jonnybaker

anyone for the deep end? community...

today's guardian has a really interesting article by tobias jones, author of utopian dreams, his reflections on visiting and staying with various communities.  the article is called why i'm setting up a woodland commune. he has been so inspired by the pilsdon monastic community in devon that he is buying a woodland as a place of community for those struggling to cope with life. it's a brave and honest piece. i instantly like the guy though i've never met him (he did speak at greenbelt a couple of years back i think). in all the talk around new monasticism, hospitality that is able to welcome those struggling and provide a place to belong has surely got to be at the heart of it? i have recently felt quite challenged by this partly through a friend who has taken a teenager into her family life with a lot of risk attached. and she commented to me that it is the only way people struggling will find a way forward...

cms has been exploring this kind of thing over the last few years, changing the overall structure to community, and investing in and kick starting a community house in iffley, oxford. that's been going just over a year now and is developing gently through teasing out what it means to live in community. it's not my place to reflect on it but at some point the community can and will no doubt reflect more. but my overall impression is that it's got a real authentic life about it already. there is a piece in the last yes magazine which is all focused on the theme of mission community written by one of the members. since starting that venture we seem to be hearing of and connecting with more people either on a similar journey or wanting to undertake a similar venture. i suspect they will network together informally and share learning on the way. tom sine (also in the last yes magazine) was advocating new economic models (as he has done for decades!) as so many people seem to live in isolation in single units and it could free up cash to live with less pressure or resource good things and help people connect with fellow human beings rather than live in isolated pods. 

i suspect many of us are so attached to our own space that it would be a challenging leap but i warm to it... though i have no doubt it would be challenging. my mum has been a shining example to me in this regard in her own quiet way, opening up her home to those struggling - she still does and i have no doubt always will. as kids, people were in and out of the house and our lives and sometimes things would literally go bump in the night but i think it was good for us. tobias jones says that one of the reasons they are doing it is for their children as counter to the common notion of defending and protecting them he thinks the children he has met in this sort of environment embody humanity, gentility, empathy and maturity in astonishing ways. being exposed to suffering and learning the place of acceptance as the environment in which people can slowly become themselves is surely good for children? and children are generally very healing in their acceptance unconditionally of people, far more than us grown ups!

jones also surprised me with this statement though i don't know why i was surprised (co-incidentally i happened to read the sermon on the mount while i was eating my breakfast today so it was a nice connection)

most of all we're taking our leap in the dark because we've belatedly realised that the sermon on the mount might actually be a manifesto for life, rather than a few nice ideals to take out for a spin on a Sunday morning. We've come to believe in the survival of the weakest, not just the fittest. William Vanstone once came out with the great line that the Church is like a swimming pool: all the noise is at the shallow end. We felt called to the deep end, to the place where it's more quiet, more dangerous maybe, more radical.

anyone else for the deep end?

tom sine creative thinking on difficult times

a ceative response manual for missional congregations in turbulent times

steve bevans lectures

the text for steve bevans two lectures at cms crowther centre are online as pdfs. i think audio may follow at some point. if i spot that i'll update this post. but go to this page - scroll down and you can download them there. i really like both - steve's blend of contextual theology and an interchange between contextual theologies globally is wonderful along with his variations in theology... these ideas come from his latest book an introduction to theology in global perspective which arrived on my doorstep yesterday which i'll review at some point soon...

it's clearly richard sudworth day (at least on my blog)...

having linked to richard's series in the last post i have since looked at his blog again and noticed a very poignant critique of the over against rhetoric of kester brewin and pete rollins. i think it's a brilliant piece and hope it blows open a conversation needing to happen. i often get asked what i think of pete's work and usually respond by saying that i love having his voice in the conversation but it's not the only voice i want to hear. i loved the book how not to speak of god. but this conversation reminds me a little bit of the book nation of rebels: why counter culture became consumer culture which makes a powerful critique that the over against rhetoric of liberals who talk a good game round the dinner table about the evils of the system and overcoming it are not the people who effect real change in society. it's the people who have engaged in the public square, engaged in civil rights marches and so on - often long slow painful processes - who have done more. on reading that book i was challenged to think that actually being alternative is a poor strategy for change which i remember saying as part of a blah in manchester in 2005.

i'd probably want to nuance that now and say what i have said many times that actually change or newness is most likely to come from having people work at both the centre and the edge. artists, tricksters, prophets and now pirates (?!) - characters i tend to love and warm to - their ruses and plays are inevitably going to dwell on the edges and so they should to do their work and share their gifts in those spaces. but the loyal radicals who work at the centre, in institutional spaces and located in traditions are those who may equally herald the future... for what its worth i try and play in both arenas.

christians and muslims

richard sudworth has written a series of articles on fulcrum on christian muslim relations - part 1 | part 2 | part 3. the web tends to lend itself to short pieces. whenever i find something long i think i'll go back later and rarely do - maybe it's my attention span that's the problem?! but i do recommend you print these off and chew over them. there's still one to come by the looks of it. they both plot the history of christian-muslim relations over the past 40 years or so and where they have got to now and open up the themes of hospitality, presence and engagement. this approach is actually rooted in cms with two former general secretaries max warren and john taylor (along with kenneth cragg) being its leading advocates. it's good to be reminded of some treasures in cms heritage.

fulcrum has become an interesting thoughtful space on the web - a generous and open evangelicalism. i am impressed by it. i confess i don't look at it as often as i might because i have a reaction to the word evangelical - it's not a description i relate to any more. it either seems to belong to a bygone era or is too tribal for me. i equally dislike the labels liberal and progressive and post evangelical and whatever else - being a follower of christ is enough for me and requires enough explaining. but for others its a helpful label and evangelicals could certainly do with sites like fulcrum to shift the public impression of evangelicals as the new pharisees...

as an example of a thoughtful piece andrew goddard reviews andrew marin's book on sexuality - love is an orientation. i haven't read the book (and don't feel i need to as the review is so comprehensive) but it is an example of how thoughtful the writers on fulcrum are, and open to questions and conversation on thorny issues. (judging by the front page it would be good to encourage a few more women writers on the site)

kester dons his eye patch and bigs up piracy

kester's series on christian piracy reaches its conclusion...

worship shaped churches - get over them

i liked this piece by david muir on the share blog - food for thought. and maybe alt worship has tripped up over this worship style question. in grace we recognised this problem about 5 years ago and developed a different way of thinking about who we were shaped by an ethos which includes mission (for us captured in the word engage) at the heart of who we are. we've a long way to go but this reminded me of the challenge. here's a quote

The problem with worship-shaped churches engaging in mission is that they find it very hard work. It is like introverts going to parties, or extroverts going on silent retreats – it's just not their 'shape' or their inner style. They can do it, but it drains them because their membership is not 'gathered' around this purpose.

alternative worship - offering clues for renewing worship

alternative worship offering clues for renewing worship has been posted on musicademy. you may have read it on here before. it was originally written for anglican renewal magazine resource

vulnerable mission

mark oxbrow has a piece on vulnerable mission on his blog hope transfigured. his blog is well worth adding into your reader or facebook or however you track the flow of data in your life. he has worked in cms (and now faith 2 share) for decades and is amazingly connected globally with a wealth of experience and wisdom on mission...

wise blindness and icons of the present

cms publishes a series of small booklets, a similar kind of size to grove booklets which are monographs reflecting on contemporary issues in mission.

the latest one is called telling it slant and is in two parts. the first is by john pritchard asking questions around the arts and how they represent an alternative spirituality and doorway to faith, and how they connect with mission. the second is a response which i have written called wise blindness and icons of the present - i'm quite pleased with what i wrote!

you can either sign up for the series or buy individual ones from the cms shop.

worship curation [5]: creating a public

worship curation [1]: opening up a series of reflections
worship curation [2]: the making of a world
worship curation [3]: negotiating newness
worship curation [4]: curating beyond the canon

a museum director's first task is to create a public - not just to do great shows, but to create an audience that trusts the institution

so says pontus hultén in a brief history of curating. this struck me quite forcibly for the simple reason that most of the people i know involved in curating worship at least in the alternative worship tradition (?!) are most interested in the creative process. i include myself in that. the processes of articulation, imagination and continuity are energising. dreaming up ideas and working out how to make them happen out of few resources, both alone and in a group of artists is like breathing air - easy and we don't have to think about it too hard. but there are a lot of events and installations and so on that are wonderfully creative and take my breath away but there is only a very small group who is fortunate enough to find this gold mine.

it's true you've got to do more work to engage in this kind of worship - it requires more than sitting in a pew and singing some songs and listening to a sermon. and i think there's something about taste - [good taste obviously!] - it's a marginal pursuit for arty types who like the leftfield rather than the mainstream. these are probably scripts we play in our minds as to why events are small. but i think it's probably that the kinds of people creating this worship simply don't get round to or think about creating a public.

i had a meal with someone new to ealing recently who was involved years back in abundant, a huge christian network and club in london 15 years or so back run by my younger brother steve and others. for that they used to have reps in every church they could think of, send out fliers and campaign like crazy. so the first question this person asked about grace was how people in other churches might know about it, did we have promoters, how did we advertise locally... i mumbled somewhat embarrassed that we didn't really do a lot of that. we had a web site, an e-mail list, an annual flier (but even that doesn't get used properly), blogs (and some of those are not bad). but it was clear to me that we haven't prioritised creating a public (or a tribe if you have read seth godin's tribes). don't get me wrong we do have a public, but it's smallish...

that's it for this post - it's one thought, one blind spot i think in many people who are curators of worship or artist-curators. maybe it's time to apply the same creative energy and process to this as to the construction of a wonderful worship experience/event?!

is europe's future christian?

is europe's future christian? this week's the guardian is asking...

Will Europe's future continue to be one of the steady marginalisation of religion and a constantly satisfied belief in reason and progress? Or will God make a comeback?

grace davie makes the first response christian but not as we know it [thanks blythe for link]

worship curation [4]: curating beyond the canon

worship curation [1]: opening up a series of reflections
worship curation [2]: the making of a world
worship curation [3]: negotiating newness

curating beyond the canon is the title of one of the chapters in curating subjects. sadly i can take no credit for the term. in it okwui enwezor says this

I have always tried to work outside the canon and do it within culture. This is not to say that the canon is bad but that the canon already has a highly circumscribed notion of what artistic practice could be. I think is already embedded within a very large historical determination that is in many ways very much set. It is un-giving. I am really interested in curating within culture, even when I am drawing from the canon in order to unsettle the kind of methodological issues that have become so situated in one place. To curate within culture is to take a space of culture in the present as an open place of working and that means that you have a greater mobility in terms of bringing in procedures of making art that may not have a place in the broader context of contemporary art. I suppose this is the realm within which most curators work except when their ambitions change and they want to make an exhibition of Andy Warhol. What could be more generic? When their ambitions change, when they want to become more institutionalised, they want to prove their commitment to the canon. This is what usually happens, it is more strategic. You can see immediately the intellectual poverty of some of those gestures and I completely understand what you see when the move happens. The curators have already reached a threshold when they want to have a permanent job... it doesn't mean giving up the canon but findng a way to re-jig the canon.

nice eh? try replacing art with worship in that paragraph. i think there are a lot of resonances with alternative worship . alternative worship has sought to curate beyond the canon in a number of ways -

1. i like the recent tendency to move things into public spaces within culture - art installations such as the advent beach hut calendar and stations of the cross, in cafes and bars and proximity spaces. johannes cladders being interviewed by hans obrist talks about the attempt by sanders and others to bring art and life completely together and either give up the institution of the museum or totally rethink it. i like the telling of a debate about museums where there is a discussion of whether it would be ok to play ping pong in a museum and cladders says yes as long as the art is taken off the walls first as it would be a distraction! cheeky playful and subversive. cladders goes on to say

i still wanted the museum but i said that just because you put another label on a bottle doesn't mean that the wine inside changes; it is the wine that needs to be altered. it is the inner attitude that we have to alter. we finally have to stop defining art as only those objects that have been accepted as art by society. we have to concentrate on on allowing art to evelove through how it is received.

2. theology - depends a bit on where you start from but curators within worship are often discovering texts that are beyond the canon at least of where they started. the initial wave of thinking around alt worship had a discussion forum called postmodern christian i seem to remember and feminist, liberation, black theologies all came to influence thinking. the discovery that were a whole swathe of texts beyond what had been the canon. this is also about where the canon is read from or through whose eyes and it came to be read with postmodern eyes. i can also think of a friend who tried to introduce contemplative practices into a charismatic church and this caused a lot of heartache - it was beyond the canon of that particular church culture/theology. the use of a lava lamp caused consternation because it was a distraction or peripheral!

3. the content of particular experiences being curated. this might be something simple such as the articulation of liturgy - i can think of a eucharist at grace on hospitality that drove hard for a radical inclusion at the table, certainly confronting the assumed theology of who can come to the table for bread and wine.  the liturgy suggested that if jesus was able to share bread with judas knowing he would be betrayed by him that pretty much blew open the ring fencing that goes on. i think of the use of technology and culture in worship - mac classics on the holy table or discmans in st pauls cathedral, playful, messing with things, matter out of place. i think of themes explored - dirt by vaux which included throwing the bread and wine dramatically and the use of language that shocked projecting the words god is found in the shit on the back wall, or queer by ikon, or being greeted by the welcoming group dressed in contamination suits at grace.

4. some groups have not had denominational ties - so they have done what they like which is clearly beyond the canon

there's a mistaken notion of liturgy at play in lots of places in the anglican church for example - that there are prescribed liturgies that need to be recited by rote. identity is tied up with perpetuating this. but this is a very stagnant view. ironically curating beyond the canion is precisely the kind of tactic that will lead to renewal of the canon. so somehow a new set of permissions needs to be created that frees up worship practice within denominations. in practice this has happened in several places. the way we have negotiated this in grace is to get permission from the bishop to do liturgies that are more experimental and canon law is covered because there is a service available as prescribed by canon law. but not everyone has been that fortunate in negotiating space. there was a small booklet/paper produced off the back of a lambeth conference (down to earth statement). i think it was in 1998. anyway this tried to address the issue in the anglican communion globally. the motivation is that the canon had obviously been written from a western perspective so this document sought to encourage and give permission for contextual liturgies - or to use the language of the document - inculturated. here's a couple of quotes that get to the heart of it...

Our lack of inculturation has fostered both the alienation of some Christians and an over ready willingness of others to live in two different cultures, one of their religion and and the other of their everyday life. Other Christians again have left our churches because of this cultural insensitivity. Similarly non Christians have found the foreignness of the church a great barrier to faith...

...True inculturation implies a willingness in worship to listen to culture.... it has to make contact with the deep feelings of people. It can only be achieved through an openness to innovation and experimentation, an encouragement of local creativity, and a readiness to reflect critically at every stage of the process, a process which in principle is never ending.

as in many mission issues the church has had to think about the canon in relation to global contexts but hasn't applied the same sense on her own doorstep. but the problem is exactly the same on our own doorstep. in the book trickster makes the world lewis hyde talks about the trickster character in mythology and suggests that although trickster is an uncomfortable character, with his ruses (such as messing with dirt, crossing boundaries, or disturbing notions of truth and property) he is key to renewal, so cultures need to make space for trickster rather then silence or kick him out. totalitarian regimes silence artists.

lastly i found it fascinating that the desire for a permanent job is seen to be a threshold in the art world by some. i guess there are the same set of tensions around where to locate yourself in relation to the institution and powers that be and the edge. i touched on this in the last post...

worship curation [3]: negotiating newness

worship curation [1]: opening up a series of reflections
worship curation [2}: the making of a world

i have just finished reading A Brief History of Curating by Hans Ulrich Obrist (thanks nic). his concern is that curation may be forgotten and so has conducted eleven extensive interviews with well known curators to help the memory live on. i say well known but part of the curator's role is often to disappear behind their work so i didn't really know the names very well at all.

it's fascinating seeing the themes that surface again and again in different ways in the interviews and with the lens i bring to reading i am looking to scrape off the surface themes that resonate with curation in worship. one of the strongest is negotiating newness in art in the midst of the public, artists, museums, galleries, benefactors and patrons, and the range of institutions and powers at play in the art world. in short the curator is most definitely a negotiator, a middleman or middlewoman even if that wasn't what they signed up for! (sound familiar?)

some curators locate themselves at the independent freelance end of things so they have the creative space to fulfil their vision. they problematise the institutions and the art world and haven't got time for them. so seth siegelaub calls the museum 'a cemetery for art' with its focus on historicisation. and sees no point in working with a museum because of its vested social and structural interests. art institutions can be very detached from artists which ends up being a real problem so why bother with them? in an article i want to come back to in curating subjects it made me smile when okwui enwezor says that the day curators want a permanent job they have reached a threshold! it so sounds like the debates around mission and sustainability and ordination/full time paid or not...

on the other hand there are plenty who managed to take roles inside the museums and used that to negotiate permissions for artists to do amazing things in and around those huge spaces. obrist suggest in questions to curators that a couple of keys to the curators who have managed to create the most impact in and around museums have been their own closeness to artists and their ability to create trust in the interplay between the institution, the public and the artists. without that trust you won't be able to do much but once it's there who knows what can happen? sandberg talked about the courage to run a museum in a non academic experimental way - but you're not going to do that without a lot of graft in building trust.

there have been a couple of significant changes in museums in particular. one was that museums stopped just seeing themselves as showing permanent collections. but warehoused the artworks to create different kinds of themed shows bringing the good stuff out from time to time and showing it in different ways, making different articulations and connections with it. and the second was a shift in some museums seeing themselves as sites for experimentation. at art historians day in 1970 michael diers says that it became clear that museums had to say goodbye to their isolation, to their function as an aesthetic church (!). out of this emerged the idea of the museum as a workshop or laboratory. johannes cladders talked about the museum as a space of risk (which I love). i remember going to an amazing evening at the victoria and albert museum in london with DJs and projections, and an evening of installations in traditional spaces by onedotzero – that definitely had this laboratory feel. i suspect that if you rewound, things used to be a lot more stuffy!

my response to this debate is pretty similar to how i feel about the wonderfully creative mission leaders, improvisers and worship curators who have been part of the emerging church/alternative worship movement that has subverted, shaken, deconstructed and brought newness to the christian faith in the soil of postmodern cultures at the edges and in the heart of the institutions. let's have both and everything inbetween! i love it that there are curators who want to sail off the edge and do things that the institution cannot imagine or permit. and i also love it that there are those who patiently earn trust and negotiate space within the heart of the church. the beauty of the new environment is that it's so easy for those people to connect and share their learning and stories and journey together. can you imagine a cathedral employing a curator to play in their cathedral which they see as a laboratory and a space of risk with a wealth of artworks (theological capital?) that's been warehoused but that the curator can bring out of the cupboard to create new articulations with imagination holding up and subverting the continuity of the tradition? renewal that comes from the centre and the edge

geez and experiments in truth

i was contacted by geez magazine a while back to ask permission to use a photo. i was delighted to be asked having heard good things about the magazine (and pleased that that is the third magazine i have had a photo in this year). well yesterday a copy dropped on the doormat. hailing from canada, it looks great, is intelligent, funny and poignant. a couple of the people working on it have done time with adbusters which didn't surprise me - it has a similar feel. on the 'feel' of the magazine the eds replied in the letters page to someone who didn't like the name by saying that they wanted a name that suggests they are in the realm of religion but not in a typical way, that the exploration of topics is more like saturday evening over beers than sunday morning with its strictures. each issue has a theme. the current one is inspired by gandhi's notion of experiments in truth (which i was inspired by in mark scandrette's book a couple of years back) - put legs on an idea try something out such as downward mobility or sit in public, see what happens. don't just sit there theorising. the magazine is like greenbelt - i.e. it's a space in church life where you actualy feel good about being a christian rather than embarrassed if you know what i mean. the magazine has been running a daringly awkward sermon contest - 300 words only. the nest issue will have a bundle of winners.

on the subject of magazines conspire also looks like an interesting new zine on the block birthed out of the simple way community - a different approach to how the economics and distribution works, with communities subscribing to be able to distribute it free having signed up and agreed to donate towards it as a community.

we are doing our own experiment in truth again this week - off to run dekhomai at the london mind body spirit festival chatting with, listening to, praying with, massaging feet of, making prayer bracelets with, doing jesus deck readings for visitors to our stand. the experiment? take christian spirituality out of the church box and into the spiritual marketplace and join in with what god is already doing... if you pray, do pray for us. we hope the 'energy is strong' in our booth :-)

worship curation [2] : the making of a world

this post is the second in a series on worship curation
[1] opening up a series of reflections

what is it that a curator thinks about in relation to curating worship? in the first post i laid out a very practical list that i drew up for people taking the curation role in grace - thanks to the people who have commented btw. if you follow in a newsreader you're missing that part of the conversation. i'm beginning to think this is going to be a really interesting conversation as it plays out. i have started to and fro-ing with a few people via e-mail and plan to publish a series of interviews over the next few months.

in retrospect i'm not sure if such a practical post was the best way to start. maybe it was too functional? so let me come at the question of what it is that a curator might think about by suggesting it is three things: articulation, imagination and continuity. this is not my original thought! it's from an essay in curating subjects by simon sheikh on the techniques of the curator where he suggests that as curating looks to the future it should centre round these three notions.

worship imagines a world, nothing less. sheikh suggests in relation to exhibition making that if the curator is happy with the way the world is now they should continue to make exhibitions as always and repeat the formats and circulations. but if they are not content with the world they are in in a broad sense, and in the art world, then they will have to produce other exhibitions. i find this such a resonant idea. i'm not content with the world - globally, politically, or indeed the church world or the way worship is played out and imagines the world. so if you are curating worship what kind of a world do you imagine, do you make? maybe that is the most important question any of us can ask and it will probably take a lifetime to answer? if you are restless perhaps it is because you don't like the world being made for you by other imaginaries? i was talking with someone yesterday who had been at a christian exhibition for their organisation running a stand talking to the punters at a conference. but they were next to a stand that was selling worship cds for your church - if you didn't have a worship band, you could simply plug in their cds and sing along. the music played non stop for three days and nearly drove my friend insane. but the point is what kind of world is being imagined?! i want to create a totally different one. reflecting on alternative worship, which is where the notion of worship curation has come from, i think it has been about imagining new worlds, new relationships, new strategies and tactics, and counter-publics, about saying that other worlds are indeed possible, that business as usual simply will not do.

so these three themes...
articulation. this is how sheikh puts it (substitute worship for art or exhibition as you read any of these quotes):

a work of art is at best an articulation of something as much as it is a representation of someone: it is a proposal for how things could be seen, an offering but not a handout. articulation is the formulation of your position and politics, where you are and where you want to go, as well as a concept of companionship: you can come along or not.

worship is an articulation of something, of how things could be seen. i think this is really helpful. as a community or a curator you have a vision, a take. it might not be fully worked out but it is definitely not a neutrality. i think we sometimes want to pretend about this. if i reflect on this in grace, taking something like communion, we have articulated a radical vision of hospitality and welcome around the table in most of our liturgies - this is deliberately in the face and counter to the imagination of a world where only the insiders are welcomed. in the song table of christ one of the lines is 'come if the church stops you at the door'. this is articulation. articulation is also around more subtle things like deconstructing the front, or the role of the expert or priest, around posture and layout, and around the use of culture and popular culture in worship - making a world out of the stuff of everyday life rather than articulating a world which runs in parallel to the rest of life. i love the phrase 'an offering but not a handout'. art rarely works when it shouts - maybe punk is the exception?! and worship is the same. it's good to have clarity about what you want to articulate but it needs to be offered and explored rather than shouted and dictated. the tone and posture are really important. i also like it when art is multi-valent - functions at many levels and meanings so people can find a number of pathways through. but let's not pretend that this doesn't then have an articulation...

imagination. i go on and on about imagination and creativity. it's what it means to image god - such a gift. and the curating is a process about imagination. it's the fun part. at a macro level it's about ways of seeing, imagining another world, but it's also about imagining at the level of the process of coming up with ideas and dreaming things that have not been done before or have a different take. i will come back to the process of how people come up with ideas in interviews with people i hope. but it's so exciting to be involved in the making and producing in this way. i like to think sometimes that the angels sit in the rafters or on the balcony thinking what on earth are these crazy people going to do to worship today?! and we keep surprising them and bringing smiles to their faces. beach hut advent calendars, stations of the cross in public art galleries, embedding prayers in slabs of concrete, slapping containers of installations in city centres, sending surprises through the post, welcoming people dressed in contamination suits, guerilla worship... - i love what you guys dream and have dreamt and is yet to be dreamed. imagination - it's a muscle that can be developed and needs to be flexed and there's nothing better for it than being around other people flexing imagination, maybe it's a habit that can be caught.

continuity. i'll pick up on this more in interviews. but art/worship has a history a narrative or histories depending on who does the telling no doubt. there is a tradition, a line of ancestory, a communion of artists/saints worldwide and down the ages. to curate is to locate in this line sometimes straight, other times kicking off from, subverting, giving a new spin to, and opening up the traditions. it's how traditions get remade and taken forward. and the beauty of the art world and church world is that there is so much to play with. but it is a continuity whatever way you look at it even if sometimes a rupture is brought to that continuity. if you are located in a particular denominational setting (as we are in grace) this affords certain rules/logic/grammar. if you are outside of that, continuity will play out slightly differently. but the point is as a curator or team how are you locating in relation to continuity of the worlds before and the world to come? alternative worship in this respect was much keener to stress continuity and location in tradition in contrast with the modernising moves of worship in the 70s and 80s that broke with continuity going for the new.

this was going to be a quick post over breakfast and has extended a bit!... but a final quote from sheikh

producing a public is making a world. it is also making other ones possible.

musicademy

i have been invited to contribute to musicademy - a worship blog/community. the posts there will be occasional and mainly things on worship i have reflected on here...

it's interesting that there seems to be a growing restlessness about contemporary worship from within the communities that have led it not just from those of us who have taken a different approach - see for example this piece bored with contemporary worship? or this piece on worship songs (i love the fact that the url is spelled brain maclaren!!!)

walking forward backwards

in response to my article in leadership journal mike weaver sent me an e-mail where we liased on faithful improvisation. he has studied improv and uses it with churches. this is a paragraph from the e-mail he sent that he said i could post which has the lovely idea of walking forward backwards...

One of my improv teachers, Keith Johnstone, once talked about improv as "walking forward backwards".  What he means is this...improv in theater keeps the scene moving forward into the future, but the improvisers use recall as a way of adding to the scenes in the moment...pulling thoughts and ideas, recycling them if you will, into the present scene to move the entire show forward.  It's quite magical.  I reframe Johnstone's comment this way that improvisers move forward with eyes in the back of our heads.  I think that's how we approach tradition.  We remember what is significant in our past and pull certain things into the present as it adds and helps us move forward in mission into the future.

church on the edge

richard passmore has posted notes and slides from a talk he gave at exeter diocese. he is one of our best missiologists in youth ministry in my view. he comes at thing totally through a mission lens. i realise i like that as it's what i try to do. but it's worth a read of his notes. they are long so get a coffee and sit down and take your time...

the velvet reformation

this is a pretty thoughtful piece on rowan wiliams and gay clergy (it's pretty long too - be warned) [ht bob]

the velvet reformation