“Children are part of our geography of hope.” An almost throw away comment by Wade Davis in his 2003 TED talk endangered cultures around the loss of language and ethnocide. I completely agree, children are part of it, but it got me to thinking about what ‘it’ is and what else is part of it? I love the idea of a geography of hope.  It demands you to ask questions like, What is the terrain like?  Is the going tough or light? Is the land fertile? and Tell me about the landmarks?  Here are some of my first thoughts

The dreams and visions and ideas and desires of our children should be like the planning office for this geography.  Questions about how and what and where and when should we, those with the power, do, should be examined by the imaginative, joyful unhindered minds and hearts of those who will inherit the benefits and costs of such doing.  Such a planning office should be culturally cross-referential: the doing in the west should be examined by the minds and hearts of the east and likewise those in the east, and north and south by those in the west and south and north.  The force of this is not driven by ideas about our children being the ‘world of tomorrow’, which clearly they are, but because when Jesus said ‘unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’ [Matt 18:3].  For a long time my children equated height with age; if you were taller, you were older.  An easy mistake for someone who has almost their entire biological chronology set on growing.  As an idea though, it is at the end of the day, daft!  For a long time now we have equated age, learning and experience with wisdom and insight.  How daft is that!!

In this geography of hope the going will be tough.  Not generally, but by choice.  Wisdom, faithfulness, honesty and joy come because you work at it, it’s tough by choice because hope is cultivated through hard work.  I don’t mean being hopeful is hard work, but the way to become hopeful, being full of hope, is by working hard at growing wisdom, faithfulness, honesty and joy; the flora and fauna of this geography of hope.  And to grow such things as these at the centre of your being and the being of a community demands hard work.

The going will also be slow in this geography of hope.  At least it will seem so for those whose current geography is an upward desire to upgrade.  Once the wheel began to roll, the desire for speed grew in strength and results.  The arena in which this desire for speed is unleashed changes from time to time and culture to culture.  In my world, which is indicative of many in what we call the technologically advanced, this arena is captured by the word and concept of upgrading.  A counter-movement to this is to mend-and-make-do, which is always much slower than replace-and-upgrade.  At the moment for me this is about my lawn-mower, which has a cracked petrol tank; the battle is between my patient efforts to repair and the height of my grass.  The deeper battle is about our efforts to mine, trawl, squeeze and suck all we can from each passing moment instead of wishfully hastening onto the next with the empty hope that by doing the same in that one and the one after that and the one after that we will somehow achieve more than we did in the last one.  Hope is fuelled by what we carry from the past, which we can only really appreciate if we experience what it was.  We will therefore travel much slower in a geography of hope.

In this geography of hope, the significant and noticeable landmarks will be small gatherings of people who are committed to each other, to place and to Jesus; and these expressions of church will be found in the most unexpected of places.  When we find ourselves encountering depth, if we take time to notice, we will find people whose sense of self is concentrated and distilled from their relationship with the divine, with other people and the space and place where they are.  This is in sharp contrast to the movement of the age which has dislocated people from the land of their ancestors, from the place of their birth, from the people of their family, from their neighbour and from their selves; and in that process has found that they have been dislocated from the divine.  The challenge to find oneself is not answered by running and escape, but through stillness and staying.  The geography of hope is not based on finding fertile ground somewhere else, but staying and working the ground until it becomes fertile, until you begin to feel yourself putting down your roots, establishing yourself where you find yourself and becoming stable and embedded enough to survive the sharp frosts and the long hard days of winter.  And winter turns to spring and your bare branches begin to bud and hope begins to blossom.  A hope that is shaped not by the things that change, but by the things that don’t, which is what a landmark is after all.

These thoughts are of course riddled with my own heart and passion.  I wonder what your thoughts are?

I recently attended the Holy Spirit in the World Today conference hosted by St Paul’s Theological College, St. Mellitus and Holy Trinity Brompton, which I might post about later.  Quite unexpectedly I ran into a now ‘grown-up’ member of a youth group that I used to oversee at Union Baptist Church.  As I got over the usual shock that you get when you encounter people who you remember being smaller and younger and how old you feel now they are taller and all grown-up, the next shock was that he had the weekend before been ordained as a baptist minister.

Andrew Burnham, was one of the 20 odd young people baptised in 2001.  Andrew was in hospital when I went to see him and in the course of the conversation I just asked ‘do you want to think about being baptised?’  It was this question, Andrew told me, that turned his life around and led him to be where he is now, leading and serving in Sutton-in-the-Elms Baptist Church.  For me, encountering Andrew this weekend has been a huge encouragement, and has reminded me that I am quite clearly an Asker.

I am clearly building on the foundations of others here.  Firstly there is Andrea Donderi whose web post has seems to have generated a few ripples through the blogsphere.  This in turn has been picked up by Oliver Burkeman writing in the Guardian, which has in turn been picked up by a few others including now me.  The original web post, which you can read by following the link above, lays out two types of people: Askers and Guessers…

In some families, you grow up with the expectation that it’s OK to ask for anything at all, but you gotta realize you might get no for an answer. This is Ask Culture.

In Guess Culture, you avoid putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes. Guess Culture depends on a tight net of shared expectations. A key skill is putting out delicate feelers. If you do this with enough subtlety, you won’t even have to make the request directly; you’ll get an offer. Even then, the offer may be genuine or pro forma; it takes yet more skill and delicacy to discern whether you should accept.

The post goes on to explore a few of the issues that arise when Guessers and Askers live, work and play together.  Whilst these observations are interesting, what struck me was how these two cultures work in the life of a congregation.

The observation in many congregations is that 80%+ of the work is done by >10% of the people.  This kind of observation is often true for the finance of the church too, where around 20% of a congregation give 80% of the money.  Perhaps ecclesiastical life is being lead by Guessers who only ask the Guessers who can’t say ‘No’.  Leaders of congregations can find themselves spending time working out who to ask to do something or give something based on what they know of the person and how likely they are to say “Yes”, which often turns out largely due to the fact that they can’t say “No”.  Quite unconsciously, the leader can be perpetuating the congregations dependence on a few Guessers who can’t say “No”.  They can’t say “No” because they discern correctly that the leader has asked them because they are likely to say “Yes” and so perpetuate their own position of shoring up the congregation with their effort and availability.

Perhaps it is time for the leader to try on the skills of being an Asker.  An Asker spend time thinking about the question.  How to ask in a clear and straight forward way, being able to outline the cost of saying “Yes” and the support and training that will be on offer in order for the “Yes” to become attainable and sustainable.  They will also need to be able to paint a picture of what life will be like, both for the person being asked and the congregation as a whole, if they say “Yes”.  Such Asking leaders will need a think skin, because the will be some “No”s.  They will also need to be prepared to be surprised, because there will be a bunch of “Yes”s that they will not have found without asking.

As I reflect on my time in church leadership with this question in mind, it strikes me that most of the times of growth were when I was being predominately an Asker.

The meaning and significance of U2 lyrics is the source of many blogs and websites and a few books.  There is a great deal of mystery and misdirection from the band members themselves who rarely give a straight answers to questions about lyrics.  So at best, what follows is an exercise in eisegesis, a reading into the text of the songs, one in which I the reader supply the framework to find a meaning that may or may not have been planted there by the author and the band.  With any such project, I realise I may have missed the point entirely…  However, I am captured by this album and in particular the narrative that spans the tracks.  I’ll only manage touch on that in this post as I listen to the first two tracks; No Line on the Horizon and Magnificent.

“No Line on the Horizon [NLOTH] starts loud and fast, almost too difficult to keep up with.  The girl Bono is singing about is my life; I am her and she is me… she, it, changes everyday, one day it is quiet, the next it is big;  my life is open to the whole of the universe as it streams across my screen.  I give myself to too many things, the love I have is pouring out of my heart… there’s too much, too many, infinity is where it starts and infinity does contain a finish.  I have too many options, too many ways, too many possibilities.  Times of the day, days of the week, seasons of the year are diffused as they are no longer a constraint and do not constrict the openings through which I can pass.  I can loose myself scheming schemes and hatching plots.  Choice paralysis is my constant headache and I constantly exercise my right to change my mind.  I am lost, all at sea, in the confusing sounds of the sirens of choice and I have forgotten where I am going!  There is no line on the horizon.  My life is full of means and the lack ends.  I have many ways to get there but I am no longer sure where it is that I am going, and yet I am longing to get somewhere, anywhere, some place, I need to get away – there is NO LINE ON THE HORIZON !”

I feel myself spinning and there is nothing and everything to see.  This is where NLOTH leaves you.  Zygmunt Bauman describes the scene as “unprecedented vistas” where the “freedom of self-creation has never before achieved such breathtaking scope, simultaneously exciting and frightening.  Never before has the need for orientation points and helpful guides been as strong or as painfully felt.”  I find myself in NLOTH; its poetry, noise and speed captures those hidden and nagging feelings that I lack a vocabulary to express meaningfully.  What is there to provide an orientation?  Where can I look for a stable place in the changing sea?  Who is there that can save me from this place?

Magnificent, Magnificent, I was born, I was born to be with you in this space and time. In the reality of a life without a place to go, without an orientating point, without a helpful guide, I, like Bono, turn to the Magnificent One!

Magnificent plants your feet firmly on the ground, in the here and now, and orientates you towards the ‘you’ – Magnificent.  It is in part Bono’s testimony of his orientation, his ‘line on the horizon’ that enables him to navigate the changing seas in which his life is cast.  To know you, to sing to you, to love you, to be marked by the love of you and from you.  Love, God’s love, is the line on the horizon; always there, being the ever present guide and always much bigger than you ever thought it was.

U2 have captured the reality of most inhabitants at the front-line of western culture in a way that the church has not managed to engage with.  It is here that the following Jesus needs to make sense, in the wide horizons of life in which orientation is painfully rare and difficult to find.  It is easy to say that the answer you are looking for is Jesus, managing to express the question is much much harder.  For those who have grasped the answer, the question is no longer an issue, at least that is the illusion they live with.  Having hold of Jesus does automatically mean all lives issues are solved, especially when you do not know what the issues are.  Similarly, if we are offering Jesus to those who do not and have not yet, the offer makes little if no sense if there is no question being asked, or at least a pertinent one.  Here we hear not only U2 offer the Magnificent answer, we hear them express the question sufficiently and  eloquently.

No Line on the Horizon is the album title and title of the first track.  Album released 27 February 2009. Listen on Spotify. Buy on itunes.

Art of Life, Zygmunt Bauman, Polity, 2008. Quote from page 87. Buy at Amazon UK

Next week, trains permitting, I am presenting my first academic paper that relates to my PhD research.  The Conference is the British Sociological Association: Sociology of Religion Study Group gathering in Edinburgh.  The proposal is below and the full paper should appear as a pdf attachment below.

‘The Changing face of Christianity in the 21st Century”

The BSA Sociology of Religion Study Group Conference
6-8 April 2010 University of Edinburgh

Liquid Faith: looking for anchorages in 21st century cultures

Given the rapid changes in C21st Christianity, counting membership and observing new forms and hybridisations capture only part of the picture.  There is a strong historic approach by which to define Christianity, which represents a break from the more institutional language and categories used to trace changes in religious groups. One that is grounded in the practical and in the everyday relationships that a Christian lives within: with the Divine, with the community of believers and with those outside the faith [Charry 1999].  This relational approach focuses on these unique social bonds within the Christian worldview.

Taking a lead from work by Gordon Lynch [2002, 2003] and early experiences in the field within evangelical communities suggest that Bauman’s [2000 - 2008] Liquid metaphor offers a significant key to understanding the changing nature of these social bonds.  Focusing on these unique social bonds, this paper will allow Bauman to draw out how the Christian experience has become increasingly individualised, how much poorer it is as a result of the loss of it’s own public vocabulary and how individuals cope with that responsibility.  The results will be a much richer understanding of declining numbers and new forms within contemporary Christianity.

“Because of individualization we are living with a lot of zombie categories
which are dead and still alive.”
[Ulrich Beck & Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, Individualization, Sage: London, 2002: 203]

Maybe 10 years ago you would have been able go into any evangelically inclined church building and find some kind of filing system for OHP slides.⁽⁽¹⁾⁾ The kind of churches that dispensed with hymn books to allow more physical worship freedom during the service. It usually saved a bunch of money too since they did not have to keep buying new books every time they wanted to sing the latest songs. You would be able to discover all kinds of interesting things about the congregation by looking at this OHP filing system and it’s content. One of the most common observations would be that the ‘i’ section of the filing system is the largest. In fact I challenge you to find a church where this was not the case. Great wads of songs beginning with “I…” the worshipper, although not just the worshipper but specifically the individual worshipper.⁽⁽²⁾⁾

I remember going to Brainstormers, an annual youth leaders conference, back in the late 90′s. The theme of the conference centred around the passage in Ephesians where Paul talks of Christ as our peace; peace between groups of us who at odds with each other. “For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. [Ephesians 2:14]  They did it very well, including having the visual impact of a person actually building a wall on stage during the conference, which was then demolished at the end.  Despite all this theological reflection on the issues that divide us, all the songs chosen for worship were really songs between God and “I…” as the individual worshipper.

Every Sunday in gathered congregations up and down the country our hymns and songs perpetuated and promote individualisation.  Even as we are gathered theologically as a body, as one in Christ, as brothers and sisters of a forgiving God we would still prefer to sing “Thank you for saving me” and not “Thank you for saving us“.  There is little sign of this changing and a survey of lyrics of recent worship albums and visiting a couple of evangelical congregations will confirm.  This is not to say that middle-of-the-road Church of England, more traditional and even catholic congregations are actively promoting a different approach.  Hymn and song books such as Hymns Ancient and Modern and Common Praise have a fairly rich stream of  “I…” the worshipper present in their lyrics too.

A common reply to this being pointed out is that the context of the sung hymns and songs is corporate worship, a gathered congregation: of course we are singing it together and we make the mental adjustments as we do.  The problem with this rather weak position is that the hermeneutic, the predominant perspective of those in the gathered congregation is life-as-an-individual.  Almost the entire cultural context in which we live is individualised.  Customised individual choice is king.  There is no remaining place where the individual is contextualised in a social network of relationships that has any permanence to it.  Everything is in a state of fluidity, and the individual is both the navigator and the shipwrecked.  So when they come to church and sing as “I…” the worshipper, the congregational context has very little theological and ontological cash value.

The theological idea of a congregation, or local expression of church, has both a practical and a ontological stream.  The congregation is part of the universal body of Christ, which is formed and sustained by the Spirit.  Each member of the body, each person, has been and is joined to the rest and is a fellow heir of Christ.  “Don’t you know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” [I Corinthians 3:16].  Most people are surprised to discover that the ‘you’ in this verse, the subject, is a plural you, Paul was addressing the congregation, not the individual Christian.  Practically the idea of a congregation is a community of disciples that are loving each other towards maturity in Christ.  Called and encouraged to bear with one another in peace and love, telling the truth to each other and allowing each other to be their unique part of the community.

Back in 2000 Zygmunt Bauman outlined his liquidity metaphor as an attempt to understand our present social situation.  His thesis is that the ‘melting of the solids’ drive of modernity has reached “the bonds that interlock individual choices in collective projects and actions – the patterns of communication and co-ordination between individually conducted life policies on the one hand and political actions of human collectives on the other.”⁽⁽³⁾⁾  It seems to me that ‘congregation’ and ‘church’ have become next to useless as human collectives in the politics of discipleship.  To all intents and purpose, ‘congregation’ and ‘church’ are zombie categories.  They are no longer places where my individual choices as a follower of Jesus are given the power they need to be transformative.  Instead I am sent away to work out my own discipleship-politics in my own strength and to bear the burden of there inevitable failure.  A burden that as a disciple, I was never meant to bear alone!

1. For those who have grown up with interactive white boards at school an OHP is an overhead projector. A sign of my age that I think I need to explain what this is.
2. Today, most of these churches will have a video projector and song projection software, so the immediate observation is no longer possible.
3. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, London: Polity, 2000: 6

The reflection is based on the BCP Gospel reading for the Next Sunday before Lent [Quinquagesima]

There is clearly something in these readings about not seeing and seeing.  Jesus is making statements about what will happen to him when he enters Jerusalem and the disciples do not understand.  Understanding was hid from them and they could not see.  Are we to understand that the disciples were like this blind man that Jesus and the crowd pass as they entered Jericho.  He too could not see and had to enquire what all the noise was about as Jesus and the crowd approached; except this man calls out to Jesus to be saved.  Jesus hears him, asks him what he wants and then gives him what he asked for: sight.  This man then praises God and follows Jesus.  Yes surely there is a parallel here between the disciples lack of seeing and this man’s new seeing.

However, this is not just about those disciples on their feet walking with Jesus into Jericho, it is also about us as disciples tying to follow Jesus in the villages, towns and cities where we live.  Is Luke, as he writes this, challenging his readers to think about who can see and who cannot?  Am I more like the disciples who cannot see, or more like the blind man who has received sight?

Perhaps even more challenging is, who else could the blind man be: my neighbour, my work colleague, my brother, my friend, the stranger whom I pass in the street?  Can they see or not see?

Welcome to those who are from our larger churches. Please tell your friends at larger churches to come to gatherings like this. We need your experience and wisdom. Can I also tell you that we need people from larger churches to be ready to go. To go to places in the diocese that are in need of mission, new housing estates for instance. And places where parishes are struggling, desparate for mission but with little idea or people to put it in to action.

I’ve paraphased a little, but this is basically what he said. What struck me about this is that in most of my chrisitan experience there has been a theme of staying. Whether that is in a home group or small group, youth group, congregation, cell and church staying, enjoying the comfort zone of growth and friendship is a clear theme.

Our culture has a different theme, movement, fluidity, flow and movement. It is fairly easy to argue that our much cherished freedom, particularly of movement, has been at the cost of security of place and stability.

You would think that the ‘be prepared to go’ that Bishop Stephen encoraged would fall on easy ears and find churches and people ready to stand up for. However, as the Bishop also noted, we don’t celebate success in other, neighbouring, churches very easily, in fact probably not at all. We like success in our own patch and find it uncomfortable in surrounding places.

And yet at the same time we are a faith that has at it’s core vlaues a ‘go’. Each one of these churches that we feel like we want to stay in was planted by some who left, arrived and planted the Gospel amongst a group of people.

Being someone who used to work in a large church, who considered the idea of sending people out as a resource to other local churches, but who never managed to get to a place were we could do it, I still find the idea of not planting a new church but helping a perhaps smaller one capture and move on with a vision for mission very exciting.

I wonder whether they might be willing to accept such help.

Today I am launching my next writing project.  I have for a long time thought that the best people to offer insight into life as a curate are the curates themselves.  Hearing from those who have tread the path before us is great, their insights and wisdom is often invaluable and unique and we should be willing to listen and learn; but the expert at life as a curate today are the curates themselves.  Despite great wisdom and experience, those who have tread the path before us cannot appreciate life as a curate in these cultural times.  Not because they lack some thing but simply because times change.  This is just the general brush stokes before we get to the detail of personal circumstances and the experiences and perspectives that each curate brings with them and lives and works from within.  Add to that individual preferences of spirituality and theological twists and turns and it soon becomes very difficult for one or even a few people to essentially stand up and say what life as a curate is like.

Curates occupy a fairly unique position.  By curates I mean those who hold an office a Assistant Curate under a Training Incumbent in a training post for a fairly fixed time of between 3 and 4 years.  They will have come from some form of training sponsored by their Diocese and when they leave, the majority of curates become incumbents themselves.  This place of liminality acts as a furnace of leadership, where the curate is under authority of the incumbent and yet looked to for leadership from the congregation and community, where there is the constant presence of the promise of future authority and plans for leadership.  Experience is filtered into habits to adopt and practices to never duplicate. Where the training incumbent is both to be followed and avoided, mimicked and guarded against.  It is in these few years that habits at the core of their leadership will be formed and as they come out of the curacy furnace they cool and set and become fixtures of their ministry.

This project is a exercise in collective wisdom focused particularly around issues of leadership and will almost entirely consist of stories.  Stories told by curates about themselves in positions ans situations of leadership.  I will groups these stories and present them with a framework but only so they become accessible.  My hope is that this exercise will become a valuable resource for curates thinking about leadership as a curate.

I went to see many of the headliners at greenbelt this year. Athlete were great, Martyn Joseph with Stuart Anderson was brilliant and then there was Rob Bell.

It is not at all that Rob was not good, he was, as expected, engaging, funny, full of compassion and very clear, but two things disturbed me. The first, which I guess I’ll have to live with, is the celebratory status that the crowd afford to this human being. Ok, so Jesus had crowds too and I in fact participate in crowds as well; most notably at a U2 360 concert this summer. So maybe I should just get over this. The second disturbance, which I find sad that we are living with, was captured at the type of questions that the crowd asked this super-christian.

One of Rob’s hour long sessions was titled ‘In Conversation with Rob Bell’ which was essentially an open Q&A time. Questioners were pulled from the crowd with easy questions, hard questions, funny and interesting questions etc. It seemed to me that the questions, while extremely difficult for the person involved, were of a very basic discipleship nature.

Now, on the one hand there is nothing basic about discipleship. Re-orientating one’s life towards Christ and then following as a disciple is enormously energising and draining. “I have just met Jesus and now I wonder what I need to do in my life to follow?” Such a question can and should have great impact on one’s life. What flows out of such a question is almost certainly a range of difficult decisions and situations. If following Jesus were easy, then there might be more people in church and the world might be worse of for it. However, the place for such difficult questions and life-giving support through such situations is amongst the community of believers, where the next basic theological questions gets asked. “We a community of believers, what does it mean to be the Body of Christ in this time and place?” How do we live faithfully and authentically together as disciples of Jesus. As well as addressing internal matters of nurture and support of disciples and life together as community, it is this group and only this group that can begin to think about how to relate to those not yet part of them: “How do we as the community of disciples communicate the love of God to those who have not heard?” Yes of course individual disciples are at the coal-face of being in relationship with on-disciples, but they can only do so out of their community of believers: theologically, emotionally and practically. This layering of theological questions, this ‘how do we talk about God’ conversation, is, or at least should be it seems to me, at the heart of ecclesial theology; by which I mean church based theology. So perhaps it is now easier to see my second disturbance in context. How come these attendees at a Christian festival asking this super-Christian who has been flown in from the states basic discipleship questions?

Perhaps it is because they were just testing him out. A whole group of festival attendants got together to form a list of questions which would essentially test out Rob Bell’s authenticity to be called a ‘speaker’! If this is the case, I wonder whether he passed? Perhaps those who asked questions were not in fact active members of a local community of believers and so in effect GB becomes their community and this is where you can ask the visiting preacher these type of questions. I’m sure this is the case for a whole heap of people who attend GB. They are either disaffected church-goers or never in fact went to church but found faith in the festival circuit and never made a connection with their local church.

Thirdly, and this is where this article has been leading up to, perhaps it is because these questions aren’t being answered in the local communities of believers, the local church. The preaching and teaching in local churches is not up to addressing these discipleship questions or local preachers and teachers are not brave enough to address them. Talking about non-believers who need converting strongly implies that we have it right and they have it wrong; talking about parents and partners who don’t believe who as a result face separation from God [assuming that we still have a lost and found theology], these are hard things and you can’t blame teachers and preachers for a little self-preservation. However, these are the questions that our people are asking.

This second disturbance of mine does cause me sadness. Not because we don’t have answers for these questions, or because it is so hard, but because I don’t think we talk about these questions enough. There are no easy answers to these and other difficult situations but the best chance we have is to have an ongoing space within the community of believers of support, care, prayer, love and wisdom seeking. Which we are probably not going to find in the hour session of a paratrooper preacher in a field a GB.

I was particular interested in listening to Rob Bell, primarily to here the questions he was asked rather than his answers, because I am convinced that on the whole we have a very low discipleship agenda in our churches. By discipleship I mean just asking those type questions that I outlined above; what does it mean for me to become and be a follower of Jesus; as a community of believers how show we life our lives together and how do we as a community engage with those who have not heard?

Common Worship reading for this coming Sunday: Mark 7:24-end

Here is this woman… who is desperate to see her child released from the pain and anguish she lives in day after day.  Some of you will be able to sympathise with her, knowing members of your own family who likewise struggle with some affliction day after day.  Such anguish, watching someone you love, in daily pain and misery, is very hard to bear.

This woman comes to Jesus, willing to endure insult and embarrassment and humiliation; crossing all kinds of social convention and expectations; to come to the only place where she knew to go.  The only place worth going to.  The only place to find peace: Jesus.
Things are very different for us today.  We have a health service that helps us to patch up our bodies and manage our pain.  We have an organised church to help us encounter Jesus in the security of social conventions and practices.  Our situation is very different from this Syrophoenician woman.

And yet on Monday evening I sat in a concert at Greenbelt weeping in public waiting for Jesus to do something for someone I love.

I guess things aren’t so different.  We still struggle with things we can’t explain and pain we can’t bear to live with.  Still the only place to go is Jesus, to find peace, healing, comfort, strength, grace, mercy…  And we still get desperate enough to humiliate ourselves in public, to ignore social conventions, risk insult and embarrassment in order to get to a place where Jesus will hear us.

Below is a longer exploration of the 5-a-day self-leadership tool.  This will eventually form part of a new web resource on self-leadership that is currently under construction.

For those being ordained this at Petertide, I hope this final week amidst rehersals and retreats you find the space to hear from God…

Tentmaking is certainly as old as Christianity and probably older. Paul, the one of the Damascus Road, is known to have been a tent-maker. Literally one who makes tents so as to be able to support himself and offer ministry without charge. This was practice amongst some rabbis too and therefore certainly an influence on Paul. Tentmaking, as many who are reading this will know better than I, is still the majority practice amongst many recognised missionaries. For some it serves as a segue away from the illegal practice of being a Christian in the country they are living/serving. For others it is because the missionary activity has no chance of being funded any other way.

I have been struggling with tentmaking! Since I am coming from a place where all my waking ‘working’ hours have been consumed with ‘things of the Lord’ or at least working in the context of full-time church-based ministry, the idea of diverting a whole bunch of hours, and therefore energy, into earning a living has seemed like a colossal… diversion.

There is a whole bunch of conversation which is pertinent at this stage, like why should a calling abscond one from labour and what does a stipend say about the ministry of those who actually do have to ‘work’ for a living. I am going to skip over these pertinent points though and get to my point which is what is ministry anyway? Our ideas of ministry are of course socially conditioned and are made reality by our taking up of somethings and the ignoring of others. We have come to this place where there is a thing called full-time ministry and in such a way as it becomes a benchmark for ministry: anything less is often seen as somehow inferior. This valuing is applied not only to time but also the content of that ministry. Full-time church based ministry, dealing with the things of the lord that happen to focus around the running of a set of services and the associated pastoral care and evngelistic projects, as a calling is only beaten by full-time overseas missionary status.

Before we entertain too much digression, the point here is that this cultural valuing of various types of ministry completely devalues others: being a nurse, mother, solitictor, dental receptionist, checkout operator etc etc. This observation is nothing new and I only raise it because of the struggles I have been grappling with concerning my own life. I am just getting to this point where, yes, running a small commerical affair to prove some income is not in contrast to my ministry but part of it.

As I take note of the mental and emtional processes involved in getting to this point I see that in the large part it was a case of getting over the spiritual snobery of not been able to say that I am in full-time church based ministry! A spiritual snobery that is reflective of the cultural framework in which we see ministry – the way we do and think about ministry in these parts.

At this stage the future of stipendary ministry is up for grabs, the only sure thing being that more of the same will not work! Which therefore means a painful grappling with our social understanding of what ministry is; a dismantling of our cultural framework for constructing ministerial pathways; confronting the ecclesiastical expectations both from demoninational and congregational perspectives and a gentle healing approach to the many whose very identity is deeply contected to the way they have done ministry thus far.

It is this onotlogical component, the way of being in ministry, that will of course be the real issue. If we construct, say a ministerial pathway to train and equip people for tentmaking ministries of which part of is the preistly oversight of a local church, what does that say to those who have given their entire working life to the full-time preistly and pastoral care of that local congregation. The deep feelings associated with loosing the vicar in pastoral reorganisation [1 vicar taking on 2 or more parishes instead of each parish having its own vicar] will be repeated and added too. Since the previsously secure side to pastoral reorganisation has been the role of the vicar, whose role and identity has in some ways received a boost from such reorganisation. This boost will not be missing in such reconstruction of ministry, but quite the reverse, there will be a sapping of the foregoing confidence: what have I been doing all my life now that a part-timer is fulfiling my role?

There are all kinds of rumours floating around the establishment of the Church of England about the future of stipendary ministry. Out of these rumours arrive various futures.

For anyone who is not aware, a stipend is a living expense, paid to priests, vicars, ministers et al, so that they are freed from the necessity of working for a living. Thus freeing up one’s time to attend to the things of the Lord.

I have been in full time stipendary ministry for 10 years now [the last three of those were as one in training for ordination]. Although I could not have formulated a sentence about it at the time, entering full-time was very much part of my conversion: in retrospect, was also a call. However, this year it’s different as I am job-sharing a curacy with my wife, Kate. Job-sharing means stipend sharing and of course part-time work. In two years time I am most likely to be non-stipendary, or what is called in the trade NSM [non-stipendary minister], whilst Kate takes on a stipendary position, i.e. being a full-time vicar. All of this means that I am paying attention to what it means to be part-time, see previous post, what it means to have a stipend and what it means to be earning money alongside this.

It seems to me that these questions soon begin to cut to the heart of what it means to be a priest, or at least what it might mean for me? It also brings into play all these rumours, and to what extend I might be pre-empting one of these futures?

This is the first-time in 11 years that I have done part-time ministry. I was very excited about the idea of part-time [job-sharing a curacy with my wife] and I still am, but the problems with it run much deeper than I thought they would.

Let’s get over the idea of full-time ministry to start with. Of course I know that everyone, from baptism or conversion, is called to full-time ministry in the Kingdom of God: I am and perhaps you the reader are too. So I want to clarify that I am talking about full-time ministry in the Church of England. Actually receiving a stipend so I do not have to earn a living thus freeing my time to ‘do stuff for God’.

Part-time ministry, in this case 22 hours per week, forces you to say no to a whole number of things. Most of which start in my mind as some kind of vision for starting something new. The one at the top of my mind at the moment is around the senoir school in the area, but not in my parishes. There is currently no specifically Chrisitan input. Well lots of schools are like that, but this one is the catchment school for this area. Most of the teenagers in the 8 parishes I work in go to that school. … here I am getting carried away with thinking about what an opportunity this is! Do I actually have time to get motivated about this kind of thing?

I have been Assistant Curate here since July this year, three months now. The summer was very lite and I am grateful for that. September has been very different. I have worked more than my 22 per week every week, and every week I have been asking myself why is this so? I now have a few reflections…

Part-time cannot be pretending to be full-time. There are certain luxuaries that full-time miniters can participate in: chapters, clusters, long-staff times and other types of clergy gatherings. I have attended a few of these since being here and plenty in this month of September. Many of these times have been helpful in all kinds of ways not least in getting my bearings, meeting people and getting a flavour of church and village life. However, 2 hours for one gathering in the context of a 44 hour week is very different if you only have 22 hours.

Clergy Centric Behaviour. An Assistant Curates post is only for a limited time: 3-4 years. This in itself should be enough motivation for avoiding anything that is clergy centric. By which I mean something that needs the clergy to be there or in which they have a role that is curcial to the operation of that role [Eucharist, Funerals, Baptisms and Weddings to one side at the moment]. Double motivation therefore comes from the inmovable reality that I am part-time. I can’t be there. Sometimes that even means on Sunday morning. Adopting such an does not mean just saying no, but rather finding someone to say yes. This get to the heart of my initial excitment about part-time ministry; it forces my values about lay ministry into practice.

Kingdom and Church. My expereince of full-time paid [lay] ministry is that the edges between the kingdom and church, or more specifically Church of England, are very blured. It is quite easy to find oneself working ones butt off doing 50 hours+ a week and soothe ones weary body, at least in part, knowing that it was all for God. Part-time ministry, if you have the eyes to see, can clarify the issue very well. What am I doing that is actually pointing people towards God and what am I doing to support a superstructure whose very existence is currently up for debate in all kinds of ways at the moment?

These are the things occupying much of my mind at the moment, at least the ones I have managed to put into words. One some level they are very personal issues as I try to inhabit the new land of ordained ministry in the Church of England. One another level I think they are issues that will becoming increasing relevant as full-tim clergy numbers are cut again and again whilst the numbers training for part-time volunteer ordained ministry are rising.

A huge part of my motivation and inspiration for research comes out of my own story and journey as a follower of Jesus. The first church I went to was a large town centre Baptist Church that was evangelical and charismatic. Since I came from a non-church background, the doctrine and practice that flowed from this church experience became normative. 20 months later I was at London Bible College, large, evangelical, slightly charismatic and quite baptist. Of course these are retrospective labels since I had no idea what an evangelical was before I was well into my time at LBC. Church experience at LBC was mixed but generally along the same theme. After LBC, I was at a mid-sized CofE Church in North London that was ‘generically evangelical’ [my label]. One year later I was an Assistant Pastor at a mid-sized Baptist church again that was conservatively evangelical and embarrassingly charismatic [they were embarrassed to realise they were charismatic]. And then in a very surprising [to me at least] move I became senior staff in a large CofE, conservative evangelical and recovering charismatic church. Finally in a very surprising to everyone else move I became an Ordinand at Ripon College Cuddesdon of liberal catholic fame.

These episodes in my journey lead me to reflect on my own diversification as an evangelical this is what I came up with.

Charismatic Evangelical [1992-1994] Describes where on the spectrum I was converted into.

Doctrinally Disillusioned Evangelical [1994-1996] Is how I felt when I realised you needed to go to bible college to discover who Jesus is and the resultant belief-melt-down that follows.

Post Post Evangelical [1997-1998] Is how I described myself at the public debate with Dave Tomlinson after seeing how scattered and in some places ‘obvious’ his arguments were.

‘Edge of the World’ Evangelical [199-2001] As opposed to Open Evangelical. That place where you are at the edge of the ‘flat’ world, since flat is how the doctrine felt, and wanting to take a step to get off or out, and yet finding nothing to step on to or in to.

New Kind of Evangelical [2001-2004] After reading book of similar title and seeing that it might just be degrees of perspective and there might yet be some life left in the old girl yet!

Cosmopolitan Evangelical [2005-] Since God’s call to Anglican Ordination; being neither Anglican or thinking about ordination up until that point. Cosmo because I know where I come from and don’t want to desert or abandon that past, despite trying to previously. But also wanting to be not just comfortable but actually at home in foreign places; to be able to encounter God, minister, lead, teach and live in a culture that is not my home. “To be ready to find God in the unexpected places.” To quote my selection application papers.

These diversifications have of course being supplemented with differing doctrine and practice, or least looking for such. It is with this background that I am engaging on the long process of exploring the stories of enrichment and division that emerge from other people’s diversified journeys.

Sorry this is so long…!

Last time I wrote I explored the flipside of vision: a driven, forward looking almost urging desire to be somewhere else. This somewhere else is not, of course, necessarily a physical location, although it often is. Somewhere else can also be emotionally, intellectually, spiritually different from where you currently are. Though usually all of these aspects are involved in movement, or journey.

Along the way, in this journey, are all kinds of obstacles that need to be navigated and negotiated. Obstacles is perhaps the wrong word since it does imply that these ‘things’ are in the way: an obstruction, hindrance or difficulty. Leadership, on the other hand, is at a distinct disadvantage if it adopts such a perspective since the ‘things’ are almost certainly people. Whether directly of indirectly journey’s involve encountering people along the way. Directly with verbal opposition to the journey or destination. Indirectly with systems, procedures, traditions and habits that people hold, follow or instituted. A leader will not only have a vision of the the place to go, but they will also be able to navigate the journey, including the obstacles, which are now perhaps better described as ‘encounters’.

Navigation includes, although is not restricted to, appreciating the current landscape and the terrain of travel, perceiving and passing through the encounters. These abilities in navigation are part of the way the leader as a person ‘works’. There are not tools that the leader owns and can use as they want. There are there all the time.

Recently I attended the committee meeting of the local pre-school nursery that my Son attends. I was attending on behalf of my wife because Advertising was on the agenda and this is something I have had some input into. With six other people around the table, talking through various issues of staffing, premises, advertising, constitutions and trustees it you can gain some insight into how different people approach the tasks. Around the table there was quite clearly an administrator, someone who was very energised to do whatever was needed in the face of the current situation. What was lacking was a leader, someone who could perceive the journey and assess the current situation in the context of that journey and therefore approach the encounters in such a way that movement happens along the journey. For me, in the context of that hour, alongside addressing the simple questions of advertising and offering pervious experience of appointing trustees, I was caught up in seeing the vision of this place and drawing maps of the journey and the encounters along the way. I did not choose to do this, its just the way my thinking works. almost irresistible.

This blessing, of bringing to the community; church, business, association or organisation, a sense of journey and navigation also means that a leader can’t stop thinking in this way wherever they happen to be. I was once part of a chapliancy team at a local university. I was on site perhaps twice a week for an hour, alongside my then huge time demands from what was going on at church. Not long into this role I realised I was walking around with my head down, looking at the floor and not engaging as I walked through the campus to the Chapel [room put aside for such use]. This physical state was a manifestation of what was really going on; I was deliberately blinkering myself so I would not get caught up in a vision for mission within and on the campus. I wanted to arrive, do what was required of me and leave, and leave it behind as I walked back to my office and got on with the vision for mission that was consuming me at church.

Being wired up [to use a Bill Hybel’s phrase] for vision and navigation does not just express itself in ministry and local community group circles. It can also have very practical expressions. I have done a lot of DIY in my time; essentially refitting the 3 houses we have lived in since leaving London School of Theology in 97. When I am approaching a practical problem, be that from just painting a room through to relocating the central heating boiler in the loft, from building a deck through to converting the garage into a study and utility area, I use the same kind of wiring as I do in ministry situations. The wiring that enables me to see a vision of the completed task and to navigate my way through the steps to get there, constantly adjusting these steps to incorporate the new emerging landscape. I know several leaders, who express there leadership in vision and navigation, who similarly can approach all kinds of situations and work their way through, essentially making it up as they go along.

Given that I have saved myself what must be about £30,000+ and manage to deal with most household repairs and maintenance, why would this navigation aspect of leadership have a flipside?

Partly because you are constantly at risk of getting caught up in the next vision that comes along, sometimes several a day depending on what you are exposed to. I recently got caught up in two such visions and started two things up and now feeling like I really should have kept my mouth shut. Not because the things in question are bad, quite the contrary, they have brought some life where there was little, but because they have distracted me from what I currently perceive to be my main vision and calling. Don’t read that as me just being selfish, the need is for wisdom as to what one chooses to speak up about.

Secondly, because just because you can it does not mean you should. 5 years where most days off were DIY does something to you personhood that a lie-in on the odd Saturday does not solve!

Yesterday, we woke to about 2 inches [4cm] of snow and to much excitement from our children who got dress much faster than I can remember for a while. Despite that, I was out of the door first on my way to morning prayer, therefore the first in our family to take in the full beauty of the whitened South Oxfordshire countryside and the first to crunch my boots down the garden path. It was great, a sight and experience that I have not had for a long time, even I was excited.

However, by lunchtime the landscape was much more colourful and the paths around college were more of a wet slush and unpleasant to walk through. By the time the school bus arrived the kids had to work hard at finding enough snow to fill their palms.

Since I had spent the morning reading about mission it was not surprising that such a parallel as this should occur to me:

Mission by the church is [at least in my experience], a little bit like an English snow fall. Very exciting at first with peoples enthusiasm and willingness raised. It is easy to find the extra effort to over come the difficulties that arise and it is even beautiful to see. But after this initial stage it all begins to fade away until it is more like a damp mess and it is both a source of disappointment and relief that it will all be over soon. By the end of the day we are actually very glad that things are back to normal and ordinary life returns. Glad of the experience, but also relieved that that doesn’t happen everyday! We’ll probably have a few photos embarrassingly showing ourselves over excited that it did snow even if we can’t actually remember it.

The highlight of a Themed Study Week on Faith and Work was the trip to Canary Warf. Overseen by Fiona Stewart-Darling that included a visit around the Sales Centre, which included some fabulous models of the place, and some time at Morgan Stanley finance house. Lunch was hosted by Sir David Walker in the executive dinning area followed by a trip around the trading floors.

For our Christmas gift off Kate’s parents we had tickets to Billy Elliot. It was a great show, so much so that we are taking Anna our daughter for her Birthday. The show, as you might know, focuses of a mining community during the 1980 pit strikes and Billy’s newly found ballet talents. The family face the challenge of supporting Billy’s flight from nothing to the possibility of something, at the expense of physically letting him leave town and a serious amount of pride along the way.

At first sight there is little connection between these two trips except somewhere in David Walkers defence of Morgan Stanley and capitalism a fairly obvious point of connection emerged for me, between the life of a miner and that of a trader. Let me explain…

In the same way that miners, shipbuilders, factory workers and steel-makers where the backbone of not only our local communities but our GDP as a country, so to are, now, the traders and workers of our finance houses and banks. David Walker explained how the GDP of this country is as high as it is almost solely through the work of such places as Morgan Stanley. And his revealing of the typical lifestyle of some of his co-workers I could see that the physical dangers of mining had been exchanged for emtional and relational dangers for traders. How in both cases the work demanded long hours, hard toil and left its marks on the body of the worker.

Of course there are many points of disparity, such as the financial rewards, the comfortable lifestyle and early retirement. There are too differing motivations and expectations of the workers in these very different environments. But, the challenge to me was that as a Christian I think I have a romantic view of the loss of the communties round pits, yards and factories in contrast to my cynical and skeptical view of the life of a banker or trader. And yet they place in the life of the national community is probably not much different!

This observation, or connection in my mind has many points where it could fall down and perhaps far too many assumptions. But for me, whose ministry has largely been in commuter belt of London, God has enabled me to see these high earning, bonus chasing, people with long working hours and eternal communting times with new eyes. Not just because I now realise how much my own lifestyle, although poverty ridden in comparison, depends on them, but how much our national lifestyle and international influence is just as dependant on “a good week at work” for these bankers and traders. When you have £5bn moving across your screen in a given week you, having a good week at work seems a lot more desirable, and worth praying for, than managing to get a good order of service ready for Sunday.