jonnybaker

pastor in the park

at last week's open day matt who is a second year student on the cms pioneer training shared his journey/story which i knew but still found very movng. when he started with us he had just moved to a new place. 18 months on and all sorts of innovation is happening and a deanery project is up and running to support pioneering mission. it's been quite brilliant to watch. one of the surprising places matt has exlored and sensed god spaking to him about developing things is the local park. fresh expressions have written up some of the story here. later in march te project will be officially launched and matt will be the nation's first park pastor (we think!).

if you are in austin...

i am heading over to austin for a week duing SXSW which should be fun. i am there from march 5 to 11. bob carlton is organising the trip and what's happening. it includes 

march 6 dreamers who do - a gathering with  emerging church type people 

march 8 mobile.faith - an event exploring how faith and practice can be enlivened with mobile technologies

march 10 - pause@sxsw practices for digital sabbath 

i was also very pleased to see radiohead on the schedule when it came through!!!

harry hairy head

jen's latest knitted odd bod - harry hairy head!

pioneer course open day today

looking forward to the open day today for the cms pioneer mission leadership training ...

if you can't make today we have another on april 26 and of course you can contact me any time about it. 

new proost web site launched! and gearing up for lent

i'm very excited because we have a new web site which has gone live today! proost is a site full of creative content - movies, books of liturgies, music, and worship experiences. 

we re-invented and re-launched proost in August 2007. having initially been a label to release our own music, we wanted to shift to being a platform for other creative artists who fuel faith in imaginative ways. many of those artists are part of alternative worship communities or emerging churches who seem to produce beautiful art for worship that often only gets seen or heard by a few lucky people in that community. so we hoped to unearth that treasure for a wider audience. we wanted to diversify content beyond music to include liturgies and movies and anything else that caught our imagination. and we also re-launched to get with the [download] times making all our content or as much as possible downloadable.

but 4 years on and it's amazing how things change - time for a refresh. so we hope you like the new look and feel of the site. have a browse around, try it out, let us know what you like or if you think anything needs a rethink. if you find anything that doesn't work or look right let us know that too as there will doubtless be a few teething issues...

this time the site is in house designed by blueprint - the company of aad, one of the proost partners, which we're excited about. big thanks to tony especially!

lent begins tomorrow - a season i love where traditionally the church prepares for easter by focusing on what it means to be a disciple of christ. we have vastly improved the categories of content so for example you can now search through content for seasons of the year such as lent to find gems such as last year's cave movie or the seemingly timeless 40 by si smith (yes you can now also view an artist's page to see all of their content).

we have two new books this month that are both ideal for lent.

polartoids is a beautiful mix of poetry and photography. the minute we saw it we loved it. the poems are grouped under four themes - humour, crying, asking and waiting. pete christensen is new to proost - a kiwi living in thailand where he offers retreats and spiritual direction to christian workers throughout asia. poetry offers him a way of exploring faith and life without restrictive conventions. i am definitely adding this to my material to reflect on through lent. 

if you want something more immediate beat tweets by tim watson is a collection full of 140 character (or less) prayers, petitions, liturgies, dreams, hopes, fears and statements originally tweeted by @BeatLiturgist.

if you are a subscriber or registered you'll get an e-mail today inviting you to make the switch across to the new site. subscribing still represents great value on proost as you can access all the content -which has currently grown to over 60 movies, around 40 albums and 25 books, and 3 interactive worship experiences. the user experience is much neater all round. we hope you like it. do let us know how you get on and we'd love any feedback. enjoy!

church urban fund research into emerging church in deprived communities

church urban fund have published an excellent piece of research into emerging church in deprived communities. i have blogged about it over at the pioneer web site...

bristol street art

jen and i were in bristol for a few days visiting harry who is at uni there. there is an amazing amount of street art in bristol. this set of photos was taken one afternoon during a stroll down gloucester road, cheltenham road, stokes croft and st pauls. i love this girl blowing a dandelion clock into the breeze...

word of mouth - banbury

friends in banbury involved in mosaic arts are hosting a spoken word event on march 9 with harry baker and el gruer which looks like it will be good. details here and then there's a workshop on the following day...

it's been cold!

january and february do seem to go on. but winter sun and snow provide some relief from the grey skies!

how to blaze a trail - church times feature

this week's church times has a feature on the CMS pioneer course and it gaining approval for training ordained pioneer ministers. it's a really encouraging positive piece - thank you church times!

you can download it as a pdf here or click on the  two images below to enlarge them. i remember that photo of me well - three years ago it was the first photo i took with my 5d mark ii camera when i got it out of the box holding it at arms length in the garden!

retail therapy

ReSource in kingston this weekend was wonderful (though very cold!) - i have written something about it and non judging on the pioneer blog and there are some photos here. this one was taken on the weekend in kingston market house.

old ideas - melancholy gospel?

leonard cohen's latest album old ideas is quite brilliant. he's widely recognised as a wonderful poet but what immediately grabbed me about the opening song going home following my last blog posts is the connection he makes bewteen poetry and prophecy. i may be reading too much into it, i don't know - but it's a description of his calling, his vocation to speak out. it reminds me of the call of jeremiah or ezekiel!

I love to speak with Leonard
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd
He’s a lazy bastard
Living in a suit

But he does say what I tell him
Even though it isn’t welcome
He just doesn't have the freedom
To refuse

the whole album is shot through with spiritual reflection and religious imagery with great poetry and depth. it's melancholy gospel if such a thing exists! simple but powerful songs stripped back allowing cohen's voice in all its aged maturity to weave its words of brokenness and hope. the struggle and darkness are there as ever but a world is spoken where the victims are singing and the laws of remorse are restored, the filth of the butcher is washed in the blood of the lamb. cohen asks to be shown the place where the word became a man, where the suffering began. and in a penitential hymn of invocation, come healing, he calls for the healing of the body mind and limb and spirit 

O gather up the brokenness
And bring it to me now
The fragrance of those promises
You never dared to vow

The splinters that you carry
The cross you left behind
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind

And let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb

the cracks are letting a lot of light in on this one. it's the most compelling set of songs i have heard in quite some time...

on poets and prophets

i have blogged several times about poets and prophets. they seem to have a kind of speech that comes from the same place, have a similar way of seeing and remaking the world. 

if there is one writer who has opened up this idea more than any other it has to be walter brueggemann - the three books i am thinking of in particular are prohetic imagination, hopeful imagination and finally comes the poet. whilst i read two of those 20 years ago or so i have only recently read hopeful imagination which is an equally brilliant book. anyway that's all by way of introducing a few quotes from it on the poetic speech of prophets...

The overriding reality of the prophets is that they are characteristically poets. Poets have no advice to give people. They only want people to see differently to re-vision life.

Everything depends on the poem and the poet for our worlds come from our words. Our life is fed and shaped by our metaphors.

The enemies of the poem are the managers of the status quo.

The poets want us to re-experience the present world under a different set of metaphors and they want us to entertain and alternative world not yet visible.

Poets speak porously. They use the kind of language that is not exhausted at first hearing. They leave many things open, ambiguous, still to be discerned after more reflection.

Very often people who hear poets want an explanation, which means to slot the words into categories already predetermined and controlled. Such an act however is the death of the poem... Good porous language does not permit itself to be so easily dismissed. It intends to violate and shatter the categories in which the listener operates.

These poets not only discerned the new actions of God that others did not discern but they wrought the new actions of God by the power of their imagination, their tongues, their words. New poetic imagination evoke new realities in the community.

We lose vitality in our ministry when our language of God is domesticated and our relation with God is made narrow and predictable... Predictable language is a measure of a deadened relationship in which address is reduced to slogan and cliché.

It is always a practice of prophetic poetry to break the conventions in which we habituate God.

Every centre of power fears poets because poets never fight fair... only a poem

and a couple from prophetic imagination...

The characteristic way of the prophet is that of poetry and lyric.

The poet is not changing external politics but is reclaiming imagination... We ought not underestimate the power of the poet.

parables

kate tempest on random acts performing parables...

research into mission

i am on the e-mail list for the sheffield centre research bulletin. it's always onto something interesting. but each time you have to download a pdf and then get round to reading it. for bloggers like me if i find something interesting i often want to hyperlink directly to an article and when i download a pdf to read later i often forget. so following the last bulletin which was on larger churches and mission i sent a cheeky suggestion that they put the articles online as well as in a pdf. and to my delight and surprise they have done exactly that in the space of a couple of weeks. so there is now a sheffield centre research blog which links to the separate articles as well as the bulletin as a pdf. thank you for listening!

the summer issue explored larger churches and mission. i really hope this gets read by larger churches rather than those of us in smaller missional communities or whatever. 

in his article george lings suggests that what is needed most is the nurturing of the following attitudes...

• Generosity to give away resources, believing it is more blessed to give than to receive.
• Humility to enquire what is needed in the new place, not assume we know already.
• Trust in the people, the word and the Spirit that renounces the tendency to control.
• Confidence to let diversity flourish, as churches best multiply through a bipartite process. Within it, the gospel embodied by a church engages with context, and this leads to non-identical reproduction. The next generation of churches will have our DNA but they are not us.

clare dalpra explores what maturity might look like in sending and sent churches and their independence or interdependence.

beth keith's article caught my attention the most (and yes i think i am probably in her fan club as i always seem to highlight any research she does). she discusses ethics and finds that where there is a tension between the practice of every day life and the church's stance young adults move on rather than finding a safe space to explore questions. she suggests...

The expression of faith embodied by the church was too rigid, too controlled and leader-led for many of the young adults I spoke to. Whilst this style of leadership in part contributed to the growth of the church, it left many people short changed over time. Perhaps a less controlled, multi-congregational approach which allowed for variation in belief and practice, would have enabled the members to move beyond the inflexible faith approved by the church, and in doing so create safe spaces for them to worship and explore.

there is actually a lot of discussion and interest in larger churches in the missional conversation - i think al hirsch for example is apeaking at the new wine leaders conference. there is a genuine desire to turn outwards in mission which has to be a good thing. if that's your interest you might like to dive into something like al roxburgh's introduction to the missional church which i reviewed here

the latest issue explores leadership succession . the overriding thing that comes through that is for pioneers starting something, think about succession and longevity now and not in 5 years time when you about to move on. stuart murray willimas shares some wisdom and clare dalpra makes some great suggestions which also highlight the challenge this poses within existing structures of ordained leadership

Once again, this proposed solution for leadership succession within fresh expressions seems at odds with ‘the system’ which is geared towards finding outside successive leaders for long-established churches. It’s a shame. Our young churches would certainly benefit from more realistic time frames, participation before application by potential successive outside leaders and ways of championing young churches who raise up successive leaders from within (rather than regarding them a strange anomaly). It’s a tall order with so many financial and ministerial pressures facing the wider church. No wonder we have a problem.

anyway have a browse and add this to your selection of feeds and so on....