jonnybaker

on innovation [2] - the creative stance

my son joel studied at chelsea art college. i was really inspired by what i observed of the course he did - it was creative, assignments were stretching and nearly all done as teams, people from various sectors in the creative industries and arts would come and speak, students were encouraged to do real work alongside their training, and the graduate show was mind-blowingly good. i was also regretting having studied maths rather than art myself i think! he was there at the same time that i was designing training for pioneers and i remember thinking that i thought an art school or innovation school was more like what i hoped we could create than a theological seminary. of course we would teach theology, mission, ministry but the environment or air that students breathe needed to be risk taking, creative, free. so when i was last in the institute for contemporary arts bookshop in london i couldn’t resist buying the creative stance. this is a collaboration between art college teachers in london on what makes for a flourishing creative student who trains with them. through their reflection they have come up with seven behaviours and the book is laid out in a series of chapters on each behaviour with a short essay by an artist followed by a discussion on that behaviour with three lecturers often in relation to a particular course. i really loved the book. the seven behaviours are essentially a kind of formation for art students. they are:

rigour, risk, imagination, provocation, agency, resilience, and ambiguity.

i discuss these behaviours with rick lawrence on the podcast i blogged about a few posts back. but i’d like to reflect on them here thinking particularly about theological education because that was the discussion i was in this week - what’s the relationship between theological education and innovation (and by extension ministry and mission practice and innovation).

to take one behaviour, rigour has an essay by grayson perry in which he reflects on two internal characters - hobbit and punk. to be a good artist the hobbit is the character who puts in hours to develop brilliance in skill in a craft - in his case pottery. hobbit alone can make nice pots but in terms of art can be a bit boring. so he also needs punk who is the character who messes with things to make them interesting. this interplay between hobbit and punk makes for a creative approach to art that combines depth of skill with risk taking imagination and innovative practice. the essay is actually available in the latest edition of creative review and is free if you sign up. it’s totally brilliant! when asked what advice he would give to an artist student perry says - ‘turn up on time, be nice, and put in the hours’. you can see where i am going with this - this is so resonant with pioneers. i suspect they are more attracted to punk than hobbit. but in theological education (and in the church generally) i bump into a lot more hobbits than punks. but it’s a great idea to nurture both aspects.

i won’t elaborate on all the behaviours - you can get the book but here are a few quotes and ideas i jotted down that caught my attention.

curiosity is foundational. if you are not curious you’ll stay on a safe path. 

Curiosity is the substrate of creativity, overlaid by an appetite for risk, necessarily followed by determination

i fear that safety is a problem in theological education and the church - we are generally risk averse which is ironic because probably the theologians and saints we admire are/were curious and risk taking. but various traditions of theology have systematised it and made it about information and right doctrine rather than a quest that is creative in response to the tradition and context and the spirit. and i think there can easily be an atmosphere of anxiety and fear about getting things right rather than one of exploration and play. art school gives people the confidence to make a dangerous decision - does theology school i wonder?

risk is… 

the enemy of your own and other peoples certainty. A state of optimistic dissatisfaction, of relentless questioning. A preoccupation with quality without regard for the established order.

how do you involve students in risk? 

You show them things that they probably haven’t thought about before and that aren’t necessarily part of that central canon.

the authors suggest that art schools should be creating the kind of graduates that can rock boats rather than row boats, that question and push. and they lament that the curriculum is currently too related to industry because of pressures. has play been ruined because it has to be turned to money? we might say the same of ministry students who are under pressure from industry a.k.a. church growth. the authors suggest that playfulness should be applied to everything and every moment you’re alive… a way of being.

ambiguity is fascinating i think. it requires doubt and where there is doubt there is great space for imagination. art students need to learn to transgress rules and fixed boundaries and conventions forging new paths where no one has trodden before. this sounds like a mantra for pioneers and cross cultural mission. but i have not seen this in much theological education i have visited so far.

for a world that is changing and in need of change creatives need flexibility, adaptability, openness, vulnerability, resourcefulness, avoidance of monocultures (which are fragile rather than resilient). the church needs the same - it really does. 

and i found it interesting that the exact same challenge i described in the last post of people who remake the world in order to create solutions is nurtured in arts students. they

reshape the world to contain the artwork you make, to create a new reality - because it’s never been enough just to make the art

(substitute the word theology for art)

there is a lovely section where a lecturer from chelsea art college ponders the percentage of students who go on to be artists and make a life in it which is quite small. but he then lists what they do go on to do in a wonderful list of enterprises, community development, change agents, educators and so on. in other words a creative education enables them to have agency out of who they are to participate in making the world a better place. 

anyway you get the point. when you look at a formation that nurtures a creative stance there is so much for theological and mission education to learn. but the contrast with what is valued and in the air in theological colleges is stark. if we want innovation maybe we need students to breathe different air, art school air?!

this reminded me too of will gompertz's book think like an artist which i have blogged about before. in that he has a whole section on education generally and why it should be like art school which i loved. he says 

Art school or not students need to leave education as independently minded, intellectually curious, self confident and resourceful - prepared for and excited by the future and what they might be able to contribute to it. The future depends on us taking a different approach.

i couldn’t agree more.

(thanks to the baptist theological educators forum who invited me to reflect on formation and theological education with them earlier this year that enabled me to develop this particular sideways strain of thought)

on innovation [1] - we do things differently

i keep talking to people about innovation. i have a ton of thoughts that have been knocking around my head for a while in the areas of change, newness, innovation, imagination, pioneering, mission and changing the world! so i will try and find some space for some blog posts. life is sadly too busy to blog enough but i must blog! i was prompted by this today because i was having a conversation with some good friends about theological education and innovation and whether they do or don't go together easily. i'll come back to that in another post. several of the posts will be about books i have read. 

i have pondered several times in the last few years why i spend more money when i am in an art bookshop than a theology one - see a tale of two bookshops where i suggest that it's because they seem concerned with changing the world and not just art. i have found myself almost repeating that exact same experience only with a different set of books - all of which i hope i will say something about in these posts...

i love people who come up with ideas that solve problems. i especially love it when to solve a particular problem you actually have to reimagine the world in order to solve the problem because the paradigm itself is part of the problem. it's akin to the future present imagination that i have blogged about before.

we do things differently is a book of stories of outsiders rebooting our world by mark stevenson. i nearly didn't buy the book because it has a terrible cover but i am glad i got beyond that. it is an incredible book that filled me with hope. let me mention two stories from it to give you the flavour. one that i mentioned at the new parish conference is of peter dearman who has invented an engine that emits zero carbon. he initially began by messing around with his lawnmower and antifreeze. as an engineer he figured that what drives a piston is temperature change and you could drive a piston by moving the temperature from sub zero to zero if you used liquid nitrogen (along with isothermal expansion). i won't bore you with the details but he has invented an engine that is not oil dependant, and has a bi-product of refrigeration which in hot climates with a lot of food wastage is brilliant. you can read about the dearman engine here.

i also loved the story of the indian scientist samir brahmachari. finding new medicines is and has been a really interesting and potentially life saving area. turberculosis is a disease of the poor so drug companies simply haven't come up with new new medicines to treat the increasingly drug resistant types. further the way drug companies go about it is a multi billion dollar expense to find a new drug which involves thousands of failures. samir's approach was to find a new process by tackling the genome annotation for tb - over four million letters. for one person to do the work would take 300 years. so he effectively created a wikipedia for science students in india to work on particular aspects of the task. through this process they found 350 people who were good and to cut a long story short the results were amazing - the most comprehensively annotated tuberculosis genome in history completed in four months and published online free!!! through this he then found people to create a computer model of tuberculosis bacterium that he could experiment on virtually. once they built that (which was complex) they open sourced it. and through participation 11 weaknesses to explore in the code were identified and the latest was that a cheap drug which already exists for diabetes can be used for tb. i don't claim to follow the details of the science but i found this story compelling. it's compelling because samir who is clearly a genius has to break through the old ways of doing things and imagine very differently to come up with a solution. you would think that the drugs world would be all over it but unsurprisingly he meets incredible difficulty - he is maligned in journals, poo pooed by experts and of course his whole approach is a threat to the economics of the system. it's hard to argue with him though when he says -

'we don't believe in the western concept of knowledge being proprietary. i'm not in this for wealth but because i would like to see  reduction in death'

wow - i am on board!

the book is full of stories of such people who have to reimagine the way the world is organised in order to come up with a solution to the problem - the stories relate to energy, education, drugs, agriculture, engineering, the environment, food production, cities...

thank god for the gift of such seers/innovators - i love that they exist and it fills me with hope. of course i am reading a parallel with pioneers in my own context.

the amount of difficulty they all have is extraordinary - whether it's farming or oil or drugs industries they do not like a threat to the existing system even if it's clear that system needs to change because there are vested interests (and money!) and frankly a lack of desire to even listen to or see the new solutions. (so it's not just the church that is resistant to change as it happens - it's normal for  pioneers all over to experience this kind of resistance sadly and i think we should all wise up about that).

connecting people together becomes really important for support, for encouragement, for hope. this is why i was stressing the importance of getting yourself connected in my last post on the value of networks.

two web sites that are connecting people producing the kinds of futuring solutions in this book are really worth looking up - 

the league of pragmatic optimists and the atlas of the future 

a conversation about imagination and creativity

when i was in colorado recently i got invited to have a conversation with rick lawrence on his podcast. we had been talking about creativity and imagination in the car so that was what we dived into (which happens to be one of mine and rick's favourite subjects i suspect). the flow of the conversation relates imagination to faith in jesus, the challenges facing the church today and how to nurture creative practice. the framework for the conversation is seven behaviours in the creative stance, a book put together by people teaching at art colleges in london to explore what helps someone creative flourish. i am sure i'll come back to review that book on the blog another time...

anyway the podcast episode is here - it lasts about 50 minutes

arriving in a safe harbour after toiling in stormy seas - pioneer training with cms

i think most of you who follow the blog know i lead pioneer training for the church mission society. i absolutely love what i do. we interview one of our students each month to see what they are up to and post it on the pioneer blog. this month is jane gray who is in the first year but it reminded how much people who relate to the idea of being pioneers in the church flourish and love training with us. i often forget how refreshing it is for people who see different possibilities to be in an environment where they feel at home and we effectively say to them that we love what they are about. jane says

I feel absolutely that at last, I am with people who know what I am talking about. It’s like arriving in safe harbour after toiling in stormy seas for so long. I also feel completely out of my depth at times (in a good way!) – everything I thought I knew I now know that I didn’t, every thought I had has been taken, shaken and given back revitalised. It’s a scary place to be, and yet absolutely faith affirming. It’s without doubt the best decision I ever took, I love it and feel totally confident that I am where God wants me to be.

we are in year seven of what we are doing and now offer lots of modules that anyone can simply buy into and piece together how they like. and for those wanting to do something formal we also have a certificate, diploma and MA programmes accredited with durham university. we also train pioneers who are getting ordained in the church of england - in fact we are able to train anyone who has been selected for ordination in the church of england but are really best for those with a strong mission focus.  it never stays still so this year we are adding in the option of a degree. and we have partnered with streetspace network (fyt) and oxford cym to develop a pioneer youth ministry certificate and a pioneer childrens and family worker certificate. and back in september we helped launch st cedds in chelmsford as the first pioneer hub elsewhere which is currently piloting an unaccredited course we have developed - so it's exciting!

so far we have grown every year by a little bit which has been encouraging. this year the MA in particular has grown. and we are trying to respond to the interest in missional entrepreneurship by working out how to grow that as a new thing in its own right - i'll say more about that another time but we have a week in april with spaces on it still. 

anyway all that to say that if you are interested in mission and pioneering (it's a complicated word that the church chose to describe people starting new things outside of the usual church stuff so don't be put off if you don't like the word or are unsure what it means) and want to connect with others and do some learning in the area of mission, theology, pioneering, and changing the world then come and see us and talk about it. 

we have an open day coming up on tues march 14 but if you can't make that get in touch and visit any tuesday which is our teaching day in oxford. we starting to line up students for next september...

this video was our attempt to describe it as succinctly as we could and still makes good sense i think...

dissent

i am teaching MA students today on a leadership module at cms pioneer training and exploring dissent for leadership. this has led to me re-reading gerald arbuckle's refounding the church - what a book! it is honestly the most helpful book i think i have read related to pioneering ever. here's a quote from the book for today's presentation...

simple eh?! 

being licensed as a lay pioneer in the church of england

eighteen months ago i was recognised by the church of england as a lay pioneer. this morning i am going to be licensed as such by the bishop of willesden. the way the church of england works in relation to those who are in leadership is a two step process.

(you can simply read the first sentence of each of these steps below but if you are interested what on earth that means i have tried to explain further below each.)

step 1 - you are admitted into an order of ministry (order simply means category).

in the canons (rubric) of the church of england the order i was admitted to is 'lay worker - for those interested canon E7'. this is different to lay reader which most people seem to think is the only category available - in my view it is a broader description of ministry and includes evangelism so suits lay pioneers better than the category of reader. to be admitted in this way you have to demonstrate that you meet certain criteria. the criteria we use are in this document here which has been approved for use by the ministry council of the church of england and shows what is a good direction of travel in my view - recognising some core dispositions but then subsets for various types of ministries such as pioneer rather than a one size fits all. (i actually helped write the pioneer subset!) what is curious about this document is that hardly anyone seems to be using it - they still seem to be using an older approach but i am guessing that will gradually change. the recognition is like a kite mark of training and quality i guess that is able to be trusted across the church. the way the church of england is governed is episcopal which means that a bishop is trusted to oversee procedures - so to be admitted a bishop needs to approve and admit you. this is where i think it gets interesting. cms has become a religious community of the church (which i blogged about here) so rather than being a parachurch agency it is in and of itself a church (mission) community. as such we have a bishop who is linked as a visitor to cms - so we are able to admit people as lay pioneers through cms rather than through a diocese. in my case this makes perfect sense - my identity and calling in the church is mission focused and the majority of what i do by way of leadership is done through cms of which i am an enthusiastic member. the order (category) is a national one so once admitted you don't need to go through the process again if you move to another diocese for example. i apologise if this a bit technical but i have studied it to try and open a way for lay pioneers to be recognised in the church in a way that makes sense and this is the best use (legitimate hack) of the codes i could find.

step 2 - you are licensed for a particular local role/ministry 

licensing is the way the church entrusts ministry to people who have admitted to an order. this is how it works for vicars - they get admitted to the order of priest (step 1) and then a license for a particular parish or whatever. so i am being given a license to be a lay pioneer with grace at st marys ealing (as a member of cms) by my local bishop. what does this mean? to be honest it won't change much - i think i may be able to do a few different things such as bury the dead. but i have been leading, preaching, as a member of grace and st marys ealing for about 20 years. like many churches a lot of ministry (rightly) flourishes and continues without being licensed. in my mind the license is simply affirming what i already do and bring - nothing more. but what i bring and do is strongly tied up with who i am and my own sense of calling. it is the recognition of the word pioneer that has made me think this is worth doing because it is affirming a ministry that is not simply pastoral with those in the church but affirms the gift of seeing and building things beyond the edge of where the church currently is. the main part of what i do as a leader in the church actually is through cms in the pioneer training i lead but the licensing system in the church is such that i think it would be too complicated to license someone for a role that is essentially a national one. the church of england still imagines ministry quite geographically i think. that's not a complaint - just explaining why the license is linked with local stuff in ealing rather than everything i am involved in. 

so there you go! all that to say i am being licensed as a lay pioneer in the church of england this morning and if you've read this far i hope that sentence makes more sense. 

research into new things in the church over the last decade shows that at least half of the new expressions of church have been started and led by untrained and unrecognised and unlicensed leaders - looking back i think 95% of alternative worship grew that way. all that is great in my view! so in doing this i am not for a moment thinking the church needs to license things before they should happen. i quite like it the other way round actually - it's a way of affirming something that has emerged rather than controlling it. but for me part of the reason is that the church nationally is trying to work out what lay pioneers are and how to encourage and recognise them in a way that makes sense. so we have done that through cms and this is simply showing how that can that work with the way a diocese tends to operate around ministry (i.e. a precedent of sorts). we have admitted 12 lay pioneers through cms so far and intend to keep that rolling over the next decade. i hope where cms pioneers land in a diocese that will be welcomed by bishops as a gift to the church rather than a threat, and that lay pioneers who are members of cms are both trustworthy, faithful and hopefully dangerous (in a good or prophetic way) because they are called beyond the current edge of the church in mission.

i also want to stress that this does not mean the way we operate in grace will change or the way i am in grace. the church tends to imagine leadership in one or two people. grace has a very distributed model of leadership which i like so i will carry on in the community there exactly as before. (it would actually make sense to license grace as a whole but i don't think the church of england quite thinks that way!)

an evaluation of cms pioneer training

five years in to the CMS pioneer training we commissioned an evaluation. you can download and read the report here. if you want the short version the summary and recommendations are on pages 1-2. it's a very positive report which i am so encouraged by and we are now reflecting on how to take the recommendations forward. if you ever wonder why i blog less these days it's because i have been involved in this start up of pioneer training which i am happy to say is well and truly started and up and running. i'd love to hear any reflections or feedback on this so do give me a shout.

end of year five...

i can't quite believe it but it's the end of the fifth year of the cms pioneer mission leadership training. five years ago we launched a pilot year with students doing a foundation degree and since then have added in various other things - certificate, diploma, ma, pathway for pioneer ordinands, and admitting people as lay workers in the church of england. we have had loads of people do modules with us who are not dong a university award - which works really well. this year we have had to transition to a new university which has had its own challenges but it's been a great year with an amazing group of new students. it was wonderful to celebrate on tuesday with students who were graduating, getting ordained as pioneers, completing their modules with us, and those being admitted as lay workers. i absolutely love what i do and i think that the gift that pioneers bring is much needed and hope that we help encourage it and those entrusted with the gift.

we're now into that time of year where people are signing up for next year (i.e. september). if you are pioneering in mission or wanting to in any way come and join us. do a module, do a diploma, do an ma… give me a shout.

listen up - pioneer research

george lings and ali dorey have just published a report on pioneers who are ordained and how they might be supported in in initial training post. this has come out of a gathering of pioneers and their training supervisors in the context. i admit this might sound a bit niche so i realise you might take persuading but it is fantastic. the research these guys have produced continues to be so helpful and insightful. i am so thankful for what they are doing. if you are someone who is in training as an OPM download and read it, if you are a DDO read it, if you are someone who is a training incumbent read it, if you are a bishop read it, if you work with fresh expressions read it, if you are a missioner in a diocese read it. you might think this is all good common sense but trust me this sense is not currently common in the wider church. although the church of england has had 30 years or so of new forms of church bubbling up around its edges and ten years of officially saying it wants this mixed economy, and about 8 years of creating the designation of ordained pioneers as a much needed gift in the church there are huge challenges. there is anxiety, fear, lack of understanding, a risk averse culture, a culture of hierarchy and control etc etc - i won't spell these challenges out though i meet them almost every week with people training with us or who get in contact but this is certainly an invaluable piece of research laced with practical wisdom. i have actually just agreed to be an external supervisor for an ordained pioneer and we will definitely be talking this through.

download and read the report here

thank you george and ali!

who would want to be a prophet?

loved this reflection by richard rohr on who would want to be a prophet? in which he suggests prophets are on the edge of the inside combining tradition with iconoclasm and usually are trained in the system so they know how to work it...

You have to know the rules of any tradition, and you have to respect those rules enough to know why they do exist--and thus how to break them properly, for the sake of a larger and more essential value.

fear, courage and change - church of england welcome to the incoming future!

every organisation, institution, business has to negotiate change. the rapid changes in the wider culture and perhaps especially in technology in the last 30 years make it feel as though change is the new constant. i happen to quite like change and newness but i realise not everyone does. it can certainly generate anxiety and fear in good measure. and in many places there is a very real sense of pressure. the new environment seems to call for flexibility, adaptability and improvisation. however when the pressure is on there is always the opposite instinct at play - defence of what already is, the status quo, at all costs and resistance to change.

in the next few days the church of england governing body general synod is receiving several reports. they were published a couple of weeks ago - on discipleship, simplification, resourcing the future and resourcing ministerial education. they have a focus on mission, growth and investing better in those at the margins which in itself is encouraging (though i realise 'growth' is a complicated word that has had a backlash from those who see it tied to measures of success and effectivenes making the church sound like a business). the church of england is full of surprises! i realise a blog post about some church reports might not sound that interesting but in their own way they are putting before the church questions about the inevitable incoming future and whether the church of england will act on the basis of courage or fear. without question she has to change!

i won't go through all the reports here but the one of most interest to me personally and the pioneer leadership training at cms is the resourcing ministerial education one which stresses the need to train people for adaptibility and flexibility for the future. it is also the most far reaching in its proposals. in my view by far the most interesting and long overdue proposal is to rapidly develop lay ministries and increase numbers and to that end developing a stream of funding for lay ministry training especially to resource the future. this will be funding training in a similar way to ordinands. my own take on the various streams that have brought challenge and renewal at the edges of the church in the last thirty years is that they have been largely lay led - in many cases unpaid, untrained and not licensed as well! the majority of pioneers training at cms are in this category. this is genuinely exciting news. it will be for ministry that is licensed but at cms last year we admitted 8 people as lay workers in the church of england which we can do because we are a religious community of the church - i am one myself. i'm slightly pinching myself on this as it's as though we have set something up that has anticipated this future. if this goes through it looks as though people in the church of england could train with us to pioneer and get fees paid for.

there is also recognition that training that is on the job or in-context produces good results and they are trying to encourage development of more pathways like this that are within reach of people who are training whilst working which is a good model and will generate innovation especially if the matched funding proposed is agreed to. this is causing great anxiety amongst providers of residential training who will no doubt be on the defensive at synod. both have their place and as far as i can see a mixed economy of provision is envisaged but for pioneers, on the job training is both recommended and the only way i would ever be interested in training pioneers. it's also so much better value - i know people hate discussions around money but money is a real issue in pretty much every diocese. there will be opportunity for innovation here for colleges who have almost exclusively focused on training ordinands because that is where the money has been. the proposal on money is that there will be a standard grant allocation that a diocese will decide how to spend on approved providers.

the report proposes increasing ordination numbers especially younger and i hope that pioneer numbers will get back on the up - we'll see. dioceses will have more say about the training pathways. they want to review and streamline selection process, presumably for pioneers too so it is done in a year. individuals pathways for training will be more flexible. they are proposing tough limits on age by making dioceses pay for over 50s. there will be money available for leadership development beyond the first phase of training.

in other words it's proposing something of a sea change. i think it's exciting, challenging, and hopeful. it's not without its problems and more work needs to be done. for example i think the critique of business approaches and language is welcome. i liked linda woodhead's challenge in the church times and on tv to not collapse the church into a congregational paradigm or a clerical paradigm but to retain a vision of church in society and public life. decisions won't be made on details - i think it will be a discussion and then voting to give permission for the reports to be taken forward. the key issue for me is imagination. i have in my mind arbuckle's phrase 'culture eats strategies for breakfast' and hope that the culture of the church doesn't eat these up but has the imagination to see ahead. don't be afraid synod!

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.

gearing up for a new year 1 - a new diploma and ma

i feel like i still live by a school year! the beginning of september is the new year... don't know if you are the same? i hope you have had a good summer anyway. so a few posts about the year ahead and especially in relation to some training and things you could connect with.

first up we will be starting a new year of pioneer mission leadership training in a few weeks. this will be the fifth year. it's a challenging one because we are switching accrediting universities to durham and will have a new dilpoma and ma and still have students in the current university. these build on what we have done before but the ma is completely redesigned and i think it's an exciting mix of mission, theology, leadership, reading culture and so on. but it's a bit late to sign up now! however a lot of people audit modules and you may want to have a look around and join in something. i think we are set for our biggest intake so far which is exciting. this is of course a biased view but if you are into pioneering in mission do look at training with cms - what is unique about us is that we are solely focused around pioneering and that cms as a mission comnmunity is such a great place to locate it!

open day coming up for pioneer training

a week today we have an open day for the cms pioneer training. we are in the process of transitioning to being accredited by durham university and should get final confirmation of that this month. you can do modules, certificate, diploma, or an MA. it's a fantastic learning community - do come along and find out more. let us know if you are coming...

download a flyer here

open day for pioneer training

we have an open day tomorrow for cms pioneer training - it's not too late to sign up...

it was buzzing!

thanks to everyone who came to the day of research presentations and conversation about pioneering mission. it was a wonderful day - really buzzing! there is a write up and some photos here. it was such a treat to have doug gay, beth keith, gerald arbuckle, anna thompson, andrea campanale, and jim barker involved. we'll be adding a few video interviews online with them and there will be a book next summer with some of the papers and some others. and we will be back with another day next year. to be honest i am still on something of a high. next week i'm off here - tough life eh?!

pioneer youth ministry - final article in the series

the november issue of youthwork magazine has just landed on my doormat (actually we don't have a dorrmat come to think of it so i suppose it's the floorboards!). in it i have the third and final installment i have written on pioneer youth ministry which looks at some steps to starting something new. i really enjoyed writing the series. it's probably the most distilled version of my thoughts on pioneering that i have written. i wanted to out it in youthwork because youth ministry is where i learned i was a pioneer, discovered cross cultural mission, and was given amazing leadership opportunities quite quickly. it's also essential, and the back door for renewing the whole church. and many pioneers who train with us at cms began in youth ministry! love to hear from anyone who has read them...

weekends for this coming year for ReSource look fab!

there is no better way than wrapping your head round mission in today's culture(s) than attending ReSource. you get to visit four different places in britain, hear from the people involved, and experience what they are up to. you can also pick individual weekends but the best is to do the lot. if you are interested in pioneer training this is a great way in. there are details on the weekends here, you can download a flyer here and you can book here

manage the world or change the world?

i have not been able to stop thinking about the massive attack v adam curtis gig that i blogged about here. joel send me a link to a piece which is really interesting in FACT magazine where adam curtis says a bit more about some of his ideas. and he reiterates the theme that really caught my attention which is that we are stuck because

"we have opted to manage the world rather than change the world"

what an extraordinary insight! i think this is true in many businesses, lots of the social/charity sector and the church. we elevate managers and prefer and feel safer with them than visionaries and dreamers in top leadership positions. this may be because of fear of money, the future or simply we want to feel we can control things as best we can. and i also think it is also a really bad habit. shoot me down on this or tell me it's not true - but i am now seeing it everywhere where last week i was used to business as usual!

the article includes the words that were projected at the end of the film which i was trying to remember. they are:

"the future is full of POSSIBILITY"

"IT IS NOT PREDICTABLE"

"YOU CAN MAKE ANYTHING HAPPEN"

"YOU CAN CHANGE THE WORLD"

"PLEASE FIND YOUR OWN WAY HOME”

flippin' brilliant!

how i'd like to be led

kim hartshorne reflects on leadership