jonnybaker

let's reclaim the jubilee

well it was a pleasant surprise to find this article on the jubilee in the comment is free section of the guardiuan - let's reclaim the jubilee

language and god

maggi dawn has written a really good piece exploring inclusive and expansive language in liturgy. being inclusive of course sounds a great idea (and is) but maggi suggests that the practice of it can lead at times to other issues and even other exclusions. she suggests expansive language might be a better way to explore...

Rather than make our capacity for naming God smaller, then, perhaps it would be better to explore the breadth of the ways God has been named; to reflect on the refusal to articulate any name for God as a way of acknowledging holiness and mystery. We might rediscover, from the scriptures, and from two thousand years of Christian theology, some of the many names of God: helper, Lord, servant and friend; compassionate father, a mother who breastfeeds her children and who knits for them, a tigress, a mother hen, a shepherd, a rock and a tower, a shield and a defence, a landowner, a housekeeper, a baker of bread, a mighty ruler and a powerless infant, the light that lightens the world, and the darkness that is above all light; the God who is both love and wisdom, and at the same time the God whose name, however close we try to get to it, will always elude us.

we had a grace service a couple of years back where we explored some similar ideas - follow the links to see some of the prayers we produced taking this approach.

church as network

i was asked to write a guest post for boats without oars, a blog run by someone i met in austin earlier this year. he asked if i could come up with something using a metaphor for church so church as network is the result which is a reworking of a couple of posts from my series riffing on clay shirky's here comes everybody...

dear twenty-something self...

mark scandrette has written to his twenty-something self. probably because i am in my forties, i strongly related to it. there's some real nuggets of wisdom in there. i loved this thomas mertom quote in the mix...

Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious people are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the person or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their lives

letters home

letters home is a bulletin aimed at those like CMS who are in new mission communities or orders or sodalities (yes jargon I know but probably useful as a term) and definitely aimed at pioneers. it is edited by beth keith and this is how she describes it...

Letters Home is a collection of thoughts, struggles and dreams; it is in fact a collection of letters home. A collection of letters written by pioneers who have followed the call to go beyond the Church as is. We chose Letters Home because they want to stay connected, stay in touch, and because home is not just where they’ve come from but a family they still belong to.

When we were putting it together it felt like an odd mix combining research, theology, parable and meditation. But it felt important to mix it up. It’s in the mix we find ourselves, combining gut instincts with rationale observations, thought through prac- tices with missional spirituality. The exploration we’re involved in requires all of this.

the first issue explores the tensions pioneers experience as they go beyond the existing church. it is totally brilliant. pour a cup of coffee or something, and sit down and chew over the contents.

karlie, one of our cms pioneer students has two delightful pieces in it that were actually originally written and submitted as part of her portfolio on mission for the course.

beth present's what she has called elsewhere the pioneer's journey. this shouts so loudly to me that pioneers are really well advised to connect with a mission community or network (a sodality).

i really loved a piece by simon sutcliffe reflecting on the pioneer as guest. he creates a map of pioneering that has three types - pioneering in existing structures, creating fresh expressions and the ministry of wandering or being a guest (or sodal pioneer). this is a really helpful piece. i suspect that many in the church think of pioneer as either one or two but life becomes more complicated if you want to pioneer in the last category and dare I say more exciting, unknown, and wild...

then there are a few other pieces as well.

it's available as a series of pieces on the blog or to download as a whole.

today's experience

i found today's experience: i tried to cure gay people in the guardian weekend magazine very moving. it has an honesty and vulnerability about it and courage that models the kind of conversation the church needs to have.

kony 2012 - CMS take on it

i was pleased to see CMS posted an article on kony 2012 because there was quite a lot of campaiging in CMS around 2003/2004 which did quite a lot to raise profile. anyway this article seems to have its head screwed on...

stop throwing starfish

stop throwing starfish (ht shannon hopkins)

mods and sods revisited

there's what sounds like (and probably is) a slightly technical piece of language floating around mission circles - modality and sodality. i have touched on it before a few times i think - here and certainly in my breakout talks. george lings who is a wise reflector on these things has clearly been thinking this over and has published his thoughts on the matter here in an article - understanding mission and church better through modality and sodality. and there is a conversation developing in the comments. this is an important conversation because it helps shift our imagination around what church might be - we have been so dominated by thinking the word church means gathered together for worship in a locality, this helps open up a different idea - yes church can be that but it is also a spread out community in mission. i guess you can see why i think it's important... if anyone has a less technical language go and suggest it.

on monks and mission...

archbishop rowan williams on monks and mission

stories of empowerment

sophia network are currently running a good series of stories of empowerment

anvil volume 2 - a theology for the ephesian moment

ok so that is not the most catchy title ever for a blog post - congratulations if you made it this far!!!

anvil is an evangelical anglican journal of theology and mission that has been revamped and made digital and free and at cms we are very much seeing it as a mission journal into the future. you may remember i had an article on curation in the first edition. well the second edition is now online and is basically a response to steve bevans wonderful book introduction to theology in global perpsective which i review here. for me it's the best book i can think of that articulates what i think an approach to theology should be in today's world.

anyway all that by way of saying it's a really good edition of anvil. i think this could prove to be an exciting journal in an ongoing way. steve bevans reflects looking back at the book and what he has attempted to achieve in a brilliant reflection. the ephesian moment is a term from missiologist andrew walls. here's how steve describes it in the article

our globalized church today is in situation in which it had only been once before, in the community of Greeks and Jews in Ephesus. There in Ephesus, Christians of two very different cultures could have formed two separate churches, but they did not. Christ was the peace that tore down the wall between them, and they became not two, but one (See Eph. 2:14-22), and in that give and take they caught a glimpse of the whole Christ. Neither, says Walls, ‘was a form of Christian faith complete and valid in itself, apart from the other. Each was necessary to the other, each was necessary to complete and correct the other; for each was an expression of Christ under certain specific conditions, and Christ is humanity completed.’ Now that ‘Ephesian moment’ has come again. Today, ‘new Christian lifestyles…have developed or are developing under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to display Christ under the conditions of African, Indian, Chinese, Korean, and Latin American life.’ The Ephesian moment demands a global theology.

in other words we only see who christ is as we see christ's many faces and theologies and embodiments in his body represented around the world. this is a bit of cms jargon and something of an internal joke at times. so i blame steve's time with cms a while back for him picking up on this! but it is an exciting idea. he concludes his piece by saying

We need a theology adequate to the Ephesian Moment in which we find ourselves in today’s world, and we need a theological education that helps students who will minister in a church that, for the first time in history, is conscious of the fact that Christianity truly is a world movement.

timothy tennant has a piece on theological translatability - again this is essentially arguing that we need to become conversant with other theologies especially from the majority world, that we need to realise our own is partial and not universal and that if we are open to it a global exchange will highlight our own heresies and blind spots!

atola longkumer reflects on partnership's opportunities and challenges in another really good piece -

Globalization, the growing divide between the rich and the poor, human rights abuses, fundamentalism, violence, secularism, environmental degradation, and migration are some of the challenges that require creative and healing attention. The global Christian community must respond in unison by transforming the world into a better place — the Kingdom of God. Despite the vastly different contexts with a variety of challenges, Christians around the world are called to be partners in building God’s Kingdom, speaking the truth in love and witnessing together to the Gospel. And in the partnership between Christians of the global south and the global north in carrying out our missional task of witnessing to the fullness of the life in Christ, may we heed the directions of the mission scholar Cathy Ross who has perceptively given the ingredients for a productive and fulfilling partnership: mutual trust, acceptance of responsibilities and willingness to take risks among the partners.

there is also an interview with miroslav volf, a tribute to john stott and a poem by rowan williams.

congratulations to the editorial team - this really looks set to become a good online journal. i haven't added hyperlinks to articles because you need to register and login to read them - it is free which is also amazing judging by the price of most academic journals!

st pauls - a naive suggestion

luke bretherton has written a good reflection on the occupy movement at st pauls

rowan williams piece in the financial times was wise and thoughtful as ever

and jonathan bartley of ekklesia muses on why the danger isn't over

the greed creed at asbojesus is still probably the most insightful of the lot!

the only thought i have to add to the debate is a naive one...

why not just cap salaries all round? does anyone need to earn say more than 200k in a year? set the level at whatever level you like - equivalent to the prime minister's salary maybe (150k)? or 400k if that makes life simpler? that would shift everything. footballers, bankers, investors, etc etc would all be able to earn enough in a year to buy a small house - does anyone need that anyway?! and there would be huge amounts of money to invest in the poor, in employment, in the arts, in charities and non profits and so on. i know it's naive but we have to address the fundamental problem of obscene disparity and greed. why not have a society that values something other than individual 'success' and 'achievment'?!

riffing on newness 8: mission community - beyond loose networks

see also in this series 1 the adjacent possible | 2 the new belongs elsewhere | 3 dissent | 4 refounding | 5 darkness and unknowing | 6 connect don't protect | 7 imagination grief and amazement

this is a post on newness in relation to the church in mission. i can't think what language might be more general that would apply in other sectors. perhaps intentional community? leave a comment if you have ideas of that...

there is a stereotype of a pioneer as a lone individual who goes off to stick their flag in the land to begin something new. there is also a stereotype of a prophet who lives alone in the wilderness communing with god and appearing occasionally to deliver their message. but in terms of newness i think these are really unhelpful pictures. the kind of imagining out of which genuine newness might emerge is much more likely a communal one. in the case of prophets in the old testament there were certainly schools of prophets and i suspect pioneers were rarely alone. the nurturing of an alternative consciousness and imagination will surely come through dreaming and reflecting with others, knocking around ideas, eating together and conversation and nurturing the kind of environment in which poets and artists gifts can flourish. for this sort of environment there needs to be something intentional about community. i think this is particularly the case when we are all so co-opted by the dominant culture of consumption, and the dominant culture of business as usual in our churches. how will we find space to detox and grieve and imagine alternative worlds are possible and be energised in hope towards them? it needs a depth of community and relationship to have any kind of chance of developing a missional discipleship. but i am beginning to wonder in our world of loose networks and 'friends' if we have forgotten that to find depth in relationships requires commitment, or to use an old fashioned word fellowship which as andrew jones has pointed out originally meant buying into a cow or something together! i.e. you put your commitment on the line.

connectivity is crucial for innovation as i have blogged in the previous post connect don't protect. but loose networks and 'friends' in social networks don't afford the kind of depth required for prophetic imagination and community. they are opt in when i feel like it arrangements - typical of the postmodern avoidance of fixation or commitment. jump on board when something interesting is flowing and jump off when something else catches my attention.

perhaps one of the reasons for the resurgence of interest in monasticism is because of wisdom around community life and how to find this missing depth - in grace we were helped many years ago by roy searle's ( of the northumbia community) insights that ethos is central to community life and to see a function of leadership as guarding ethos. developing a rhythm and/or rule of life, practices of contemplative spirituality, hospiltality and lots of other things could also be seen as treasures. ian adams cave refectory road is a delightful book in which he explores some of these.

i am particularly interested in the ways that religious communities have (and might still) nurtured  prophets, dissenters and refounding persons in the past. gerald arbuckle has written at length on this (yes sorry - arbuckle again!). in from chaos to mission he looks at formation and how that might be refounded in religious communities precisely to cultivate this sort of newness. one of the things that he highlights in a very helpful way is that it is not monasticism per se that forms people in this way. it's a very mixed picture. in particular, it is not a cloistered (or residential) monasticism that we should look to if weʼre interested in prophetic ministry and mission. the purpose of formation in cloistered orders was obedience and conformity and stability in an unchanging world. but for the spread out orders (friars)  - the likes of the jesuits and fransiscans and celts - prophetic mission to the world was at the heart of their concern which requiried radical flexibility and imagination. the purpose of formation in the spread out communities or mission orders of friars is inculturation - i.e. innovation in relation to gospel and cultures. being part of a mission community like this formed people to engage in prophetic mission.

he suggests that denominatons struggle to contain this gift and people. they simply don't know what to do with it or them. it makes far more sense all round that these mission communities nurture and form the dissenters/prophetic ministry. the religious communties are then a 'shock therapy of the holy spirit for the church as a whole'! especially if they are actually ecclesial (part of church in and of themselves) as opposed to para church (a bit on the side of church).

i say a bit more about all this in the breakout talks and this blog post is in danger of going on rather a long time! but research is backing this up - pioneers are far better placed to bring genuine newness today when they are located in and out of a mission community/order (such as cms, church army, urban expression, the methodist venture fx diaconate etc).

this is by far the hardest piece to write so far in this series and is in many ways the most contentious, if not weird - i welcome any feedback and discussion on it. the implications are pretty huge if it is anywhere near correct... if you are a dissenter/pioneer/prophetic or whatever language you prefer get in an intentional mission community of some sort. and if you are in a denominational or equivalent structure looking for newness make friends with those in a mission community and ask them to work with you and with anyone you nurture in this prophetic mission to help form their prophetic imagination and to connect them in with a community that gets it and them. it's why am a member of cms - a mission community. it nurtures me into this kind of imagination and ministry and mission.

(if this is all too established i think it might translate for non conformists at the local level into small mission communities gathered around shared ethos values and practices and those communities networking together but with some genuine buy in and not just a loose network?)

riffing on newness 7: imagination, grief and amazement

see also in this series 1 the adjacent possible | 2 the new belongs elsewhere | 3 dissent | 4 refounding | 5 darkness and unknowing | 6 connect don't protect

perhaps this should have come much earlier in this series but prophetic imagination is key to nurturing genuine newness. imagination is hugely under-rated. i have no idea why. anything that has been created someone must have imagined. without imagination there will be no newness. prophetic imagination is the kind of imagination that is able to nurture a vision that is alternative to the dominant or royal consciousness. it is a kind of seeing.

It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination to keep on conjouring and proposing alternative futures to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.

walter bruegemann's book the prophetic imaginaton is amazing on this theme. he suggest that there are two moves in this prophetic imagining - grief and amazement. i have blogged at least twice on this before and quite recently - grief and amazement, and grief and amazement in the life of jesus. the role of the prophet is to evoke grief - the shedding of tears where we have become numb, and it is to create amazement that new worlds are possible. he also calls these two moves criticising and energising. we might conceive of this in relation to capitalism or where the church has become stuck and wedded to particular ways of acting and being and so on.

there are many ways of thinking about mission. it's partly why it is such a rich way of thinking about what it means to follow christ. one that i often come back to is a way john taylor describes it in the primal vision. he suggests that we could conceive of mission as an adventure of the imagination.

one of the mission words i incresingly find helpful is inculturation which is the process of how the gospel will be imagined and embodied in a culture from the inside. it sounds simple but it is clearly much harder than you might think judging by the ways foreign cultural robes are imposed from the outside in new cultural spaces. bevans and schroeder have a new book out prophetic dialogue which i will review at some point (it is brilliant) which has a chapter on the spirituality of inculturation which i found incredibly helpful on how to help nurture a genuine newness in mission. they suggest that there are two different postures or stances of those who come from outside a culture and those who are on the inside. the outsiders key task is letting go:

Outsiders need to let go of their certainties regarding the content of the gospel. They need to let go of cherished practices and ideas that have nourished and sustained them in their own journeys towards christian maturity. They need to let go of the symbols that anchor them in their human and christian identity and let go of the order that makes them comfortable….

One of the hardest and yet most spiritually enriching tasks of the outsider is 'taking leave of the gospel' so to speak for the sake of the gospel - so that the gospel can be understood in a radically new and meaningful way among new peoples and in new circumstances.

by way of contrast the insider's task is speaking out. they need to trust in their culture and experience and result in a courage that gives energy insight and creativity to articulate how god is present in their lives, focusing on god's nearness in the stuff of everyday life. the insider needs courage to experiment, to risk, to try new rituals, explore new symbols, to have pride in their culture and self identity and risk going too far in bringing the resources of their culture to christian identity.

this is strong stuff! i am convinced that there is great wisdom here if genuine newness is to come in mission. what does this mean in practice? there are plenty of examples of the outsider/insider relationship in stories of mission. sadly many of these don't involve enough letting go from the outsider so we have cultural forms of the church that are overly western in many parts of the world and ongoing struggles around that. but there are also many inspiring stories in mission of how this has worked well. what it might mean for me is that if (and i am not planning to at the moment) i were to move into a new community, i would need to let go of my own ways of worshipping - liturgies, music, movies, rituals and so on, and even the way i conceive of the gospel, in order that insiders might be able to discern and shape that from the inside.

this 'letting go' of the outsider clearly relates to unknowing and darkness which will need to be entered to alow the new to emerge. it also relates to refounding - i am not suggesting a letting go that is a move away from the heart of the christian faith. but this needs to be held in some kind of tension for the outsider.

riffing on newness 6: connect don't protect

see also in this series 1 the adjacent possible | 2 the new belongs elsewhere | 3 dissent | 4 refounding | 5 darkness and unknowing

in the book where good ideas come  stephen johnson is interested in discovering what kind of environment enables innovation to thrive. so for example he writes about research that shows that a city of 5 million is 3 times as creative as a town of a hundred thousand because of the natural way it's possible to collide with other people and ideas. it made me glad i live in london! by way of a summary statement jonson says this

We are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.

ideas flow best in unregulated channels in open environments. this is instinctive to people in the new networked culture but much harder for organisations to wrap their heads round perhaps especially at times of financial pressure when to give and share may seem counter intuitive. in a fascinating piece of research johnson plots inventions in blocks of two hundred years along the axis of market/non-market and individual/network. it completely shatters the image of the lone inventor. the last two hundred years have seen by far the most innovation in the fourth quadrant - non market networked.

he also talks about what he calls exaptation - borrowing an idea from one area and applying it to another. so for example the gutenburg printing press would possibly not have been invented if gutenberg wasn't interested in winemaking. his genius was bricolage from a number of different areas to create the printing press including ideas from the wine press. he also cites a survey of 766 entrpreneurs by ruef which highlights that the most creative individuals had broad social networks that were outside both their own organisations and their own fields of expertise. diverse horizontal networks were three tims more innovative than vertical networks. and groups that are familiar and long term tend to dampen innovation.

i have blogged at length before about clay shirky's book here comes everybody - 1 2 3 4 which looks at network theory and the importance of connectors who focus outside of their small world to increase energy in networks which demonstrates in a different way the same point. one of the creative tips in a whack on the side of the head is to look outside your own area. margaret wheatley's magnificent book leadership and the new science suggests that a very different mindset is required in leaders who operate in this new environment of connectedness.

some organisations have famously sought to encourage this in their staff. so google for example encouraged staff to spend 20% of time following up connections, exploring, nurturing hunches with great effect, enabling serendipitous moments.

it goes without saying that the the internet has opened up connectivity in extraordinary ways. those people who moan about it and see it as a waste of time are somewhat missing the point. that's not to say that all internet use will lead to innovation. it's equally possible to live in a bubble with familiar connections and relationships and web sites that can be very dull and stagnant. instead explore tangents, follow hunches, get curious, connect with new people outside your area of interest and so on.

so what? connect and nurture connections beyond your own area. meet people, drink coffee, exploring hunches, operate out of a posture that seeks to open source and share ideas rather than batton down the hatches.

in terms of newness in the church which is of particular interest to me, this is a hard reflex to develop. theological positions are often entrenched and defended. people go to their tribe's festival, read their tribe's books, do their tribe's leadership training, meet their tribe in coffee houses and so on. it's easy to end up in a loop that is quite small, self referential and ultimately uncreative because of fear. this is equally true of progressive as of conservative as of emerging as of orthodox as of liberal as of evangelical as of catholic etc. by contrast, the body of christ is an extraordinary network of connections that opens up all sorts of amazing possibilities with a different set of instincts out of which much newness could and i hope will come.

parable of the wedding banquet

a while back i was inspired by richard passmore's theology from below in relation to the parable of the wedding banquet, a very tricky story that jesus told. this was the text in the lectionary this weekend so would have been preached on in churches round the world. jenny was preaching at st marys and as a result we have discussed interpretations at length... she spotted that nadia had published her take on it which is definitely in the passmore school and is quite brilliant - sermon on the worst parable ever.

riffing on newness 5: darkness and unknowing

see also in this series 1 the adjacent possible | 2 the new belongs elsewhere | 3 dissent | 4 refounding

this may seem a strange theme to follow on from refounding but it's equally a theme on creativity in lots of peoples writing and in my own experience. perhaps an example is the easiest way to get at this...

i vividly remember feeling that grace had got stuck some years back and that we needed to stop the way we were doing things in order to be able to find something new. in practice this meant stopping weekly meetings and letting go of what we were doing. we had a grace service where we wrote down things that we held dear about grace on plates and smashed them and the word grace on a mirror was smashed with a sledge hammer. this was in part inspired by ikon's service at greenbelt exploring eckhart's god rid me of god prayer. what felt scary about this was that we hadn't worked out what came next and had to trust it would emerge. our sense was that until you let go of the old or in some cases kill it the new simply can't emerge. it would be so much simpler and safer and easier of course if you did know what came next but it just doesn't work like that! and often that season of limbo goes on longer than you think.

writers variously call this experience liminalty (maybe being in limbo is a more common way of expressing it - inbetween), darkness, chaos, unknowing. jenny wrote a couple of brilliant pieces of liturgy that captured this moment in grace - we are creatures of comfort and god of broken people and places . i love the line - nothing good or creative emerges from business as usual...

the most extreme version of this is death! i was reminded of this in a quote from steve jobbs that was all over the papers this last week following his own death where he says that death clears out the old to make way for the new. jesus said something similar (i am not for a moment trying to equate the two persons btw!) - unless a seed falls to the ground and dies it remains a single seed. but it needs wisdom to know what needs to die and when and i have no idea how you discern such things or persuade others.

here's a couple of quotes from arbuckle on this (yes sorry there had to be a quote)

To sit in the liminality or the darkness/chaos of not knowing without distractions or the escapism of busyness is the way to new insights. (in refounding the church)

Though experiences of this kind can be confusing, even terrifying, paradoxically contact with chaos or the world of the unpredictable or the unkown is critical if there is to be creativity in life or culture. Innovative scientists, poets, philosophers, artists, refounding people of organisations or cultures, all have one thing in common: they venture into the unkown, into the unpredictable, into chaos, in search of new meanings or new ways of doing things.(in out of chaos:refounding religious congregations)

it sounds straightforward enough but it takes courage to be in this space and to lead others into this space. the temptation is to try and curtail it and move on. it's especially difficult if you have no money  and others dependent on you asking for some strategy wondering what on earth is going on! i can think of a couple of people who are training with us as pioneers at cms who have been in this sort of a space or scenario in the last year. out of it has come and is coming wonderful new things and this phase was crucial to that. but it's a hard journey at times. as leaders it requires the ability to live with unknowing and chaos. and in the letting go of the old, communities often need space to grieve what is being lost, before they are ready to move towards the new. it was instinctive at the time but ritualising this moment in grace really powerfully helped us let go and greive and eventually embrace the new out of which so much life has come.

riffing on newness 4: refounding

see also in this series 1 the adjacent possible | 2 the new belongs elsewhere | 3 dissent

there are many ways that newness comes and if i attempted to suggest newness came in only one way it would doubtless spring up in another. so please don't read my attempts to reflect on newness into determining only one strategy or tactic. after all the wind blows where it wills but i still do have some thoughts...

refounding is what arbuckle explores in several books - the three i have read are out of chaos: refounding the congregation, refounding the church, and from chaos to mission: refounding religious life formation. this discovery of arbuckle began for me actually in thinking about developing the cms pioneer training. following on from previous posts on newness i was definitely pushing an adjacent possible, i was convinced that this new pathway belonged elsewhere, and it was dissent in the sense of a definite imaginative alternative to what already exists - i was the pathfinding dissenter and there were various authority dissenters brokering the space. but once you have that, where do you look to create something new that has depth? and really i was after what might be at the heart of formation for pioneer mission leaders beyond just my own set of instincts and experiences. i won't elaborate on that journey here but it's how i got into this question and became convinced that refounding is a very good route to explore if newness is to come.

refounding is a return to the founding story or experience of a community, connecting with the energy of it in its day, re-owning it and then creatively applying that to today's most urgent needs. i.e. it's a drive to the heart or roots of a tradition sometimes reclaiming it over and against itself in order to break open newness in the present.

prophets are often misconceived as future tellers but actually they are covenant refounding persons, calling communities back to the giving of the law for example where the blessings and judgements of following particular ways of life are spelled out. brueggemann suggests that it is impossible to speak a future that none think imaginable by simply inventing new symbols. the prophet has to move back to the deepest memory of a community and activate the symbols in their story such as the exodus or abraham's journey. jesus is supreme in this. he drives to the heart of the tradition and reframes it in the present where its essence has been lost. i think a lot of people have this instinct when they arrive in a position of leadership in a place or community - to re-tell the story and make it live. refounding is doing that and then making it creatively live in the present through faithful improvisation.

when i was younger i would not have liked this suggestion. but now i am completely convinced that wherever its possible, more depth will be attained in the new through this locatedness in the story and life of a traditioned community and looking into its heart to find the energy to carry it forward, than there will be leaving. there are of course exceptions and exceptional circumstances. but my own observations are that the track record of those who split away from a community to find newness struggle to find depth and struggle to create something that carries forward. in many instances they seem to create something equally dogmatic or controlling as the thing they left in order to be free! it's too easy to stick two fingers up to the church or to whatever else and start something new with a 'radical' tag. it's the story of protestantism but i think perhaps we protesteth too much. that is in part why i loved doug gay's book so much because it suggested a pathway to newness but through a refounding (not that he used that word - audit, retrieval, unbundling, supplementing, remixing are his five themes but they actually provide a neat summary of refounding) and a deep ecumenism.

underneath this drive to refound lies something equally if not more important which is the kind of person that can do this. what sort of person is a refounding person? i don't think this is easy to discern and there is certainly plenty of evidence that there are plenty who have the sound of a refounding person but who are bogus in the old testament. but minimally surely there must be a huge overwhelming love for christ and his body as part of it - all the grief and dissent and speech must come from this place of love and commitment. in postmodern times it is so easy to avoid this and sit on the sidelines - it's our dis-ease. and secondly can i be as simplistic to say that we should ask whether they exhibit kindness, gentleness, patience, peace, love, self control… and the other fruit of the spirit? arbuckle in each of the three books has sections where he considers this question. but it would be a rather lengthy blog post if i combine them all together though i am of a mind to do that for my own reflecting at some point. if i do i'll let you know.

do come back at me on this. as i have said at the start there are many routes to genuine newness. and i am of course in danger, as i suspect we all are, of drawing on resources that make sense of my own locatedness and chosen tactics - in my case in cms a mission community within the church of england. i hope refounding will continue to open up the new.

mission and creation care

at cms the library subscrbes to anumber of mission journals. increasingly these are online and some you have to be a member or subscribe to access but others are free. i mentioned anvil's re-invention recently online and free.

well another journbal that is online and free is the international belletin of missionary research. the latest issue which you can download is on mission and creation care possibly one of the most important edges in mission as we head into the next few decades. loads of back issues are available. if i am being penickety i found it awkward to find out what issues might be interesting as the titles of the issues online are the dates of publication rather than the themes. but having said that there is a search facility on the site. there's a wealth of mission thinking and research here - have a dig and see what you find.