gather is next week and there is now a full programme available to see here. ticket sales end monday night. it looks incredible and it's been put together by volunteers co-ordinating various venues and spaces. hope to see you there - i am so looking forward to it. it's not very often you get involved in planning something that is so new that you can't quite visualise what it is going to be like!
about a year ago i backed a kickstarter. it took a while due to various lockdown challenges but finally the aerial a1 tent from opeongo.camp arrived. it suspends between two trees and whilst it looks hammock like it has two straps which mean it is very stable by comparison. it happened to be the coldest night for a long time so was glad i had got the underquilt with it! it's perfect for prospect wood as we have so many straight conifers and not a lot of flat floor space that is bramble free.
The Sunday after Easter is known as Low Sunday. Maybe it’s the lull after Easter? This is the season of the stories of resurrection, but Low Sunday is often associated with Thomas and his doubt. He is a reassuring disciple. We don’t meet on Sunday but we thought we’d go with the fLOW anyway.
So do come along to Grace this Saturday to reflect on stories of doubt and absence, and stories of hope and presence. We will be on Zoom - do get in touch if you would like the link.
now to finish it off and get the book printed...
happy easter!
i blogged about gather, a virtual festival-in-a-day celebrating and exploring pioneering mission practice. it can be hard to imagine what exactly that looks like. so if you are wondering here is an update which has been added to the booking page but it should help you imagine what to expect. we are really looking forward to it. the image above is one of the venue entrances.
Spaces and Venues
- Goodmakers - a venue hosted by Cathers from Goodmakers Society exploring all things pioneering related to making good in the world. If you have an idea and want to know how to work with it to make it real, this is the venue for you.
- Toolshed - hosted by Richard Passmore and Gavin Mart this workshop space will showcase and explore tools that help with pioneer practice on the ground. A tool helps you do something better, more easily or quickly than you could without it.
- Story - hosted by Sarah Clarke and Luke Larner. A storytelling tent to hear and share stories of pioneer practice.
- Starfish networking space - hosted by Andrea Campanale with the starfish team. Meet others that share your passion for pioneering around a related theme. Just drop in.
- Panels - hosted by Jonny Baker, Shannon Hopkins and Harvey Kwiyani. Four panels creating lively conversation on themes related to pioneer practice.
- Mind The Gap - hosted by Tina Hodgett and Paul Bradbury. A venue for reimagining church and missional community.
- Breathe Prayer Space - a space to get away and slow down and pray. It includes the wonderful St Paul’s millennium labyrinth respun by Grace for gather.town. Close by will be some one to one spiritual direction sessions.
- Wild Wood - hosted by Johnny Sertin, Rachel Summers and Gillian Traverse. There is an outdoor woodland ‘The Glade’ and the funky ‘Treehouse’ where you can dive into pioneer practice, biospirituality and the outdoors. Rewild your soul!
- Research lounge - hosted by Cathy Ross and James Butler. Grab a sofa and hear from students and researchers exploring the contours of pioneer practice.
- The Oratory - a programme of talks and presentations to inspire and reflect on pioneer practice.
As if that wasn’t enough there are some social spaces to explore. As well as the main site which is a greenspace, there is a beach, a garden, and the moon where you can go and hang out.
Programme
We are organising the programme by inviting hosts to create programmes in the ten spaces above. There will be slots running for about 45 minutes at 11, 12, 2, and 3.
Worship
At the start and end of the day there will be a choice of 4 worship slots ranging from maranatha yoga to creative liturgy.
Evening entertainment
After a break where you get away from screen or hang out with friends in gather.town there is an evening programme as follows:
- Quiz designed and led by Harry Baker.
- Performance cafe - a mix of music, spoken word and artistry compered and curated by Katy Partridge and Tim Watson.
- Cocktail lounge with tunes from DJ Steve Leach.
- Campfire in the Wild Wood to hang out and share songs and stories.
We will add details of the programme ahead of time and send to everyone who has booked so you can plan ahead.
two hours after sending last week's kickstarter update we had reached the target. wahoo! thank you so much to all of you who have backed the project. it still has two weeks to run and we hope to reach our stretch target so we print 2000 copies so if you are still pondering do go and pre-order copies of pioneer practice. the two offers of 'inspire a friend' and 'network catalyst' are deals that won't be available after the kickstarter.
the project has steamed ahead since the last update. jon has done an incredible amount of design work. having now laid out and designed the pages with stories and articles he is now working back through and begun to add photographs. have a read of the kickstarter update if you want to see a few more spreads.
i thought this is a good point to tell you about GETsidetracked. the idea ironically came out of a series i was doing on creativity in january. one of the themes explored was that often people come up with ideas when they get knocked off course or provoked in some way and find themselves sidetracked. so if you want to be creative being sidetracked is a good thing. the name GETsidetracked fell out of that process. what amuses me no end is that if you look up books around it they are titles like 'How to stay focused and not get sidetracked!' and to be honest at work i am quite often in meetings about focus.
lo and behold a new idea was born and we have set up a new partnership between jon birch, myself and joel baker. GETsidetracked will be a platform on which we can publish any projects we have that sidetrack us! it is in itself a side project. pioneer practice will be our first release. so after the kickstarter you will be able to order copies or point other people to GETsidetracked.co . at the moment there is just a holding page with a fun image from joel.
i learned what i know about pioneering probably through a blend of three sources - youth ministry, cross cultural mission and ideas on imagination and creativity. so it's been great recently to do some things that are youth ministry directed. today the youthscape podcast went live on which i have a conversation with martin saunders about innovation, pioneering, youth ministry and lockdown. available in usual channels...
and next week i am taking part in renew normal which looks set to be a really creative youth workers gathering online. the idea with renew normal is exploring the question of where youth ministry goes next post lockdown. looking forward to it.
one week in and the pioneer practice kickstarter is nearly there. it's going to happen! thank you to everyone who has backed it, pre-ordered, and cheered us on. watching the kickstarter total ticking over turns out to be a new kind of addiction.
it's also been a really fun week for us as jon has got cracking with the design. every day he has done several spreads and sent them over to me to look through and edit and send back and day by day it's coming to life. we are loving it so far! to give you a flavour of what to expect here's a few spreads
the rewards of inspire a friend and network catalyst have proved popular and rightly so because they are a good deal that won't be available after the kickstarter. if you are one of the no doubt hundreds who thought to themselves 'o yes i like the sound of that must back it' but hasn't yet then go for it - now is the time.
a quiet reflective grace this saturday. it will be on zoom but no breakout groups or anything for those not so keen on that! get in touch if you want to join so we can send you the zoom link.
i have been working on pioneer practice for a year and am self publishing it. i have set up a kickstarter which runs until easter to raise the money through pre-sales and other rewards for the cost of printing and design. please have a look and i'd love you to back it. it's a full colour book meets magazine - one of those chunky coffee table ones. and i am working with friend jon birch who is doing the design. thank you in advance!
we are hosting an online festival for pioneers in gather.town. it's on april 21 and tickets are £9 for students or £19
gather.town is an online environment in which you have an avatar and can wander round and go into venues and chat with people in close proximity. it’s like zoom meets minecraft or something! it’s fun and dynamic. we have designed a whole festival site which includes a beach, treehouse, wild wood, even the moon and around a dozen venues in which a varied programme of story telling, talks, conversations, workshops and panels will take place. there are loads of spaces you can hang out and chat with people - that’s often one of the best things at gatherings like this. in the evening there will be a range of entertainment - quiz, spoken word, performance and so on.
the overarching theme is pioneer practice - and we are designing the programme so that there will be things suitable if you are interested in particular kinds of pioneer practice, tools to help you, and things if you are just starting out or if you have loads of experience. there will plenty of sharing stories and conversation.
we hope it will be a huge celebration of pioneering, an inspiring and encouraging gathering and a brilliant day.
we’d love you to come if you can. we’ve kept the price as low as possible. do spread the word. because it is online, as long as you can make the timezone work you can come from anywhere in the world. We are not recording the content so you have to come to experience it.
the time sounds long but there are loads of gaps and you can turn your camera and sound off and come and go as you please. so don’t for a moment imagine being online attending things for 12 hours solid! see the booking page for more detail on the timings.
we have also been working on a book called pioneer practice which you will hear about in early march as we are running a kickstarter for that. that is a full colour practice focused book. the first 25 people to buy a full price ticket will get a free copy of the book when it is published in april. this year at cms we are celebrating 10 years of pioneer training - we haven’t been able to meet in person for a party but this event is one of our ways of celebrating. the book and theme have been picked and written to share practical wisdom that has been gleaned over that decade.
i really hope you can make the day.
congrats to stephen radley on his unsung hero award for amateur photography 2021. he runs regular workshops and retreats on the theme of contemplative photography and mindfulness which he developed since leaving the military 5 years ago. i titled the post when two worlds collide because i am a photographer and part of what i like about photography is that it helps me notice and pay attention similar to what stephen describes - that's one world. the other world is pioneering and stephen attended the make good week we run a few years back to develop his idea for what has become soulful vision. it's exciting to see how it has developed. he has written a piece about it over on the pioneer blog.
proost is still going strong i am pleased to say hosted as it is now by space to breathe. there are two recent books that are available as free downloads or you can buy as printed books
the first is a collection of liturgies collated by heather cracknell for fresh expression called opening the doors. mark berry, ruth wells, tim watson and dorothy woods are the contributors so i am sure it is good. i gave printed copies to a couple of people at christmas.
the second is the long promised return? by tim watson, a set of poems and prayers written in the latest lockdown. i have just downloaded it.
i also noticed future present is currently in the free downloads section so if you have never got yourself a copy of that it's definitely worth getting hold of.
i am a day late but never mind! congratulations to jenny, daisy and grace on the second birthday of out of the box cards. they produce wonderful cards that are subversive and playful. jenny first brought the idea to make good in 2015, a week where we help people work on ideas to give tools to make them reality. it's such a joy to see how ideas become reality and then grow and develop.
they have a new line of cards to give to someone who becomes a grandparent. if you have not come across them do check them out and sign up for their monthly news.
i got a copy in the post of missio dei in a digital age edited by jonas kurlberg and peter phillips. i attended a conference back in april 2019 on the theme and presented a paper there which i called mission: an adventure of the (digital) imagination. all those have been worked up into this volume. at the time no one knew that reflecting on mission in relation to digital communication and connection and community would be such a big thing come 2020.
in my chapter i explore how the currency of mission is imagination in relation to culture. the wisdom gleaned from intercultural work is a great resource to reflect on in relation to digital spaces. in a section called imagination, seeing and inventiveness i look at examples from winson green and nomad podcast. my chapter is also a dialogue or riff on pete ward's liquid ecclesiology. love to know what you think if you read it!
it's the kind of book you can dive in where you like and where your interests lie - i found it a really interesting read and think my takeaway was katherine schmidt's down to earth suggestion that "most Christians should be in digital spaces as themselves witnessing to God's mercy through relationships".
that's me done for a while on books i have contributed to (apart from the one i am working on right now of course!)
following up on yesterday's post, another really wonderful book of reflections, prayers and liturgies is seeds of hope. this is produced by amos trust, a charity focused on human rights, justice and solidarity. it's in a similar space to liturgies from below organised into sections such as solidarity, protest, planet. i got it for christmas and am reading it through it daily. i am going to make that and liturgies from below the two books i use to pray and reflect during lent this year. it's also only £10. there is something really good about organisations/movements like amos trust articulating their spirituality. it began as a series of daily reflections in lockdown but it's great they have turned it into a book.
this book is simply brilliant. you have to get it! one of our students put me on to it last week and i ordered it straight away and it does not disappoint. if you want to get a feel for it and indeed access lots of the liturgies for free head to reimagingworship.com . these are liturgies in the context of empire written from its margins in places of oppression, poverty, injustice. it's a project of the council of world mission.
i write and curate liturgies and love that in grace the community i am part of that is part of what we do rather than just take worship off some centralised shelf. as i have reflected on why that is impotant i have come over the years to think of liturgy as world making. we live in a world and indeed church that is run on particular logics and imaginaries. where do we find spaces where the world gets unmade and remade? where dominant narratives get subverted and resisted? one place is the arts. but another should be the church. this collection is most definitely world making. as sudipta singh says in the preface
the book is an invitation to resist the temptation to be co-opted by the empire and to find the nerve to come out of the empire creating counter imperial alternatives
honestly this book is so refreshing. so much worship and liturgy can frankly be vacuous. this is anything but.
i submitted my communion prayer on jesus and the powers and it has been accepted on the web site which i am pretty chuffed about too. it feels an honour to contribute to such a project.
one thing that is intriguing is that there are two covers and subtitles - one is praying with people at the ends of the world and the other is prayers in defiance of empire. i love both but the one that arrived for me has the former - does that mean that the uk and usa can't cope with the second title? i have no idea...
thank you to claudio carvalhaes who is the artful curator of this collection and project.
i have a new book out imagining mission with john v taylor which i have co-authored with cathy ross
