jonnybaker

improvisation and trickery at the netzer co-op - worship trick 58

i absolutely love this solving of a problem that paul soupiset has posted on his blog. in a worship service at the netzer co-op in austin where bri and tim are (hi if you're reading) the challenge was how to run a presentation on a laptop from a distance when you've forgotten your remote... i'll say no more. go and see for yourself. it's definitely a worship trick of sorts though probably not one that will be repeated much elsewhere but i am adding it to the official list as it's so brilliant - no 58 is series 3. we've had a few moments like this over the years.

there's nothing like pressure to fuel creative thinking using whatever is at hand to solve a problem - tinkering i guess. imposing constraints or limits can actually help the creative process - there's less other stuff to worry about. so if you want to be creative, intentionally throw spanners in the works like this and see what happens...

grace leading an evening at london school of theology next week - open to anyone

grace have been invited to lead an evening at LST next weds. we will be using the theme wounded in all the right places from grace in sept. the evening is part of the LST worship and music evening classes and is open to anyone to come so if you're in that part of the world come along...

lent

lent is underway. i always like this season. there is always loads of great stuff out there in the blogosphere which i hope to unearth and link to over the next few weeks. an easy starting point is to follow my category lent if you want to see previous years' content.

this year grace are not running a lent blog. but if you want something to dip into or follow along the previous three years are here -

2006 | 2007 | 2008.
(because of the way blogs work they start at the end)

i thought i was being organised ordering maggi's book ahead of time for lent but have realised that it is clearly for next year's lent - doh! so i guess i am prepared for next year :-) however true to form mark pierson has produce a wonderful little booklet through lent with a reflection for each day so i will be following along with that. that arrived in the post as a gift so that seemed perfect (thanks mark) - if it's online somewhere let me know!

we have three extra grace evenings through lent exploring the theme of gift further - a film night watching sigur ros film heima and discussing giving gifts in the community, a storytelling night in the new inn and a discussion around giving . the dates are march 5, 19, april 2. leave a comment if you want more info...

and leave a comment if you have come across some great lent stuff online...

life is not measured by the number of breaths we take

life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, originally uploaded by jonnybaker.

god is rice

i read the book god is rice a few years back. i really like theology that comes from other cultures. i was reminded of it by phil simpson, who connects together what cms is up to across asia. he has been travelling and connecting with the changing face of cms in asia.

skinny to hit the european road

in my job i manage/support a team for cms of creative people. it's a lot of fun! one of the people on the team is andrew jones who with his family is about to embark on a new adventure going back to a travelling lifestyle round europe. they have got a huge van that is currently being converted - windows, furniture, cooker and all that and will be heading off round europe stopping at various places to connect with entrepreneurial mission leaders, creating networks, hanging out, doing some training, mentoring and so on. watch andrew's blog to see how the story unfolds. the sortingroom, the collective of businesses in orkney they helped start will be continuing now it's up and running.

i am excited that they are heading round europe. whilst we sometimes moan about the state of the church in the uk, actually there is so much creativity, resources, training, networks, permission and so on here. it's a very different environment to say 10 years ago. in my travels (which is only certain countries and even then a limited view) there are many other countries that simply do not have the same openness in the churches to mission and change. so i hope that the jones will be able to connect with creative people, offer encouragement and catalyse some newness as they go.

if you are in europe, they will be taking part in a few roundtables - get togethers of leaders from different countries. one of the largest will be at slot festival in poland. i am thinking i may head over to that to join them...

surprising what you can do with a cheap book on html and a bit of blog experience

i don't think i mentioned that i have taken over running the web site of the ealing photography group. so i gave it a redesign. i did most of the work round christmas time. you may not remember what it was like before but i used it as a chance to teach myself a bit about stylesheets and am simply writing the code for it rather than using any software package. i have hopefully gone for something clean and simple using some of the structure of the previous designer that also looks like it is part of london independent photography

part of my theory round it is that i want to try and shift some of the work over to members of the group - so rather than me creating galleries i have suggested people create sets in flickr or create a slideshow using 280slides - see my idiot's guide . then i can simply paste the code for their gallery into their members page. it seems to work pretty well though pages can take a while to load up the slidesets. for flickr sets i am using pictobrowser - see my member's page for an example. and for 280slides it gives you the code - see brig's page for an example

the only irritating thing is that when i created a group in flickr for the recent garcin challenge it turns out that only photos from people with a pro account show up in the slideshow so i have had to create a slideshow after all.

i have also set up a blog for anyone in the group to use with tumblr - tumblr seems a very straightforward interface. and i have then found a widget to pull the feeds into the blog page. widgets are ugly but my coding skills are such that i wasn't sure how else to do that and i have tried to make the widget as clean as i could. if anyone knows another way let me know...

web design and coding is not my area of expertise but it's surprising what you can do with a cheap book on html and a bit of blog experience. now is the challenge of encouraging participation in the group many of whom probably preferred it when someone else did everything!

the velvet reformation

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

the velvet reformation

lent book

i have ordered maggi's book giving it up for lent...

worship trick 57 - new year labyrinth

looking back through the blog i realise i never added anything about the new year labyrinth at grace.i was reminded of it because we had a group of students visiting from calvin college who recorded a short movie and sent me a link. anyway i thought i'd add it as a worship trick as it seemed to work well, was very low tech, and may be useful for other people...

it's all written up in the grace archive page. we used the st paul's labyrinth cloth which has inbuilt stations and the themes were:

stillness
reflect
thanks
sorrow
holy space
gift
hope
fear
presence

the backdrop on the screens playing silently (st mary's where we meet has now got three projector screens) was the movie by st etienne finisterre which is a beautiful hour of footage of a day in london.

you owe me?

lis e-mailed me about gift following the last post and included this poem which i thought was brilliant...

Even after all this time
the sun never says
to the earth,
"you owe me."
Look what happens
to a love like that,
it lights up the whole
sky.
 
- Hafiz (early 1300s, Persian, I think)

have this gift because...

have this gift because..., originally uploaded by jonnybaker.

this was part of last night's grace exploring the theme of gift. the next grace is also on the theme and we have film, storytelling and discussion evenings through lent on it as well. the service outline is (probably with a few bits to be added) here. but it sort of went like this...

the space looked great with a huge pile of gifts, an enormous cat's cradle type installation with gifts tangled in it and a table at the far end. babette's feast was silently playing on the screen, a parable for the night.

sit and talk about gifts and experiences good and bad. then take a label and write on it what the real meaning was behind a gift and tie it to the pile of gifts. this was really good - some really good meanings and some scary ones!

then on to the installation exploring the idea of gifts with ties that bind positively or negatively. find a gift and trace it to an envelope which is the tie/string attached! mine was this message above...

give your gift to someone else without the tie...

then cut the strings down (adam scissorhands?)

gather round the table and reflect on how god gives and how we respond. the response was to pour rice until overflowing into peoples hands and then they could leave some grains as a token of relationship with god. relationship not obligation... i was doing this bit and we read psalm 50 that i then rewrote/improvised for grace as follows:

Grace listen...
I have no complaint about your sacrifices -
you certainly put the creative effort in to your worship.
But I do not need your art installations, stations, movie loops, ambient tunes, apple macs, ipods
gas masks, photography, font selection, stories, good taste, creative liturgies and new technologies.
All the silicon in the valley is mine
I know all the art in the whole world
The creation is my gallery
I made imagination!
Make thankfulness your sacrifice to God
out of friendship and not obligation
That's what it's about...

then finally a blessing having reflected on gifts we have that are for giving on behalf of the community before the usual cafe which had an abundance of danes, wine and cakes!

the photos i took are in a slideset gift and there will be more no doubt in the gracelondon flickr pool.

the inspiration for the service was lewis hyde's book the gift and for me, sigur ros' film heima which we will be watching in lent.

i have made this whole thing a worship trick - it was all so good! no 56 in series 3...

parable of the sea - mission and the church

andi mac rocks! he is one of proost's unusual suspects - new talent that we publish. he contacted us out of the blue last year and we published clouds - a quirky movie. last year at the greenbelt unusual suspects session he played vampire love - which we adored - even more quirky! that now has an electro french pop sounding soundtrack and we decided to hold it back for valentine's day so it's just come out this month. he was also one of the artists we featured as part of nine with another brilliant piece. andi is now carving out a niche as a designer, animator, illustrator... and he sent me a link to a piece he has done for SAMS ireland called the parable of the sea. it is stunning - simple, sad, powerful.

go and watch it on his site and there is a link to paypal to buy it for three pounds. also if you haven't watched any of the three movies andi has released on proost they are all on his site in the animations section...

next up at NET...

next up at NET, the netowrk of entrepreneurial talent is eddie stride of city gateway and andy smith of regenerate . as ever it's the 4th monday of the month - 23 feb 6:30pm in a bar on a ship on the thames. if you've not been it's very informal and relaxed...

getting angry about doing the dishes, laundry and cleaning!

ok not my usual blogging subject but this article on chores and how they get shared out or not in relationships between men and women threw up no surprises. every survey i've ever seen always shows up that men do not pull their weight or take responsibility in household chores (cooking, laundry, cleaning, picking kids up etc...) and that's in relationships where both partners work - of course there are plenty of exceptions. why? i have no idea! though this article describes a common pattern of not taking responsibility for the man but of festering anger and not communicating about it on the side of the woman doing the bulk of the chores. i see this played out quite often... there are three pages of comments on the article already which are also worth a read.

i'm not even going to to attempt to hang my dirty washing out in public - you can ask jen about that! but read the article and talk about it with your partner. if you are not in a relationship phew - you can avoid all this - but you just have to do everything!

so spotify isn't going to have it quite so easy...

spotify (if you don't know what i am talking about sign up!) is putting noses out of joint or so it seems...

pride

pride, originally uploaded by jonnybaker.

i have added a bundle of colour photos to my dungeness set

canadian edges

i have been to canada a few times now doing some training and connecting with a few people involved in mission and reflecting on how church can emerge in the new postmodern environment (or whatever we call it now) there. and i have followed with interest some of the creative edges there to see what is growing and emerging. jordon cooper was one the first fellow bloggers i discovered when i started blogging back in the day when only a few of us were and i think that connected me in with canada. plus i have several friends there...

in some ways it feels a bit more like the uk than the usa does as a mission context partly because less people go to church. anyway it was with interest i watched the dvd one size fits all and it was great to hear/watch stories in a variety of places in canada where newness is emerging. and a couple were things started by people i had met before now. it's amazing to see the parallels in terms of challenges and change in different parts of the world. these things are small and fragile but that's true everywhere i think.

jenny's cambodia photos

jenny's cambodia photos

give

this saturday is the first of a series of two grace services exploring the theme of gift - give and receive. inspired in part by lewis hyde's book the gift and kester's reflections on that book in the complex christ - see previous reflections from me - the gift | artists are poor | wise blindness | blind gratitiude . looking forward to it...