a blog by howard jameson @ gatheringgrace.org

A sales pitch of sorts: ministry, IT and some modern management methods

I mentioned ages ago that I had asked that next summer's Clergy Residential, which is on the theme of wholeness and well-being, might contain something about how we as ministers might be able to utilise current practices in the world of IT and (critically) to look at some of the ideas in management of self and groups that I read about in books available at Waterstones etc. The answer came back in two parts; firstly that there is a regular offering in the Continuing Ministerial Development package covering this sort of thing and secondly if you want it you lead it. To the first I have to say that I have not gone on the recent days so I cannot comment on how good they are and whether I am proposing anything different. To the second I would say that I am struggling with work-load as it is and have no appetite for preparing another batch of material.

What I do find interesting, though, is how many of the colleagues I talk to on a regular basis seem to be interested in asking what I am thinking in this area, so what I am proposing is the following as a sort of sales pitch.

I am prepared to host a seminar into which I will supply some of the material I have been working on and would endeavour to include any additional questions which are added to the comment section below. If this post is of sufficient interest to a number of people who respond in the comments or by an email to let me know I am not wasting my time or dragging a boat load of material up to Derbyshire which is not relevant to the sorts of questions being asked. If you like what you read below then let me know or (even better) give me some leads to the material you have found useful.

The starting point for the current iteration of my thinking has been this book...

"Building the Bridge as You Walk on it: A Guide for Leading Change" (Robert E. Quinn)

I realise that "Building the bridge as you walk on it" might sound rather like "Making it up as you go along", but I think there are subtle differences. Primarily this book has been helpful because it provides a mechanism and an encouragement for recognising and facing up to my mistakes. Too many books I have read assume the manager as the key player within an organisation and the managed as being the ones who need to be chivvied and corrected into working the right way. This is not the case.

So we start by acknowledging that our current practices as Priest-Managers are sometimes/often wrong because we make mistakes in all sorts of ways but, despite the above book not being written from a Christian perspective, it touches on a very Kingdom-like idea that the redemption of our wrong bits can be as fruitful as the correctness of our good bits.

A second book I have written about recently is...

"Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business" (Patrick Lencioni)

...which challenges the very static way we run meetings. I am going to risk something for a next PCC meeting based on this book which will try to capture the corporate creativity of the PCC members, to challenge them on those areas where conflict (or the threat thereof) is allowed to hang over certain issues, and delegate some of the responsibility to them to set the agenda. This may or may not work. I'll have to come back to you on this.

A third book which I have found very useful in selecting bits from it, but also in the way that it has shaped various tools I have adopted, is...

"Getting Things Done: How to Achieve Stress-free Productivity" (David Allen)

Loads has been written about this elsewhere, but the basic idea of identifying those areas which cause stress (in this case the idea that stress areas create procrastination points) and therefore need to be addressed is very helpful.

Some other ideas I would want to include, in no particular order are...

I don't use my laptop on the road because I actually want times when I am not working, or at the very least am working in a different way. However, having something like an iPhone is brilliant as capturing calendar data and knowing that it is stored securely.

I use a software package called Omnifocus to capture my to do's, a real potential source of stress. Other packages are available in different degrees of sophistication.

I find the writings and (more importantly) the videos of presentations by Merlin Mann a real source of ideas and good practice. His ideas about Zero Inbox and Time Burglars are really worth a watch.

Free software such as Google Documents can be awesome. I can create a document and publish it into the public domain (or limit the access and/or editorial rights as I wish) so that I am no longer the owner, editor or collator of information about a document. People hopefully can become responsible for the data that they need to use themselves and can edit it without me acting as a very weak link in a chain of communication.

Its also worth having Google Reader going for you (its the RSS Feed Reader I use but others do the same thing) with which you can then follow sites such as Lifehacker to give ideas about all sorts of things. Most of them are not relevant, but there is the occasional gem, and a feed reader is great for skipping through long lists of stuff and just reading what grabs you.

Survival techniques are life-savers. I don't mean Ray Mears, but I do mean things like the message on my answerphone says I am away until whenever, but as you can see I am working in a roundabout way. I know its cheating, but I am not a 24/7 call centre and need to have space to do some of the thinking/planning sort of uninterrupted time.

What other ninja hints and tips are there out there?

For ease of copying the address I have made a shortcut URL which is http://tinyurl.com/56kvkb which will link to this post directly.

You can also read more of my thoughts in this nebulous area by clicking on this link to my Priesthood category.

When in Rome (part iii)

When my parents moved to a new home some years ago they attended the local village Church. One particularly memorable occasion was the Rector's return from an extended holiday in South America, and his sermon that Sunday was, basically, the story of his vacation topped off with "...and the thing it made me realise is that we are all God's children". Astonishing.

I have therefore struggled with my three services today not to mention Rome too much (only one or two references, honest m'lud).

I kept a third and rather less serious post until last. We laughed a lot in Rome.

We felt privileged to eat one evening in a venue also being used by Larry Duff Pilgrimages (if you're a fan of Father Ted then you'll get the idea). One of the party had to be taken away by ambulance with blood pouring from her neck. We hope she wasn't trying to re-enact the martyrdom of St Cecilia (much loved by musicians and the local person who put our stained glass in).

The driving in Rome was something to behold. I think we had broadly worked out which side of the road you were meant to drive on by the end of the stay, but other than that we were stumped. We still don't know whether we had right of way on their equivalent of a zebra crossing, and the traffic lights seemed to be for information only as far as the mopeds were concerned.

But I think the highlight goes to our chance discovery on the Hotbird satellite available in the apartment, which was The Church Channel - this was something else. It had everything; some very shiny light grey suits, preaching in which the Pastors seemed unable to put a coherent sentence together but added lots of pseudo-Biblical words (people tarried a lot), but our favourite by some distance was the preacher speaking live from a car museum advertising his upcoming sermon on Acts chapter 3. Referring to the beggar he said that

"he asked for alms, and he got legs".

Truly something to behold.

When in Rome (part ii)

So, if you read the post last night, you know we are just back from Rome. My brain is struggling to process the amount of data running around (still) and it feels like when we arrived in our last place and my brain was in such a bad state that I described myself as suffering from overmation infoload, which sounds wholly more accurate.

We once had a house which was a traditional Wiltshire brick and flint construction and where we discovered one summer that some bees had found a hole through the mortar between piece of flint and made a nest between some internal partition walls. We lived with this despite the buzz of activity and the staining we got on the room side of the walls. One year, however, the sound of the buzzing had changed. When we looked more closely we found that wasps had taken over the nest. The sound was more aggressive and we reached a crisis point of sorts when we found that they had been enlarging the nest at the expense of the plasterboard walls, resulting in wasps being able to get directly into a boy's bedroom. Not good.

This image come back to me quite strongly as we observed the mix of Rome; Empire, Church and current state, and tried to see where one ended and another started. For example we sat behind the magnificent National Monument of Victor Emmanuel II and next to the ruins of the Forum, and found a step in a bit of shade upon which to eat a pistachio ice cream when we realised that there in front of us was the prison within which both Paul and Peter (and no doubt a lot of other Christian martyrs) had prepared for their executions.

We had a similar experience at the Coliseum where the Guide Books tell one lots about the construction (it is an amazing piece of architecture) and the under-floor lift system (again quite astonishing) but was also the place in which a lot of Christians have less favourable memories.

Where did the Rome of Empire stop and the Rome of the Church begin? It felt like the Church had seized the opportunity to take over the internal elements of Empire and cover it with a very expensive marble and gold facade. All this afforded by the victory of Constantine in the fourth Century...and yet his victory arch makes no reference to the vision he apparently had of a cross the night before his famous battle at the Milvian Bridge.

So what is going on here? I think I can fully understand the desire by the early Christians to, using my earlier metaphor, replace the Roman Empire from within once they had been given the opportunity, for this was surely the ultimate sign of the victory of Christ over the really rather nasty Empire. If I'd been there I think I'd have joined in with that too. But this has to come at a price ultimately, because it is taking as its model something of the world and not of the Kingdom. As an example I would want to ask to what extent the Roman Empire's male-centric culture and contemporary Rome's continued macho environment has infiltrated the Church's thinking about gender of Clergy, and I would also want to ask (if it were at all possible) how much an assumption of the status of the Church in Rome itself effects the Church's wider engagement with a society which, for the most part, seems happily oblivious to the life of that Church - there was very little visible interaction between the population (including the tourists) and the many Clergy and Nuns walking around the city.

It would be easy to finish there, pointing the finger at others, but that is not the right way. I find myself thinking through again what it means to try to be Incarnational (living in a real corner of the World with its own distinct culture and values - like Jesus did when he was born at specific time and place) whilst also to be holy (that sense of being distinct and set apart for a purpose). It is always easier by far to be wholly one or the other, but becoming a bunch of well meaning apologists for a society or an elitist clique is not where the Kingdom is either.

Going back to my earlier illustration I am certainly not saying that the Roman Catholic Church are wasps compared to the bees of the Roman Empire - that would be untrue and very unfair. For instance, we did finally find a moment of quiet and spirituality. We happened to stop (really by chance) the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri...

...which, whilst not quite to my personal taste architecturally, seemed full of reverence and stillness. People moved quietly around praying, and any excesses in the fabric of the building didn't overshadow the sense of historical worship and prayer that had gone on in the place. I couldn't get a good photo of the outside doors, but the figures of martyrs set into them were very powerful. It was really beautiful to be still here for 20 minutes.

I imagine many similar ideas could be written by a Roman-Catholic visitor about the Church of England, with our obsession with order and Registers and our instinct towards cerebral liturgy and the downplay of emotion going hand in hand with our Anglo-Saxon national characteristics.

When in Rome (part i)

Where else in the world could you pay an absolute fortune for a couple of cappucinos with this view, taking in thousands of years of history...

...than in Rome. Full of some rather ramshackle pieces of Italian history, such as...

...this little Fiat tucked in on the right.

They also had a bust of somebody remarkably like Voldemort...

More to come.

Taking a break

Having a bit of down time. I might post if I feel inspired, but I have a Lamy pen and a Moleskin notepad for a rather different writing experience.

Alternatively I might hit a rich vein of ideas and you'd be wishing I would shut up. You never know.

Living with disappointment...

...is one of the defining characteristics of ministry. Take this little exchange today over coffee...

"You know you mentioned about being made clean on the inside", I was asked.

"Yes," I replied (try to remain calm on the outside - this is just casual conversation - but this could be a break through moment on this person's spiritual journey!!).

"I wanted to shout colonic irrigation," I was told (try to keep smiling- it was nothing really)

"Thanks for not shouting," I said, struggling to hide my disappointment, "have another Party Ring."

I might be wrong...

...but I am developing a bit of a theory. Currently it is based on anecdotal evidence only (I see what I see) but I would be interested to hear if others disagree or interpret things differently.

I am a long term inmate of the Church, which gives me the right to be critical of it when I believe it needs to be criticised. I think this continuation of the prophetic tradition (by others and not just me) is healthy for all Christian institutions - its one of the things we learn from the Old Testament narrative, so I fully accept that the Church needs to be challenged and renewed - that goes without saying...

...and yet I hear a lot of criticism of the Church from within which I don't think fits this historic (and honourable) tradition.

The prophetic tradition is one which looks to God and then looks at the Church, laments the distance between them and then uses imagination, for example, to act on drawing the Church back to the place where it ought to be. But the thing I think I am noticing is a tendency for many of those within Church and on its fringes to look at the World and compare the Church with that. This is a very different dynamic indeed. In a World where there is suspicion of religious extremism (usually rightly) then there grows a move to remove anything which might look like enthusiasm or commitment from our Churches (but enthusiasm and commitment to the real Gospel is nowhere near the World's view of extremism). I am not quite sure how discipleship can possibly work without these two ingredients. There is certainly a time and a place for Church to have a sense of refuge from the struggles and pressures of the World - ultimately if coming into the presence of God is not the perfect "safe place" then there is little hope for us, but I rarely see this sanctuary being claimed by those I would think of as needing it. Rather the idea of a place where there is no change or challenge is often expressed by those who are already pretty comfortable, at least in the World's eyes.

I'm not sure where I read something about a dynamic in American Churches where the desire from parents for their children to have the best (read: most competitive) educational opportunities has acted to squeeze out the option that would allow a young person to, say, take a gap year working for a Christian Mission in the Third World - an opportunity to transform a person's outlook and experience beyond measure).

It is partly, I would suggest, because of a loss of confidence in what Mission is; therefore we have to make sure our message is palatable to the World so that it is acceptable and allowed to compete "in the marketplace". This is a very tentative and feeble view of Mission and assumes that it is not possible for God to do a wonderful work and bring Shalom (peace, healing, restoration and so forth) into a situation. It is also in part, I think, down to a having cake and eating it response to the Gospel whereby some Christians want to keep their place within the Church, but also want to make sure they maintain their position in their careers or the locality. This makes no allowance for a person's integrity to speak from the depths of their faithfulness. I am all in favour of a broad Church and an acceptance that people are in different places (in fact I really don't enjoy Church where everybody is imagined to be the same and in the same place), but we do tend to mollycoddle and celebrate really quite trivial effort. I once worked with a man who went home at 4pm on the dot everyday. One evening he stayed on and the M.D. came through the office the next morning and made a big thing of how grateful he was that Dave had worked late. After the M.D. left the room my boss looked over to me.

"Have you ever been thanked for staying late?", he asked.

"No," I replied.

"Hmm, me neither".

The problem also has a further down side in that as a result the Church is not able or allowed to provide a place within which people can live out the Gospel as a way of showing the World a better place because that difference is the subject of suspicion not rejoicing; the Church is therefore disqualified from being able to speak to the World by some of its very own membership.

I once made a fellow Church leader laugh by saying that it sometimes feels like parts of the Church are confused about who are the customers and who are the work-force...

...how does it look to you?

Death by (PCC) Meetings

Enjoyed reading a whole book in a little under 24 hours, as my mobile blogging thing from a day off yesterday hinted at. The book in question is...

"Death by Meeting: A Leadership Fable About Solving the Most Painful Problem in Business" (Patrick Lencioni)

His basic premise is that meetings are dull because of the way we run them. We think nothing of sitting through a 120 minute film yet would baulk at doing the same with a meeting, even though in theory a meeting should be more exciting, because the outcome can directly influence our immediate surroundings. I think a fair synopsis would be that the problems lie in our first 10 minutes (where a film would set out the basic scenario or start to introduce interesting elements to the characters) and the way we handle conflict (seeing conflict in its widest sense, resolving differences and coming to terms with situations).

The interesting question is then how can all this good stuff be translated into a typical Anglican Church situation. Lencioni recommends four types of meetings, helpfully drawing parallels with the types of TV programmes we might watch - and how we relate to those programmes. His suggestions (for a business, let us remember) are...

• The daily check-in (5-10 minutes of "what is important today?" and "what are we each working on?")
• Weekly tactical (60 minutes of initial sharing of "where are we?", then set an agenda for the rest of the meeting to overcome obstacles)
• Monthly strategy (2-4 hours of tackling limited number of big topics)
• Quarterly off-site review (days away talking team development, people, competitors and so forth)

In a standard Church like we do it then we already have a couple of meeting type...

• Monthly standing committee (1-2 hours of "what decisions do we need to take?" and "what agenda do we need for PCC?")
• Termly PCC Meetings (2 hours plus of the same sort of stuff, reports from sub-committees etc)
• Annual Parochial Church Meetings (1-2 hours of reporting back on the last year, with questions possibly)
• Annual PCC Away Day (day away trying to spend time together in worship and looking at the next big idea)

These two styles don't easily match up. I am sure a big part of this is down to the pace of the organisation - we don't spend 30-40 hours per week in each others' pockets (like a normal working organisation) so the speed of things is a lot slower, but I guess that ramps up the demands on the time we do actually spend time together. Typically Church meetings (in addition to yesterday's comments) follow an outdated form of doing meetings (IMHO). Now it is difficult to reconcile this, for example a business might differ from a Church in that the vast majority of business meetings do not resolve matters which have the same degree of legal standing as some Church decisions do, but most business meetings are focussed on the job at hand and so all that "minutes of the last meeting" bilge is condensed and held within a process of review of activities, and then those elements which haven't been done for a reason, or those things done which weren't agreed are drawn out as a review of project activities rather than a dull reading of past events.

So I am working on a bit of a plan for the next PCC meeting of one of my Churches as an experiment to look at issues raised in the book; drama, engagement, passion, conflict mining and trying to make some things happen.

Death by meeting

So I am reading this book. It's a business book but it's written as a story, which is an interesting take on how to run better meetings.

Meetings are funny things. We have to have them. If you are an Anglican then it's a legal obligation and the way we do them is a bit wierd too. As Incumbent I am expected to chair the meeting (ok mostly chair the meeting) and yet frequently the subject matter is either a discussion of things I need to start doing, or we are talking about things I should have already done.

I'm on page 119 and I think there are two important lessons to draw out. First is the start of meetings. In one of my regular meetings we often spend 10 minutes or so with a short Evening Prayer but then resort to a rather dull series of items; correspondence and apologies and so forth. For me this ordering of an agenda smacks of the presumption that little of significant import will ever be discussed, so we stick to the formula based on the maintenance of the status quo.

The second is the issue of conflict. As the book says it is the resolution of conflict that makes a film so riveting and yet we adopt two stratagem for avoiding conflict...

We let certain people avoid conflict by giving them space to say whatever they like and however they want to...

And the rest of us avoid conflict by tolerating this but by remaining unwilling to challenge it.

Woah! Even just writing that has got me pacing round the garden with my brain whizzing, which is good except that this is supposed to be a day off!!

Apologies for a bit of regurgatation...

...but I wanted to iron out a few bits and pieces - as usual the clever ones have already written about this.

For those who are not aware the Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail has written an article about the 50 people who have destroyed Britain, and straight in at number 39, pop-pickers, goes our very own Graham Kendrick. Whilst conceding that hymns such as All things bright and beautiful are naff, Letts criticises Kendrick for modern stuff which he compares unfavourably with He who would valiant be and Hills of the north rejoice. Other have picked up on this here and here, for example.

I find Letts' choice of hymns very revealing, such as the moment during the wedding preparation when the groom suggests Jerusalem as the hymn that he thinks everybody will know, because they ring alarm bells for me of a certain brand of Public School Christianity. Both the hymns are ones we sang at Grammar School, and I have already landed myself in hot water by publicly criticising Hill of the north rejoice. In my defence, m'lud, I said that what I had against the hymn was based purely on the fact that we sang it at school (in my mind, sufficient in itself to bring about ripping pages from hymns books and building a very big bonfire).

So let's be clear about two things. I would almost always refuse to sing He who would valiant be because it is one of those hymns which makes me wonder whose praise is being sung. I can't see it as being in praise of Jesus, for he doesn't even get a name check, but the tone of the hymn, for me, is that of self-satisfied back patting by people who couldn't spot a pilgrim life (as lived by somebody like John Bunyan, credited as the inspiration for the hymn) if one landed on the Grammar School pupil's head. I wonder if Lett's actually looked this hymn up, by the way, because it doesn't seem to make the index of first lines in either Hymns Ancient and Modern, or the A&M New Standard version. So who sings it?

Hills of the north rejoice is another kettle of fish. Jesus gets a look in (hurrah) but for my taste the poetic structure of the hymn is the problem. Once upon a time(so we are told) people knew their Bibles and so the Biblical imagery of lines such as "and makes your waste his great highway" might have been meaningful to all present. Personally I am not convinced of this, but either way the hymn uses poetry and language to repackage truths of the Christian faith, but I would prefer to see them less poetically disguised - its a bit like going to a restaurant and having what should be a simple meal superbly prepared, only to find the smart-ass chef has tinkered with all the sauces and so on to try to be clever.

Now in the interests of balance we have to concede that a lot of contemporary worship songs are similarly "challenged" - the difference is that few of those who lobby for newer songs in Church seem to deny this. I am also aware of something not quite right in the way material is distributed, so books like...

"Selling Worship: How What We Sing Has Changed the Church" (Pete Ward)

...are worth reading, as are books like...

"And Now Let's Move into a Time of Nonsense: Why Worship Songs are Failing the Church" (Nick Page)

...which demonstrate that a system of self-criticism is growing within this culture which is far more healthy than anything I see in a more traditional area of Church music.

Ultimately worship is first and foremost about expressing something of God, not Prep School values or coral caves. Once we have a right attitude of God we become open to being made more like Jesus by the working of the Holy Spirit, but (as they say) that's another story...