A wild goose?

Why “a wild goose in flight”?

… a parable credited to that radical nineteenth-century disciple Soren Kierkegaard …

Many of us, and especially those who have lived in the country, will have witnessed the migration of geese as they undertake a massive journey to follow spring and summer around the world. Characteristically, geese make a screeching sound as they fly. If one were to observe the effect of this wild call on tame barnyard geese, the ones who have given up on the dangerous journey in favour of barnyard food and security, one would see that as the wild cousins fly overhead, the tame geese run along the ground and flap their wings wildly, somehow trying to imitate the mad flight of the migrating geese. The squawking seems to awaken something innate in them, a memory of wildness.

… On one level we suggest that it is the task of leadership to do exactly the same as the wild geese; to fly over the heads of those we lead in order to call them to the dangerous journey of mission and engagement in the name of God. To do this, we ourselves have to take flight and risk the long journey across the continents.

… The twist in the tale is this: that while it has been observed that wild geese have become tame .. it has seldom been observed that tame geese can become wild again. We need to beward of the anesthetizing and stultifying effects that Christendom, the tame, nonmissional church, and our safe middle classness have had on us.

Frost and Hirsch “The Shaping of things to come” p222