jonnybaker

cms twenty: doing the imaginative work

this is the tenth of a series celebrating twenty years at cms

see  1. gold | 2. emerging church | 3. blah | 4. new forms | 5. worship tricks | 6. mission shaped church and fresh expressions | 7. pioneer ministry | 8. church planting | 9. red tape

in almost everything I have been involved in at cms there has been a quest that is more interested in the future than the past. the church has always adapted so it’s nothing new but although the church has the rhetoric of knowing she needs to change and perhaps wants to change it turns out she prefers business as usual really. i noted this when I reflected on what we had learned after 5 years and still think it’s true scroll down to the section 3 the church says it wants pioneers but.... i’ll come back to that question of systemic or adaptive change in another post as it interests me more and more.

i quickly found out that if you look to the usual sources through which leaders are trained they really are not set up to do this future faced thinking. the language and forms from one era or culture don’t make sense in the new. so the last twenty years have involved a lot of conversations, reading, writing, thinking, theologising ourselves - trying to find resources and ideas that will resource a different kind of imagination and practice. the blog and series of connections with others on a similar journey has been the site of much of that reflection.

i was pondering that process of reflecting and it has been a really wonderful part of the adventure. 

one area of reading and reflecting and noticing is in the direction of artists and writers and filmmakers who catch the zeitgeist and describe what’s going on in the wider cultural space. just before joining cms i did a masters degree and a large part of that was engaging with cultural studies drawing on thinkers like zygmunt bauman. there is so much to be learned there. it’s basic mission practice to read the culture. 

another is finding the treasures from the tradition that seem to help break it open afresh in the present. there is a rich vein of this but you have to dig them out. they often seem to be tucked away and half forgotten with dust on the cover. for me in particular this has included an engagement with cms own history, stories and especially some of its prophets - i am thinking of the likes of john taylor and max warren as well as stories of cross cultural mission and contextual, local and intercultural theologies from round the world. i have definitely found some of the gold I was seeking which was a fund for my own imagination. i have returned again and again to the notion that mission is ‘an adventure of the imagination’ which is how taylor describes it in the primal vision.

then perhaps the most surprising has been to find ourselves doing our own publishing in the area of pioneering, mission, theology, practice, church, spirituality and so on. we have not been the only ones of course - it’s been wonderful to exchange learning with those in fresh expressions for example who also got on a roll with publishing books reflecting and theologising about what was happening as well as those in other parts of the world exploring similar questions. i remember a lot of energy when we toured the country with mike frost and al hirsch to talk about the shaping of things to come for example. we have hosted annual conversations days since november 2013 reflecting on what we are learning about pioneering mission - i found the flyer above for that first one. that has led to publishing, editing or contributing to quite a lot of books. i have listed my contributions here - books like the pioneer gift, pioneering spirituality, future present, curating worship, imagining mission, mission on the road to emmaus, missonal conversations, pioneer practice, go between god (the foreword) as well as running proost for several years to self publish artistic expressions and liturgies from the emerging church including a couple of pocket liturgy books - grace pocket liturgies and making communion. proost doesn't seem to be in action any more so have put these two books here as free downloads - help yourself.

we also picked up the editing of anvil journal on the way, a journal in theology and mission which is themed each issue with two or three editions in each volume. anvil is free online. the team I am part of have been incredible in this regard and i owe a debt of thanks in particular to cathy ross whose enthusiasm for publishing has pulled the rest of us forward and enabled us to grow in confidence and think we might dare to write. i have loved that some of our students have published for the first time through the books we have edited. paul bradbury published an amazing couple of books - stepping into grace and home by another route, tina hodgett and paul created the pioneer spectrum which has taken on a life of its own. it’s a delight to have harvey kwiyani and joseph ola most recently join the team who are publishing in the space of mission, diaspora, intercultural theology, african christianity and decolonisation. i have no doubt there will be more to come.

if people ask me what I do ‘writer 'would never be a label on my list but looking back i do seem to have done my fair share! but for me I think it’s more about the necessity of doing the imaginative work and offering that into the wider conversation. in movements I suspect it is essential.

the book of veles and the lucky find

i couldn’t believe my luck when we stumbled upon an exhibition of the book of veles in the hague at the beeld and geluid museum. it is an absolutely wonderful project by jonas bendiksen who is a magnum photographer and was the inspirational spark for our trickster exhibition.

veles is a town in macedonia and caught his attention because it was a hub for fake news. there are some many layers that play with fake news in the project. veles is the name of a shapeshifting god. there was an old manuscript of a book of veles that did the rounds but that too proved to be fake. bendiksen taught himself to make avatars in lockdown and photographed empty landscapes in veles and added the characters tor the photos. he fed text on fake news in veles into an ai programme and the text in the book is generated by that artificial intelligence - it too is fake! when the book was published no questions were asked and nobody realised anything about it was fake. In fact it was very well received and he too part in a big festival in paris. shortly after that he wanted the truth to be uncovered so created, you guessed it, a fake account on facebook and twitter raising suspicions about his work until finally some cracks started to appear and then he published this interview with magnum where he reveals all. i have the book and love it.

the exhibition had a section on chloe, the fake twitter account holder, and it was amazing to see the responses to those tweets printed out.

and there was also a montage of the various avatars that jonas had created so you could see how they had been put into the photographs. one of my favourite tricks was the avatar of bears. the god veles shifted shape as a bear so I found that particularly amusing. Presumably readers of the book assumed that you might regularly see bears about town!

absolute genius! one of trickster’s ruses that we came up with for the exhibition was the lucky find so it felt very apt that finding the exhibition in the hague was indeed a lucky find.

z is for...

zuiderpark of course. had a fun weekend in the hague and rotterdam all because jen has been collecting the parkrun alphabet. it turns out there is no parkrun beginning with z in england. so zuiderpark beckoned!

latest anvil - sustainability and mission

a new edition of anvil journal is up online. i am happy to say you can download it for free. it is a collection of articles and reflections from our pioneer conversations day last year which explored themes around mission and sustainability with a whole set of questions around growth. it reminded me a bit of donut economics actually and how to live in a space within limits in a way that enables flourishing of life.

i have two simultaneous feelings when anvil comes out. i feel excited because i love the reflecting and thinking going on around mission today. and i am delighted because since landing it in cms this is now our 18th edition so there's quite a collection of thinking and conversation now. 

the other one is that it looks overwhelming. i think this is because in spite of technology i still don't like reading really long things on a computer. probably if i had a cool ipad i might feel differently about it. it's a lame confession i admit. so here's what i have decided to try out this time round. i am going to pick one article and read that every day or three and ponder that. i was at the day so have already heard some of the pieces. alison webster's piece on building collectives with soul felt very resonant at the time so it's good to have a chance to ponder that. there are also a ton of book reviews this time round. the new book review editor is clearly on a roll! 

cms twenty: red tape

this is the ninth of a series of short reflections celebrating twenty years at cms

see  1. gold | 2. emerging church | 3. blah | 4. new forms | 5. worship tricks | 6. mission shaped church and fresh expressions | 7. pioneer ministry | 8. church planting

navigating change in any institution has its moments. the church of england and other denominations are challenging spaces in which to advocate for and make pathways for newness. they have been around a while and there are lots of vested interests. anyone who works in change will tell you this is entirely normal in any organisation or institution. over the years i have learned a few things about navigating change though recently have found myself drawn to reading more about it again as it resurfaces so often. i am currently reading the change agent by lyle schaller which was written in the seventies but is really good (ht ash barker). but looking back over twenty years on the blog i can see various points where i got so exasperated trying to navigate change and encountering resistance or red tape.

it was actually quite amusing to come across red tape - this installation i did at a cms conference. i was given a free hand so just set it up and amazingly there were no complaints at least that i heard of as i red taped a bible, barrier taped off communion and made a dog collar out of red tape - i think i was feeling there might be some issues of control in the church!! 

once cms had been invited to design a training pathway for pioneers i remember the challenge of then tring to persuade the powers that be at the time that what we did was trustworthy and i nearly drowned in red tape.

it wasn't just the church of england - i was wound up by evangelicals attitudes here - you'll have to scroll down to the sept 24 entry but i was surprised reading how blunt i was in response to the neac gathering i attended!

the church of england's response to lockdown and sharing communion provoked me to produce the photo above, rant and write a liturgy about jesus and the powers. i don't know what you have to do to get the church's attention but no one batted an eyelid at that either! 

i am enjoying reading holy anarchy at the moment which is from a congregationalist graham adams, who like the united reformed church are non-conformist and have a tradition of dissent. it's made we wonder how i have survived this long in the church of england as i identify strongly with dissent but it is my tribe or my tradition where i think i'll continue to do my best to navigate change, red tape and no doubt continue to get exasperated on a regular basis!

sault come up with five gospel albums free - godislove

sault are a wonderful band who produced some great funky political grooves over the last few years. they seemed to catch the moment post george floyd's murder - i found them a great comfort in lockdown. they are a bit shrouded in mystery and announcements suddenly appear like today's which was on twitter and instagram as above - 5 albums released simultaneously as an offering to god!!! i have not had a chance to listen through but they sound very gospel - and they are available for free for 5 days. the password is in the message (and the message is godislove btw). there is no guarantee these albums will subsequently appear on spotify or apple music so get downloading. it is for real. i have to add this as a worship trick - remember those?! but typepad is currently so poor that i can't access them so will add to the list later. joy!

the link is here

yoho journal - kester brewin on top form revisits piracy

i have really been enjoying yoho journals - i first came across them at a friend's (ht martin) who showed me one on the subject of rotten institutions. i wanted to read that especially when i found out that the university and the church of england were the two under the spotlight! the format is that there is one extended essay and then 3 or 4 responses. that one is by linda woodhead. it's all both good fun and deadly serious at the same time. it's nicely designed and put together. you can sign up to receive them or buy individual ones from unfold media. it has a nice feel to it - untamed.

the latest one is by kester brewin and is a really brilliant reflection. his book mutiny was part of the inspiration for the journal so it seemed fitting he penned an essay. this is journal no 6.  a decade back he suggests there was an optimism about the likes of the occupy movement and creating alternative spaces to reimagine the world. but the world has changed and that idea seems somehow empty or at least it has not delivered. we need new tactics. we have encountered some rebels who act under the guise of being for the people, populist, revolutionary, against the establishment (trump, johnson et al). but actually it's a con - they are the empire in disguise and are just robbing the poor to line theirs and their friends pockets. so kester gives piracy a bit of a rethink and suggests some possibilities for how we might act now. i found it very helpful to make sense of what is going on in the world and for what might be good to consider how we act now. i'd love for some others to read it and then have a conversation about it. it is honestly one of the best things i have read in quite some time.

if you are in london that conversation is actually possible btw - nov 14  7-8:30pm at the anchor pub on bankside (near the golden hynde pirate ship of course) is a launch of the yoho journal issue with kester. i have it in the diary!

[update: the gathering is now not happening but is online which is a bit disappointing for me as i was looking forward to something in person but is probably good for others who wouldn't access it other wise so don't turn up at the anchor then]

after the apocalypse

it is always a delight to discover friends creative projects. i spotted on instagram a new collaboration between poet chris goan and illustrator si smith. chris penned a few books of poems and liturgies on proost, and si is probably best known for the wonderful 40 series of illustrations of christ's journey in the wilderness.

after the apocalypse is arranged in three sections - before, during and after written and drawn in and around the pandemic. you'll find yourself in the words and images - it's a landscape we all traversed. artists have a knack of being the kind of nerve endings of a culture or something - a sort of feeling their way on our behalf or something. the times we are living in have made it hard to feel genuinely hopeful but it does blend grief and sorrow with hope against the odds.

chis blogs at fragile tent and is someone who has really stuck with the blog format over the years and done an amazing job. you can see some illustrations from the book and poems if you scroll down - like i want to live on this post.

while i was looking to see what was there i really enjoyed chris' latest 4 posts which are explorations of theopoetics - spirituality through artful making. this is a link to the fourth - click on that and scroll down. well worth a read...

the book is available from seatree argyll - that's also the site for chris and michaela goan's creative projects working in pottery, words, wood. they both left jobs a few years back now to pursue a simpler life where they could explore their passions and creative interests and make a life from that. it seems to be going pretty well! 

cms twenty: church planting

this is the eighth of a series of short reflections celebrating twenty years at cms

see  1. gold | 2. emerging church | 3. blah | 4. new forms | 5. worship tricks | 6. mission shaped church and fresh expressions | 7. pioneer ministry

in 2003 a year long course called re:source began (the irony of the name!). it was one year course where six different contexts were visited over weekends to learn from what was happening on the ground. it was a partnership between a few organisations - from memory they were cms, anglican church planting initiatives, revs, oasis, soul survivor. i really loved it - we still draw on that model now visiting contexts over a weekend to learn from them. but here's the thing - the strapline on the logo was church plant training. it changed over time and became creating church in the emerging culture and various other iterations.

i think the spirit of it is captured in this quote off an early flyer:

i found this pretty interesting looking back. if i may indulge a little more in looking back the question about church planting actually began for me in conversations about young people before that. it was deemed to be highly controversial at the time but in places it was clear that they were never going to join the existing church so growing a new one out of that seemed the best option. this was back in the 90s. i remember discussions about it when we ran a nightclub for young people in bath and wondered what we would do. fast forward a bit and by the late nineties i was in london and had got involved in grace which was a new congregation of an anglican church that began as part of what then was termed alternative worship. i wasn't involved in starting it. but the point i want to connect to is that i was contacted by a couple bob and mary hopkins who set up anglican church planting initiatives in 1996 and they started an annual anglican church planting conference and wanted a range of stories or models of what was happening to be shared. i went along to talk about grace at that church planting conference. i don't know what year that was. and in the earlier post on emerging church that was in response to new churches beginning that were very much at home in the emerging culture

fast forward to mission shaped church being published in 2004 and the subtitle of that is guess what...

church planting and fresh expressions of church in a changing context

in that a range of examples are listed and they would have been very similar top the range of things at the conference - youth church, new congregation, messy church, alternative worship, new monasticisim, cafe church, cell church, planting into a new building and so forth. according to the day of small things research stats that is still the best movement the church of england has had in briitain for genuinely starting communities where those who didn't realise church could be for them find out it can be. why the church of england has not continued to invest in it baffles me whilst at the same time it has a stated outcome of wanting lots of new worshipping communities.

what is also interesting to look back on is that bob and mary used to teach at re:source on a range of models and dynamics and how that affected what you did - what was the context, what size of team, the relationship with the culture and so on - did you start with church culture and worship or the local culture... it was a pretty broad and expansive range of things (their web site still has a models and types section) and contextual approaches were seen to be good from the get go. in fact overall the drive for all this was a sense that western culture needed an approach informed by the best of cross cultural mission that grew indigenous or contextual expressions of church. cms were so on board with this that we contributed to funding bob and mary and they were part of the same team as me for several years - i must catch up with them!

fast forward again to the last decade of training pioneers - they start many things in mission including new communities of disciples. some describe that as church planting, others use different language but that is a big part of what they do. in the recently published book of stories of lay church planting  from myriad they have pretty much all been done by pioneers! 

looking back over my time in cms i have been and still am very much engaged with church plating in the emerging culture. there is so much more i could say about this and why the language has become contested or lots of people have abandoned it. but i think it probably needs recovering and/or reclaiming or at least we need a generous and wide range of approaches going forward much like that mapped by acpi and fresh expressions as above - did i hear someone say mixed ecology?!

interested in church planting? then at cms we have been doing that the last twenty years or so in this context (and by the way probably helped plant two thirds of the anglican communion back in the day which is also now a complex space too). 

greenbelt film

big 5 0 celebrations for greenbelt next year. what a gift greenbelt is! here's a new greenbelt film

scooter caffe is no more

i was genuinely shocked today when i discovered the scooter caffe was shut. over the last twenty years i have had countless meetings with people there. i had a book launch of curating worship there. we held a resource weekend gathering in the basement in 2010. but mainly it was meeting people to dream and plot the revolution. it felt like it was the london base of the underground resistance aka emerging church. i have been trying not to read too much into it being shut by the powers that be for not meeting regulations!

cms twenty: pioneer ministry

this is the seventh of a series of short reflections celebrating twenty years at cms

see  1. gold | 2. emerging church | 3. blah | 4. new forms | 5. worship tricks | 6. mission shaped church and fresh expressions 

one of the recommendations in mission shaped church was that the church recognise that the kind of person starting these fresh expressions of church had a bit of a different skill set, way of looking and being in the world, a different gift. the report used two descriptions for this - pioneer ministry and missional entrepreneurship. quite quickly the church of england created a new designation for ministry whereby you could be recognised and ordained as a pioneer. this was pretty encouraging and surprising. at this point at cms we were already involved with others in some training called resource - i still have very fond memories of that. the model was that over a series of weekends we would visit somewhere creative mission was taking place and learn from it tied in with a series of teaching themes. we folded that into what we went on to develop.

[our first prospectus which we produced in 2011 - we didn't have one before we started!]

when pioneer ministry was recognised as a thing, theological colleges were invited to design training. i don't quite know what they designed but the imagination was not quite what it could have been. i remember being in a few meetings where it was discussed and being labelled 'priest plus' - in other words you learned all the regular stuff and then did a slightly different placement or an extra thing on a wednesday afternoon or something. 

one of the other recommendations in the report mission shaped church was that training for pioneers should include or be done through the lens of cross cultural mission (see quote to right). and after a couple of years the then head of ministry approached cms to ask if we could design some training because in his view what was being done was frustrating pioneers and wasn't really fit for purpose, and i think he thought that we would have experience on the cross cultural imagination and practice - which was true. essentially cms then asked me if i would work out how we would do that, design it and find a college to work with on it or a way we could do it. to cut a long story short i did and that request took over my life for the next decade really. of course in classic church of england fashion although they asked us, it was quite quickly obvious that was not approved of by various other people and it took a further three years to actually get permission to train ordinands. but we got dreaming, drew up a roadmap of what we wanted to do in december 2009 and i was tasked with getting the first cohort in sept 2010. somehow we pulled that out of the bag - looking back i have no idea how. we started with training independent students, lay training if you like and then two years later added in training ordinands alongside them. our first prospectus cover is above and is a road going into the fog - that felt pretty apt.

i realised i was at a change point and wrote a blog post and accompanying newsletter here reflecting on changes over the first 8 years at cms and then a post looking forward to the next 8 or whatever it was to become. that was year before we actually launched and i enjoyed reading this in it:

i can promise that the training we do will be totally geared to pioneering in mission with creativity and imagination and will be shaped with and by pioneers rather than pioneering as an add on to existing training for being a parish priest

i think we delivered on that promise! since then we have gradually added in various things so that now at cms we train at undergraduate, post graduate and doctoral research level with around 90 students at anyone time and also unaccredited training round the country (more on that later). yes we do train ordinands but the vast majority are independent students paying their own way. in many ways the whole emerging church movement has largely been a lay led movement. many of those who did get ordained did so having already pioneered so that they could share communion with the community they had helped start.

i'll say a bit more about this pioneer gift and about training in others posts.

alice in wonderland eucharist - grace this saturday

the next grace will be led by tina hodgett and kathryn marson. they have crafted a rather delightful and playful liturgy fusing holy communion and alice In wonderland. it was created for the holy rumpus in the south west of england for a gathering of pioneers. intrigued? come along and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. it will be relaxed, gathered around the table followed by a cafe. everyone is welcome. and of course do feel free to dress accordingly if you would like to!

full circle

 

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seven and a half years ago i did a bread making course - ever since then i have made sourdough bread from the same starter. when we did the course we were invited to name our starter and say why. i came up with bbb which stood for baby baker bump as kat was expecting at the time. i knew i had to keep it alive - i guess that's the psychology of naming it! i also had the thought that wouldn't it be great if i could keep the starter going long enough to make bread with bbb at some stage years down the line. it felt a very remote prospect. i don't think i voiced that thought out loud since.

well last week i got a message saying that bbb (who is now known by the name flo) had a school project and wanted to make bread for it - could she do that with me?! and so it came full circle and made this grandad very happy. also got to love the f in the loaf :)

mistbow

it's a thing apparently - mistbow was the name i gave it - a rainbow but white, created by morning sunlight and mist. on the pioneer practice tour in cornwall we visited looe and the mist drew me out early. i got back and googled mistbow and that is what i saw! there is an album of that morning light at looe here.

trickster photos and interventions

the trickster exhibtion was a lot of fun! here are a set of photos - click on the photo above to scroll through. i'll try and come back and fill this out a bit more by way of explanation on the trickster exhibtion page. but a quick summary is that the exhibtion consisted of

• a series of photos which were responses to ruses of trickster randomly drawn
• some installations to view or interact with
• some interventions which you may or may not have noticed if you came to the exhibition as they were out and about 

the photos include the set up, the coyote sticker trail, installations, opening night, and interventions. the thing i took least photos of was the phots in the exhibition but you can see them and the ruses on the exhibition page

this was my photo in the exhibition. the ruse i was randomly given was lifts the old shame thresholds and places them in new doorways and this was my commentary on my thought process:

The more I thought about this ruse the more I realised how many thresholds there are that many people can cross no problem. But for others they are shame inducing. That can be as simple as a bank, a shop, a church, a neighbourhood. Our culture is very shaming and has all sorts of ways of keeping people in their place but keeps it subtle and hidden. So I wanted to see what it looked like to make that visible. I initially envisaged photographing the ‘go away’ doormat in multiple doorways. The Home Office, or Dover passport control sprang to mind. But in the end I settled on a household doorway for a couple of reasons. It’s somehow more evocative to be no doorway in particular. And that also served to hold a mirror up to me to wonder how and where I unwittingly create shame thresholds.

cms twenty: mission shaped church and fresh expressions

this is the sixth of a series of short reflections celebrating twenty years at cms

see also  1. gold | 2. emerging church | 3. blah | 4. new forms | 5. worship tricks 

what age do you become mature? we certainly celebrated our two lads birthdays at 18 in crazy style as that felt a moment of transition into adulthood. i had an email this week inviting me to something to celebrate fresh expressions of church becoming eighteen - wow! where did that time go?

looking back on my time at cms it was couple of years in that mission shaped church was published. here is my blog post when it landed on my doormat. this was a church of england and methodist report published in 2004 which was in response to the wave of new things bubbling up round the edges of the church. two members of cms were on the group that produced the report - chris neal and gill poole and i am proud that cms were involved in what was a seminal report really. it is very rare that a church report becomes a best seller but it caught the moment and maybe even a wave of the spirit! it said it was catching up with what was already happening through the likes of the emerging church. it coined a new term - fresh expressions of church - drawing on the declaration of assent where the church says it will proclaim the gospel afresh in every generation. there had been an earlier report called breaking new ground so this was a build on that actually. graham cray chaired it and there was a foreword by rowan williams in which he wisely described a mixed economy of church to suggest that the new and the old were all part of the church's household and he came up with a pretty radical definition of church which has not been bettered since in my view. you can dig it out to find the content but it was generous in what was welcomed into the mix. and it was brave - there would be a lot of work to do in the church of england around culture change if this was to have legs.

the report had a series of recommendations and the then archbishop rowan williams gathered together some people who got behind resourcing it as i think he realised he probably needed to bypass the central funding structures to act quickly. he was an absolute legend, an authority dissenter who was loved to bits by the movement that followed. it's so fun to read the blog post of that evening at lambeth palace which I was at telling the story of grace as an example of a fresh expression and the blog entry is titled bring on the angliCAN church . a fresh expressions team was appointed and they got to work speaking, develioping training, sharing stories and setting to work on policy such as creating a pathway for ordination , changing the regulations around church planting across parish boundaries and so on. the tenth anglican church planting conference that june 2004 sold out. cms were one of the sponsors. but reading my blog post on it you get a sense of the energy that was around. along with notes i took on rowan williams wisdom. it's also weird how small photos were then on blog posts - but i loved this one of steve collins, ben edson and adrian riley . other denominations joined in (urc, baptist, salvation army) and it was picked up internationally. for example i visited korea where it was translated and inspired new expressions. the relationship with emerging church was interesting - if you know the diffusion of innovation curve emerging church was in the early adopters but fresh expressions was more working with the early majority - at least that is my sense of it and stephen croft and i had a discussion at greenbelt one year to that effect i remember. and it really did diffuse to a significant degree over 18 years thus far.

in july 2019 it was 15 years on from the mission shaped church report and at general synod it was reported that this had been the single most effective thing the church had done to reach genuinely new people (at least for a long time). it was also futuring the church in its forms. a motion was adopted to encourage every parish to consider a contextual expression of church (contextual means that it is creatively related to the culture of the place it is in). others would know better than me how theior denoiminations hgave responded.

the diagram above i sketched at one of the later fresh expressions gatherings and jotted down what graham cray reflected on as the facets of its charism.

the weird thing is that it is at a funny moment right now. covid has been difficult for lots of things which is one factor. another i think was a change of archbishop so the funding changed perhaps rightly to things he was passionate about. but several people used language of it being embedded as if to say we've done that - which i think was pretty naive looking back. my own take is that the church has always needed a combination of its structural way of organising and a movement way of organising (the jargon for this is modal and sodal). if you just leave something like fresh expressions to the structural it will likely slide back into more internal agendas. you need those groups with particular focus and energey to help and continue to call the church to its edges. i also think that the nature of fresh expressions was broad church and ecumenical and it worked hard at that with book series in the sacramental tradition as well as the low church end. the more recent developments are located in a much narrower stream or at least that is how they are perceived. that inevitably means some people get on board but others simply won't. the church of england also stopped its central funding contribution to fresh expressions. it is now an independent charity. it's still doing good things but much smaller. i actually feel we're at a bit of a critical juncture to see what the way forward will be for the mission of the church in this regard. i am not saying we should turn the clock back, but in retrospect i think the church has not made the most of the huge opportunity that it was on the cusp of in july 2019 because it thought this was embedded enough. 

the good news is that all sorts of newness has bubbled up and multiplied. the church is most definitely looser round the edges. and cms and church army and other groups who were there before fresh expressions are still here and passionate about and involved in encouraging the mission of the church. we (cms) always seem to be perceived at the more radical end of things (which i don't mind) but actually we have been engaged front and centre in lots of ways. it has honestly been an absolute privilege to have been able to be part of that era and movement and i think cms was great in encouraging and helping resource it. we funded a couple of people on the fresh expressions team (bob and mary hopkins) for a good season as well as carving a furrow in the pioneer end of things (more about that later). fresh expressions is still going in a smaller format and we will carry on! i am so grateful to have been part of cms that has kept investing, kept at the table, kept drawing on lessons learned about contextual mission elsewhere, and shared stories internationally to help fuel this adventure of the imagination. ht to everyone involved. it has been a huge joint endeavour. 

cornwall and exeter pioneer practice next week!

i am excited to be back on the road next week again from 20-22 september. we are headed to falmouth, looe and exeter for the final leg of tbe pioneer practice tour. if you are down that way do come along, tell others. the details of registering are here - just click under the relevant location where it says ticket link.

i looked up photos of cornwall and it made me realise i have not been there for quite a long time so a visit is clearly due. here is an old one from the tate at st ives

trickster exhibtion open

it's been a hectic week! but it has been such fun to set up and see the trickster remakes this world exhibition as part of BEAT, ealing's local art trail. i'll add more photos and say a lot more about it in due course but if you are in ealing do visit - opening times are here.

it's not just photography - there are some installations and interventions too. joel loaned us his amazing flipdot board too which has various ruses scrolling across  it which looks amazing.

and thanks to jon birch for his coyote illustration which is popping up all over the place!

one year unlocked

unlocked exhibition at ealing police station - photo by edmond terakopian

i realised today that the exhibtion unlocked has been up now on the oiutside of ealing police station for a whole year. initially it would have been two weeks that got extended until christmas 2021 but they have let it run. it's largely because the building is due to be sold  and then likely to be demolished so we are hoping we don't have to take it down before that point.