jonnybaker

stir

i love stir magazine. there are very few magazines i subscribe to but after seeing a couple of issues of stir i decided it is essential reading and i normally read it cover to cover.

it's a magazine about community economic development and transformation. what i love about it is its energy for change and alternative thinking. it's a great example of future present thinking (watch this space for news on that theme on june 4th!) or the kind of thinking that believes another world is possible. but i also love that it is informed by a very different body of knowledge and skills to what i was taught working in charities in the christian sector. the approaches and instincts fit really well and i think pioneers who get stuck into community change would find it really helpful. you can get a flavour of what it is about through the web site where lots of articles are available free. there is also a toolkit for working with your local community which has some great stuff in it. and they connect to all sorts of ideas and inspiration. for example the blog introduced me to this incredible commons transition primer. the recovery of commons in local communities is a key to the way forward in our society i think.

this area of engagement is something churches have great opportunity to be involved in. one really interesting project that i mentioned before is that stir have seen churches and their communities as assets and have piloted with some churches around helping them set up community enterprises - see here for the process. there is likely to be a conference about it in the autumn once the results of the pilot are published. this process is so similar to what we encourage pioneers to do at cms - listening, mapping the community, discerning opportunities, building stuff together with the community around it and so on - being good news. and if you are near bristol, oxford or london watch this space for a series of workshops you could get involved in. they are currently running a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money for them.

the power of a simple diagram

i was really pleased to see mark berry and philip mounstephen have written a grove booklet on mission and community. it gets a hefty review here if you want to know what it's about and that saves me writing too much (!). i am particularly pleased because it's part of grove's mission and evangelism series and cms has become a partner in that series contributing a couple of booklets a year - at least that's the plan. this is the first. it used to be the evangelism series but we were keen if cms were to be involved that it become mission and evangelism. i have read it and really recommend it. it's the kind of book you read and think 'of course!' but then realise that what seems obvious often isn't.

the thing in the book that i thought was very neat and powerful was a diagram. they draw on robert warren's missionary congregations book which i really liked when it came out and that had three interlocking equally sized circles in a venn diagram of worship, mission and community saying that all three were important and that in the intersection you'd find the heart or spirituality of a congregation. i remember drafting what grace was about years ago and having those three sections on an older version of the web site.

what mark and philip do is redraw the diagram showing the reality could be very different in practice to warren's nice equal version. it seems quite shocking - community is small and mission is isolated. but the more i have thought about it the more i think that diagram nails something with truth in it even if it is exaggerated.

it's at least worth pondering if you are in a congregation or church what the balance is and where all the church's time, money and effort goes. we have been thinking about this at grace recently and realising that in our case community has grown in importance over the years and we are reflecting on what mission looks like. i guess worship has always been a reasonable size as we grew out of what was then known as alternative worship. i'll blog again in a separate post to say a bit more about this with a diagram we drew for grace. 

 

a place of refuge

at greenbelt this summer i was less busy than normal so actually went to a couple of talks (shock horror!). one was to hear tobias jones. i read his book utopian dreams several years ago. in that book he recounts visiting various residential communities and the impact it made on him was clear. as a result, together with his wife fra they purchased a house with a reasonable plot of land in somerset called windsor hill wood and have run a community there for 6 years. the model of community is an extended family home. at greenbelt toby was apologetic about that in that it was an imbalance of power and resource but i felt that was actually the key to its success and it is a wonderful model, if not the best model. a place of refuge is a book that tells the tale of the first five years of that experiment. it's extraordinary - extremely challenging and inspiring in equal measure. the community has welcomed people who others simply don't know what to do with - those very much at the edges of society. it sounds extremely tough especially the rawness of the first couple of years but gradually as they learned a rhythm and rules to put in place and i guess simply the wisdom that can only come from doing it the community seems to settle into more of an ease. they have raised their kids in the midst of this rag tag community and toby said at greenbelt that he thought this was wonderful for their children albeit it has had its moments. at greenbelt toby was suggesting that everyone could do this. read the book of acts, read bonhoeffer, the sermon on the mount, jean vanier and away you go! i love that challenge and i certainly think being a follower of jesus calls me to really listen to that and try to be at the edges with people who are broken. but i am not so sure everyone can do what they are doing - it's a very special thing, and to be able to hold open such welcome, non judgement with the level of patience required is sadly not that common in my own experience. but i hope many more people do do it and find ways to open up generosity. it's a great read but be warned it will challenge you. if you have any interest in community you really should read it. at greenbelt i loved what toby ended by saying:

any way of living that is worthwhile is risky

40 days reflecting on mission for lent

cms is the community i am a member of. 40 days of yes is another lent resource if you would like something to reflect particularly on mission. i have used it before and i am pretty certain have blogged about it before. but it's another great lent resource and mark berry will be adding a weekly reflection too... oh and it's free!

come and see

not sure where the time goes but september's upload on proost was a wonderful resource which i meant to blog at the time but it's now october and i haven't got round to it until now! how did that happen? anyway...

come and see is a guide for beginning and sustaining a missional venture downloadable as a pdf. it's written by ian adams and contains 20 steps, all restricted to one page alongside ian's photography. it's simple, clear and you feel when you read it that anyone could start one. it's the kind of thing that's ideal to discuss round the meal table for a newly formed group distilling down what it is they are about and how to function together as a community. pick a step a week...

proost willbe creating a collection of resources for pioneers - last month's news was in praise of pioneers

missional communities - something's going on!

something really interesting continues to bubble up in the church in the uk - small missional communities.

yesterday there was a gathering in london diocese of around 30 groups like this and church plants. and well done the diocese for encouraging such a gathering! i don't want to create a glossary or anything but a church plant is generally someone starting a new church and the language of plant means it often takes something of the character of what it's planted from and usually looks like a church - people gathering, worshipping, reaching out, making disciples, giving money and eventually embedding into the wider structures of the church. it used to be quite something to be able to get permission to plant a church but now certainly in london there is a lot of activity in this area which is great.

but what was so interesting yesterday was that most of the people in the room were doing something else, often a bit looser, harder to pin down and perhaps harder to see, more missional. most were a small community that had moved into a particular area (often one with a lot of deprivation and poverty), meeting together in a bar or home or allotment, seeking to follow christ but their focus is simply helping transform their community - in arts, environment, in social needs, with youth and so on. they are not that focused on growing big - but more like the yeast of the kingdom that jesus talked about infecting the wider batch of dough. a couple of people spoke of the challenge of weaning members off their addiction to consumer approaches to church where they get their fix of worship and teaching and meeting with friends before they could properly engage in this more local, outward focused community approach (maybe we need a 12 step detox programme for leaving consumner church!?). what was also interesting is that many of these described a positive relationship with their local churches - they were not competing for punters - far from it. but they brought a mission energy to the area that could really help a local church or do things a local church was not able to do. on the basis of what was shared, if i was a parish priest (which isn't going to happen) i'd be on the lookout to see if i could encourage a mission community or two in my area. for those up with mission thinking this is a great example of what missiologist ralph winter termed sodal and modal expressions of church working well together (see also this follow up thinking from george lings). the challenge of his paper is that our language has so bought into the local church as what church is that we easily forget it is actually langauge that describes both structures.

anyway if you are interested in missional communities ian adams gets interviewed about starting them here, there is a list of 20 tips for getting started here, cms has a facebook page for mission projects and communities here, along with a growing network of small missional communities some of whom are developing a stronger relationship with cms by being rooted and connected (contact ian adams or mark berry if you want to know more). something's going on and i like it!

on community

chris goan (whose blog is always so thoughtful...) reflects on the life of small missional groups after 7 years of the community aoradh in dunoon. he particularly highlights some of scott peck's reflections on groups. this includes  the stages a group goes through and the characteristics of community. they are really worth a read if you are in any kind of small group, community or missional group. there is a lot there to chew over...

small missional groups are one of the growing edges in the church in the uk - often just tucked out of sight of those who like to count and measure numbers of attendance. if you've not seen it before ian adams ways in to small missional communities is a wonderful simple guide to the sort of process a group might go through.