jonnybaker

adventurous ii on saturday in hackney

adventurous ii this saturday promises to be creative challenging and inspiring with a mix of discussion, art, poetry and performance. i'll be going along - maybe see you there? it's being put on by engegi arts and amos trust with a focus on peace in palestine and israel. and it's free...!

details of the programme are on facebook page

and i am exhibiting a photo in the exhibition

acer

this tree in our garden is a wonderful tree - this was the best i could do to show off her autumn colours...

utopia

if you are in london before december 18 make sure you go and visit clay sinclair's brilliant exhibition utopia at the woolff gallery . there's actually what looks like a cracking evening on thurs 27 november that i am heading in for that is also free - it's a small gallery so not sure how everyone is going to fit in! best not advertise it - doh...

if you can't make it his catalogue is on the woolff site. 

advent on proost - we who still wait

well it's a month to christmas which means the season of advent is almost here, that time of expectation and waiting. proost has a new resource we who still wait - this is put together by four artists. chris goan, ian adams, steve broadway and si smith have brought their collective creative wisdom together to shape a wonderful book. it's a book to follow the season with  photos, a reflection and a poem each day. download it as a pdf

proost actually have loads of great resources for advent that have built up over the last few years. read this post.

of course if you subscribe which is a bargain you can log in and download anything for a year.

wow - am amazing week at missional entrepreneurship in devon

i have uploaded some photos from the missional entrepreneurship week in devon into a set here

it was as ever a fantastic week. this is the fourth one we have run and it just gets better and better. this is largely due to the amazing effort that cms pioneer shannon hopkins from matryoshka haus puts into it along with the wonderful hosting at pickwell manor. this year there were a whole load of sheets on tables and other things that have been specifically designed for the week. people come with an idea and it gets developed through the week. there is a team of people who work with those on the course through the week to help develop the ideas and the final morning it all culminates in presentations or pitches. this is our very own dragons den - this year there were fifteen offers of support from the dragons plus resources from others in the room - amazing! 

whilst there it was great to read a tweet from heather cracknell who came last year to develop her idea of a social enterprise cafe which launched last week - so some of the ideas definitely have legs!

miriam goodacre was there having won the greenbelt dragons den competition and she has kept a video diary through the week. the last one is yet to go up but you can see that on cms facebook page. 

due to demand we have added in two weeks next year so the next one is the week of 19-24 april 2015 and then there'll be another in november. there will be more places in april as a lot of the ones in november will be filled by cms pioneer students so book early if you want to get a place.

the stuff of nightmares

i was genuinely angry when shell had the audacity to put out an ad making out they are some kind of environmental saviours - what a joke! there’s another energy ad at the moment doing the same thing with an overlay of an orangutan. do these companies think we are stupid???!!! so i was delighted to get an email as a member of greenpeace inviting me to contribute to buying an ad in response which was featured in thursday’s papers doing a bit more truth telling!

hacking, edgework and the meld!

if you read my tale of two books shops post, the second of my four books that i purchased at the ICA is i admit a little more obscure than rewilding and you may think what on earth inpsired you to buy that?! it is explore everything: place hacking the city by bradley garrett. in it he describes joining urban explorers who hack the city by which i mean that they find ways into adandoned buildings, sewers, skyscrapers, disused underground stations. the study itself is an ethnography - i.e. the author joins a group to particpate and observe their culture to research and document it. this is a brilliant way of getting inisde a culture and it doesn't take long before he is utterly compelled by it. a lot of this hacking is illegal so what grabbed me about the book? here's a few things...

i love the word/metaphor of hacking. i appreciate it has a lot of negative connotations especially since the phone scandal. but the original definition of a hack is a solution to a specific computing problem. this quickly got extended to life hacks - creative solutions to problems in everyday life usually exploring the limits of what is possible. but it is particularly the spirit in which it is done that is interesting - there is a sort of ethos or ethic of sharing, openness, and decentralisation. rather than a world where i do my thing to gain competitive advantage and keep it from you, hacking assumes that information should be shared in an open source fashion so that somone else can access it, take it apart to its component pieces and reassemble to make something new and better or repurposed which is then shared with the wider community to make the world a better place. this it seems to me is a fantastic metaphor for mission or theology or the church - making available liturgies and theology and canons to be creatively played with to come up with new and fresh takes on things rather than as boundaries to be defended and kept pure. but in the book hacking is really about viewing a very different city to the one on offer, finding a different map and route through, levering open cracks in its surface to slip through. it reminds me of the work by french philospoher michel de certeau in his masterpiece the practice of everyday life where he contrasts the strategies in place within a system with the tactics that 'readers' or 'poachers' use to make do, to create an alternative route which makes a different meaning to the one imposed in the strategies. 

secondly i love the spirit of adventure in the book. i think the author feels alive and discovers a sense of wonder in the world and the city - he says that the one thing urban explorers all share is "the desire to find adventure in everyday life. this is the central foundation of place hacking". now this may just be the rush of adrenaline but i think it's a bit more. a friend and pioneer student at cms, steve, suggests that the gospel can be understood as a call to adventure and he is exploring that - i think he'll like this book. garrett has this lovely word for moments when everything is right and comes together, of epiphany, of "when the seen and unseen, the possible and impossible, the self and community fuse" - the meld! what a great word - i know i have experienced the meld in silence when i have felt at one with the world, at home in my own skin, in god, at peace. the place hacker is trying to get back a sense of what they have lost - a sense of self, place and community. in this sense it is a sort of spirituality i think. it's also a challenge to the way things are, finding cracks in the world, in the staus quo to squeeze open and to disturb notions of property and ownership - which if any of you are familiar with theories of trickster who is a mythological character who remakes the world through mischief is one his or her ruses. in a world where the commons has been almost totally eroded we need people doing this in my view. one way urban explorers describe this is edgework which again is a rather lovely phrase - i recognise this in pioneers who find the edges, the margins the cracks and dwell there in forgotten spaces with forgotten people. 

thirdly i love the photography - wow! i don't think urban exploration began as that but the book is full of amazing photos taken in these spaces in the city. here's one from a crane on top of the shard before it was finished!

it's a wonderful ethnography, a brilliant exmple of getting inside another culture to learn its language and codes as a participant observer. for students of mission it might not be the most obvious story of crossing cultures but is worth a read for that as well. 

 

the poppies are in the field but don't ask me what that means

inevitably living in london i passed by the poppies at the tower of london. whilst it is impressive i am not a fan (sorry!) - i can't seem to deal with war and especially when it is tied to national interest. i hope now one hundred years are past we might move on as several others have expressed in various articles. anyway of course i took a couple of photos and preferred ones where i was messing around. this line from teardrop explodes seems as good a caption as any though i know i have used it on a photo before!

happy 21st grace! and a worship trick - place mat liturgy

we realised last night that it was grace's 21st birthday! had a wonderful meal with friends led by steve summers. its become an annual thing now to have a service in the context of a meal in the main space of the church. i really love doing this. one neat innovation last night which i am making a worship trick (53 series 4) was that the words and prayers were written as a place mat - such a simple idea that i am sure will be repeated! i didn't have my camera, only a phone but you get the idea...

a meal with friends - grace this saturday

grace this saturday is a meal with friends - yes it is a  meal so don't eat first if you are coming! i have loved the times over the last few years when there has been a table down the middle of the church space at st marys and commnion has been shared in a meal. do come along if you can. i have particularly pleased that steve summers will be curating - his book on friendship is one of the best bits of contemporary thinking about church (as a community of friends) that i have read. so simple, so practical (his book is far from simple mind as it was a phd thesis). really looking forward to it…

this stopped me in my tracks...

i snapped this on my phone today - an ad from oxfam in today's guardian. when you see it put that starkly it just seems ridiculous, an outrage. why do we have a society that is organised this way? we don't have to organise society this way after all. mean time all the focus is still on those on the other end of the scale to bleed them dry in the name of austerity measures. another world is possible. time for a year of jubilee methinks - restore the land and set the slaves free?!