substantially achieved. But what we learned in those days was that renewal is less a form of healing than a form of relearning.

 I had imagined that this was a book for disappointed Christians. But, as the work unfolded, I began to see that whilst my prescription is Christian , the reality is that the problems addressed here (e.g. performance-addictions, the need for meaning and acceptance, living with guilt, the fear of failure, anxiety and the deep-seated belief that our best might not be good enough) are not peculiar to Christians. Far from it. They are universal issues which confront us all. Whilst it is true that the primary audience of The Bonsai Conspiracy is the disillusioned Christian, it turns out that this is not an exclusively in-house book. A failure to understand who we are dwarfs us all.

 A thought amplified by Zohar and Marshall in their collaborative work, SQ: Spiritual Intelligence The Ultimate Intelligence ¹, which contains an insightful chapter entitled How We Become Spiritually Stunted . The authors cite Jung s belief, as expressed in his famous work, Psychotherapists or the Clergy , that this stunting is the product of a suffering soul which has not discovered its meaning.  The one thing which we all have in common is that the thirst for meaning is universal. Meaning in the face of meaninglessness is what this book is about.

 By profession, I am a Life Coach and have developed a concept which I call Life Coaxing . Far from being semantic, the differentiator between coaching and coaxing is crucial. In coaching, the assumption is that the coach knows best . In what I call life coaxing, the answers lie within. The challenge is to enable people to be who they really are. And herein lies the great mitigant It is hard to be who we are because it does not seem to be what anybody wants.

 Over the years, I have had the privilege of being retained by many organisations as well as numerous professional sports people and I have employed the principles which lie at the heart of this book in my therapy sessions with these private clients to good effect. Readers unfamiliar with the world of evangelical Christianity will be able to readily draw parallels from their own plausibility structures. The performance-based life is a pandemic. Beginning in the home, it follows us to school, pursues us at work and goes with us to the grave.

 The Bonsai Conspiracy is for all who find themselves planted in shallow and constricting pots. It is for those who have hewn cisterns for themselves, cisterns which proved unable to hold the water to feed their growth. These Christian cisterns have left many to inhale a slowly suffocating brand of Christianity which rendered them afraid to be happy and also, overwhelmed by a lurking sense of guilt caused by a faith system that is to be endured and not enjoyed.

 This book follows a particular line of thought

 Our strategies to make life work are bound to fail and this, in fact, is their redemptive quality. We have coined the term Churchianity ² to draw the contrast between the formal church ³ and Christianity. However, the term could equally be applied to every religious system and any paradigm of self-effort. By a perverse paradox, the brand of religion which most Christians have embraced is bondage and not freedom.

 In order to escape from this paradigm of self-effort, it will be necessary to die to self-validation. The freedom of which we elude to throughout this book is the exclusive preserve of those who are dead to self in any and all its forms including self-reliance, self-confidence, self-assurance, self-pleasing and self-authentication.

 Real freedom is not accessible to the strong or even the weak for to claim that one is weak is to admit that one has a modicum of strength. It is for the dead ! For many, this death to self-effort comes in the form of burnout which we define as a person being in a state of fatigue or disillusionment brought about by a dedication to a way of life which failed to bring the expected reward.  There will be those who wonder whether the burnout phase is inevitable. I would dearly like to believe that it is not inevitable but I am yet to have any evidence to encourage such a view. Ultimately, everybody must have their own personal moment(s) of Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? [Rom. 7:24]. Everybody must first exhaust their own resources before such moment(s) can be experienced.

 Now, having undergone our period(s) of disillusionment (i.e. Dark Night(s) of the Soul), we emerge on the other side only to discover that we do not like the look of freedom. This is understandably so because freedom is a scary thing. How does one function in a paradigm where there are no alibis, rules, codes of conduct, ethics, structures or law? How does one function in a world where morality has been surpassed and outclassed by the absurdity of grace? It is up to you to interpret freedom for yourself. Nobody is going to tell you what to do. All this new paradigm will do is to reinforce who you are. So, you can neither control nor be controlled. Freedom is truly frightening as it is an alien and implausible structure to a bound guilt-stained soul.

 So, if we are too frightened to go forward but know too much to go back, what are we to do? Well, we will learn that as freed persons, we have a new responsibility and in this new paradigm, responsibility means that we, as freed men and women, have been freed and empowered with the ability to choose our response to the things which have previously caused us so much pain.

 The believer, having been freed from the wrong structure, may well wonder, What is the secret of living an effective Christian life?  This question will be discussed in the remaining chapters of the book, viz. Perfecting The Perfect What s Love Got To Do With It? and Scion-tology .

 If you are an evangelical Christian contemplating the reading of this book, it is only fair to warn you that should you decide to read and meditate on the contents of this book in your hands, it is highly likely that your current view of the Christian faith will be seriously undermined and may be compromised beyond repair. If you are content with the Christian Life as you are currently experiencing it, it may be just as well for you to close this book and put it back where you found it and forget you ever opened it. On the other hand, should you sense that there is something wrong, something missing and that you view the Christian Life as something more to be endured than enjoyed, this book is for you.

 The material herein has greatly benefited from a period of rigorous peer reviews. The loving and sagacious insights have, almost without exception, been embraced and are reflected in the revisions to the original text. Let me provide you with a bit more orientation as to the road or pathway which this book is seeking to travel.

 In the chapter Labour Isn t Working! , we suggest that in most circles, what passes for Christianity is not Christianity at all. We shall prove beyond reasonable doubt that the essence of Christianity is self-replacement where the Old Man (Adam) is removed and is replaced by the New Man, Jesus (Last Adam). This is distinct from what we call Churchianity , the kernel of which is self-improvement.

 In this paradigm, the old man is saved and the new man is simply the old man reconditioned or improved. We suggest that most believers are actually doubters because consciously, subconsciously and/or experientially, they acknowledge a difference between the Christian Life and the Life of Christ. We posit that there is no such distinction.

 In the next chapter, we face the inevitable consequence of the aforementioned misconception  Burnout . This chapter of the same name explores and explains why burnout is an agony to be embraced. Burnout clears the path of all self-sufficiency and places the beleaguered believer on the threshold of realising the true nature of the Christian Life. Therefore, in what may appear to be an apparent paradox, we argue that the key to success in the Christian Life is our abject and total failure to live it.

 In the chapter Frightened By Freedom , we examine the thorny problem of freedom. We are, for the most part, institutionalised and conditioned. Consequently, we are intuitively very much afraid of freedom, especially in circumstances where freedom comes at the high cost of change. As Daryl Conner, author of The Speed of Change , puts it

Humans are the most control-oriented animals on the planet . When we are unable to meet our needs, we become disorientated. When we meet these needs, we gain a feeling of stability and psychological comfort so powerful that attaining this state is one of the most potent motivators of human behaviour. ⁴

 Anyone who has read the story of the Exodus of the Israelites from the captivity of Egypt to the Promise Land of freedom will take little convincing as to the congenital nature of this problem.

 In the chapter entitled Perfecting The Perfect , we unpack the biblical basis of Christian discipleship which is, simply, becoming who you already are. In our paradigm, sanctification is not so much a progressive rectification of our behaviour as it is a progressive recognition of our identity.

 The penultimate chapter, What s Love Got To Do With It? , sets out the rationale for the Christian Life. Here, we reveal the secret of the Christian Life Agapē i.e. God who is Love [1 John 4:8] and loving through us as us.

 In the final chapter, Scion-tology , we attempt to answer the most practical of questions: So what?  How does all this impact us in the here and now? How, for example, do Christians live without consciousness of their sin? How does the life of Christ flow into and become unified with the life of the believer? How do we apply the prescriptive elements (i.e. the doing) of the Apostle Paul s teaching? We provide an answer through the Apostle Paul s mystical analogy of grafting.

A Thought for Christian Workers

 The Bonsai Conspiracy has been adapted from a guided programme of study known as The Pathway which the author prepared to facilitate study for those who have been used to being told what to believe and to whom independent thinking (in church , at least) is an alien concept. Consequently, it is especially important that Christian workers seeking to engage with this book as a teaching tool undertake to facilitate their groups by leading with questions and not answers and by engaging in discussion and debate.

Agapē,

Paul Anderson-Walsh

London

May 2006

¹ Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, SQ: Spiritual Intelligence The Ultimate Intelligence [New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000], Chapter 9, p. 165ff.

² See Chapter 4, Labour Isn t Working! , on Churchianity .

³ Unless otherwise stated, throughout this book, the church means the church institutions and organisations generally and the church means the mystical body of fellow Christian believers.