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Can an organisation live forever?

Fascinating article on the BBC News about the longevity of businesses. I wouldn't have put it past the Finns to have a company still operating that began in 1288 - I presume the web site was a later addition (although it is surprising that it was involved in copper mining and not white sock production).

These very long-lived business seem to have survived by having the knack of changing their focus at the right time - moving on as an opportunity arises. who would have thought that Nokia began in pulp and paper? If you live the supply of things that people want then you need to adapt when either people want different things or your raw materials become harder to find.

Not surprisingly I suppose Alan Hirsch would argue the opposite in The Forgotten Ways. In adapting to meet the needs of one era we become compromised and, contrary to the above business logic, lose sight of the purpose of Church. The need, therefore, is not to move on to pastures new, but rather to rediscover the raw stuff of life in Church - reverse evolution.

Can we do that whilst maintaining the structures of organised Church? I think this might be possible. It is easy to start from scratch, but Christian History gives us a story of multiple startings again from scratch, only to end up strikingly similar to what went before. I think organised Church should be able to give us the resources and accountability to rediscover our dna on this. We might discover some other assets in the organised bit of Church which stand us in good stead too.

Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas...or quiet, simple ones.

If the Kingdom of God begins with the tiniest of seeds, then most often the Kingdom of God will begin in our situations with an idea.

I loved this tribute to Steve Jobs given by Jonny Ive...

...and the glorification of the creational moment of the first idea.

I love ideas for that very reason of the spark of new creation that occurs in the challenge to a previously held certainty, or a previously avoided complexity. But ideas, as Jonny says, are so easy to squish by a comment or an offhanded rejection. We need ideas - we need ideas to be received and nurtured, tended and mined, explored and crafted.

As Steve Jobs said elsehwere the process is then to let the best ideas win. Let the truly dopey ideas wither and perish, but let them be recieved and discerned first.

I want to do new things, for such is the Kingdom of God, and so I want to cherish ideas. Here's to the bold, crazy, magnificent ideas...or quiet, simple ones, the ones that suck the air from the room and leave us all speechless.

Whatever happened to Sundays?

I found this post by Andrew Jones utterly compelling.

Nine aspects of a dynamic and clearly growing Church life, and yet nothing in there that is dependent of a typical Sunday-centric regime we in a Western style of Church take as the norm. This is scary stuff indeed, but I find it really strange.

This article also caught my eye as I flicked across the BBC News web site. Seemingly, by the time big institutions have got to the point where they want to mark their success by building an enormous white elephant the markets are already receding.

Now I see our buildings as potentially an enormous asset. There is a brilliant painting in a Chapel we used to use regularly which shows the time there was a bad fire in the town and quite a large number of people decamped to the Chapel complete with washing and livestock. Moreso nowadays is the disappearance of public space, and whilst many think of Church as the most private and respectful of places there is certainly something to be said for opening the doors wide to host the public.

Sadly, though, there are numerous examples of things which seem to be the tail wagging the dog, and the building takes over from the Kingdom as the agenda-topping item.

But I would love to discover that dynamism amidst the people which would then make the buildings come alive for all the right reasons. 

Tribalization

Am finding Alan Hirsch's book…

"The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church" (Alan Hirsch)

…very thought provoking.

We did Church Cafe style this morning - and potentially disconcertingly there was little of what makes a traditional styler of Church feel like Church. I did feel it right to say that there is something holy about the sharing of food, and the conversations buzzed away non-stop. Adults and children did some craft things in the next room and it actually felt more like a relaxed family party than anything else I've been to.

Somebody at the door did describe it as "interesting", which is one of those words that can be a complement or complaint depending of the pitch variation as the word is spoken.

If traditional society is waning and as a result traditional Church is not inherently attractive then where do we get the space to reach out to the tribes in our midst?

January 2012

Rota_01_12.pdf Download this file

8th Jan - Methodist Covenant Service removed (now 15th in morning) 29th Jan - Baptism moved from SW to MF

Winsley duty rota Q1 2012

W_Duty_Rota_2012_Q1.pdf Download this file

Jan to April 2012 with more minor changes, plus Christ Church Wednesday rota for Q1

CC_Weds_Communion_Q1_2012.pdf Download this file

Rota_02_12.pdf Download this file

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Rota_04_12.pdf Download this file

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January to April 2012

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Rota_02_12.pdf Download this file

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Advent iii - illuminating

One of the most memorable moments of the last few weeks was a Collective Worship I led on the theme of Advent. We started by writing a large flip-chart size list for Santa Claus with all the things we wanted for Christmas. The children were excited, offering various ideas of the thing they had put on their letter to Santa. I then invited them to think about if we wanted to write a letter to God with the lsit of things in the world that we wanted changing, and so we put together a similar flip-chart sized list. The mood in the room changed really powerfully from the excitement over presents to a solemnity, almost a reverence, as we shared those things in the world that we thought wrong or painful.

I was struck by the way in which the children displayed a natural sense of wrong and injustice, and were perfectly comfortable verbalising issues. Advent is one of those times of the year when we all want to break out the candles and say something about light and dark. The children were naturally wanting light in dark places.

However, I have been struck by areas of darkness within the public arena in our own nation recently. We can point at Bankers and blame them for the financial situation, but we are all complicit in living beyond our means. We can revile sections of the media for the phone hacking that has led to the Leveson Enquiry, but we have all bought or read those articles they printed full of gossip or malice. It is easy to point the finger, but it is each one of us too...

As I drove home the other evening there was a Nickelback song on the radio and I think towards the end of it the words are

the light we need to guide us
is the light we find inside us

Now certainly the human capacity for goodness is great, but so too is the human capacity for blaming others in order to dodge the blame. There may be light inside us, but it isn't enough to truly illuminate and see clearly.

John wrote, talking about what Jesus had shown the disciples

God is light; in him there is no darkness at all

we need that light to truly see how far we have changed from the beautiful honesty of chilldhood, we need more light in order to strip away our cynicism and willingness to compromise, or simply our inate ability to not think about it. We need that light in order to reveal the way in which we can return to being, once more, truly the children of God.

May Father Christmas bring us all the things we might want to put on our lists, but may God give us so much more!

Advent ii - preparing

A common thread through many of the readings concerned with Advent is the idea of preparing the way for the Lord; most famously with John the Baptist in the wilderness, but he was only quoting from Isaiah.

Two stories came to mind as I thought about this...

We were on holiday in Ireland, at the time we lived in Cheltenham, and a charry Irishman was in the pub. I went to the bar to order our drinks and he asked me if we were on holiday. I replied that we were, and we lived in Cheltenham. With his strong accent I thought he then told me that he had once been near Cheltenham walking.

"Oh the walking is lovely - the Malverns and Cotswolds", I replied.

"No working", he clarified, "I was building the big road to Tewkesbury".

We are most definitely instructed to prepare a way, and this is very different from preparing a place. Just as Peter wanted to build booths on the mount of Transfiguration, we too have this totally human instinct to get something just right and then preserve it. Perhaps the Church of England may be more guilty than most in doing this, but I think all Churches do this in different ways - if we can just get that one last rota sorted, add a few more volunteers, make that slight change to the Remembrance Day service etc. then we will be pretty much there. But this denies the dynamic urge within God to move.

Near where we used to live is a very odd Roman Road. For a start it is curved because it follows the top of the watershed between two valleys. But even stranger is the construction. The story goes that it was built by a man who had previously been building roads in the marshes of East Anglia, so even though he was building a road on top of chalky Wiltshire hills with virtually no standing water for miles he still used a raised causeway style of construction. This is still visible today.

Another totally human characteristic is to prepare a way in the same style as the last way that we prepared. But God is not usually the God of simple repetition.

Some months ago F pointed this verse in Isaiah 62 out to me...

Pass through, pass through the gates!
Prepare the way for the people.
Build up, build up the highway!
Remove the stones.
Raise a banner for the nations.

Again the idea of preparing a way is used, but here the simple, menial task of removing the stones is important, and we thought yes, we can do that. We can clear some stones off the road at the very least.