gave a lecture for a salvation army conference church on the edge gathering leaders involved in mission and church planting. you can download the pdf of the slides i used if you are interested – creativeleadership.pdf. the title was creative leadership in the new environment: imagination, improvisation and innovation.
one of the slides i used was a picture that was in friday’s guardian of a church being moved on the back of a lorry – the caption suggested it was a response to a dwindling congregation somewhere in canada. that seemed to be a metaphor for our problem – if it isn’t working we transport exactly the same thing down the road and do it the same way or with a few tweaks rather than creatively re-imaginging what church could look or be like in the new environment. before anyone asks, no i don’t have any notes – the slides are what i used to remind me of what i wanted to say. was fun to be able to try out ideas from the starfish and the spider…
Looks decent, am trying to track down the starfish book at the moment as it is rather relevant to a whole load of restructuring I’m involved in at the moment…
Just out of interest, when deciding on the slides how much are your own photos and how much taken from things like iStockphoto etc?
Also, do you have a slide per minute ratio type thing?
Regards ever
John
Looks really interesting, Jonny. I heard people got a got out of it.
Peace & Blessings
J
what a great, great preso jonny
really good stuff here jonny..
i wonder..did you call out various practices of the church that you think resulted from accommodation to modern culture?
i also wonder how we can wisely discern between practices resulting from accommodation and practices coming from a healthy theology of interculturation?
I’ve been reading a little about the methodology of problematology. It basically argues that the foundation for meaning/knowledge is questioning. Thus, we can begin to get at the meaning of a statement by wondering what question that statement was an attempt to answer. Often we find that the questions have long been forgotten (and closed off) so we are left with floating propositions devoid of the context in which they were originally asked. I wonder if we applied this to much of the practices/liturgy/speech of the church today if we would not find many floating propositions? That is, we would answers to questions that have long been forgotten or closed off so that we have little knowledge of why they were questions in the first place. Even worse, many would deny us the opportunity to re-open these questions in our new contexts for which new answers are needed..
anyway..fascinating stuff jonny..thanks as always..
mark
Gutted I missed it… There is talk of another course in Scotland – hope to get to that.
Loved the pic too. The Army are making a big deal of “cafe church” which keeps the content the same but changes the seating.
We need to move from this view… and reimagine.
Fab.
T
Re: the call to reimagine:
Deleuze and Guattari and other postmodern philosophers have been reimagining what it means to be human in terms of ‘flows of desire’ – to eat, to reproduce, to breathe, to seek knowledge and so on. They imagine the world as an intermingling of currents and invite us to see the flows within ourselves and ourselves within the flows. Walls block flows, but can also guide them. The illusion of power is equated with fascism and dams (sic) up the whole system.
The potential for us is to reimagine church in such a context. If it is the fulfilment of all these flows, it ceases to be about a single building or cultural form and is instead the fulfilment of all the desire for food in the world, for shelter, for healing, for family etc. Conversely, the whole risks becoming fascism whenever even a single aspect of these desires is obstructed.
The photo is fascinating when read in such a context. Yes, the building is unwieldy – a potential blockage. But at the same time, with the help of the truck, it is flowing. Then again, it is relying on a petro-chemical-burning leviathan to drag it along a series of prescribed routes. But the lorry is driven by people…
nice thoughts steve – be interested to hear a bit more about that – maybe next time we meet?…
The picture is fascinating. It betrays so many assumptions about what church is and how to make it “work”. In the inherited church, there’s such a heritage of services and buildings that it’s easy to get them out of proportion: they become the whole movie rather than just a snapshot of church.
Not a new or radical thought, but as it’s so bound up in our culture, we can’t underestimate the effort required for the inherited and emerging cxhurch alike to challenge these assumptions (as Douglas Holt keeps reminding me). As a Bishop in the C of E, it’s easy to get sucked back in. We’ve been thinking about this stuff more, and I’ve started to post about it.
Keep up the thought provoking work, Jonny, both on the blog and on your travels.