discipleship | mission | practical theology

“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?

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.

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!

Blessings and curses are opposites in both intent and result. Blessings tend to come with good will and curses tend not to. Blessings bring something good, fruitful, lasting, joyful from a heart of love towards the intended. Curses don’t tend to be any of those things. Which is why the idea of a curse does not quite fit with this little study I am embarking on.The Curse of Leadership has been the title since its conception in my thinking some 2 years ago. A title that reflects my personal experience over the then 7 years in full time church leadership of one sort or another. But as soon as I come to begin writing it ‘curse’ sounds altogether to hard. And yet there is something there that I can’t quite let go of because at the worse of times it just feels like it – a curse.The ‘flipside’ sounds altogether more friendly and palatable, almost funky and trendy as if it might represent some new insight into leadership and management – although I am fairly sure that is unlikely to be the case. So a double title it will be for a while.This writing exercise is meant to be an exploration of personal experience in the hope of dredging the depths of it for all the wisdom it contains. Personal experience of leadership in a few guises but mainly in the context of local church and ministry. Distilling something about the gift of leadership over and against leadership positions and skills – a distinction that will be explored – and what in particular that gift brings to the life of its holder. Perhaps contesting the widely held assumption that many of the perceived strengths of such a gift could in fact be its weaknesses.For me this is also an exercise in regular writing. So we’ll see how that goes! Given the wise contrast between training and trying, lets go for an episode once a week – or there abouts!Some of the title splash came from a piece by Vicky Newman highlighted in the Indepndent this week as taking part in the Stuart project.