i am in helsingborg sweden for the weekend having been invited by mark cotterill to speak and take part in a weekend for pioneers around new forms of church and so on. i am here with david cotterill who is pioneering in deptford and trained with us at cms as a pioneer. he is mark’s brother. they are both pioneering with the salvation army. the theme of the weekend is future present. this was fun to find out because they chose it without any idea that we had explored that at a conversations day at cms that became a book. i have added the book here as a pdf to download – futurepresent.pdf – and it is linked to in the books page because the proost site on which it was hosted as a free download is defunct.

here is the reflection i wrote for the book to introduce the theme. i will be sharing a mix of that, pioneer practice and a couple of reflections on jesus embodying a different imagined future in his encounters with those at the edges (which is new material i am working on). looking forward to it… (thanks to kat for the photo which i think is from an exhibition in copenhagen)

Future Present introduction

There are so many areas of life where it feels as though the system is broken or stuck, that it needs to change, that we need to imagine and build something different. This is true of political life, farming methods, our dependency on oil which is depleting and overheating the planet, the growing disparity between rich and poor, how we organise society, how we care for those pushed to the margins of society, how we celebrate diversity, and how the church organises as communities of followers of Jesus.

When faced with the need to change there are a few possible responses. This zine is not that interested in postures of denial or defence. I saw a a wonderful photo typifying this sort of response with a crowd of people on a beach all with their heads buried in the sand – it was a protest at the denial of climate change. I took the self portrait photo below when I was out walking near Bath on a disused railway track. I called it ‘waiting for the train that no longer arrives’. in many areas of life where the world has changed and the flow of life moved elsewhere people keep doing things that once worked and flourished rather than move elsewhere. This is not necessarily denial – it can simply be a failure to notice the change that has taken place all around and then suddenly it feels too late, or perhaps it is a blindness or an ignorance. 

We are assuming here that the reader is interested in change and newness wanting to to make a better world, to make good, to enable flourishing, to come up with creative solutions. We won’t be spending much time making the case for change. 

A common practice around change is to look at the way things have been done and to tweak and adjust them. This works well to improve existing solutions. But where it doesn’t work is where the system itself needs to change. Something much more radical is called for. 

In their book ‘The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research I The Age Of Austerity’ Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven give an example from university research which is the field they work in. They don’t like the way university life is organised and structured. So they say what is needed is prefigurative research. What they mean by this is that the first task is to imagine a university that is differently organised in a way that leads to flourishing. Then the research in the present should be designed and done on the basis of that imagined future university and not on the basis of tweaking the present way of organising, i.e. it prefigures a different world. They work with social activists and movements to work in this way. They facilitate groups where the task is to dream and imagine different futures and then ask ‘so what’ for how we act in the present now. They have discovered that this builds communities of resilience and social movements that are fecund ecologies ripe with possibility. In using research to gather people in this way they find that participants gets loads out of it and thank them for it. But they also say that they would not have made the space for reflection and imagination that has led to change if they had not been invited into a space to do so! 

Future present takes that idea, that approach to change. It can be applied to any area of life and culture. The first task is to imagine the future and then the second task is to act in the present on the basis of that imagined future, to make the future present, to embody a better world now. The reflections in this zine are quite macro – planet, church, city. But it actually gets just as interesting when drilled down to something very focused and local – a village school, a business, sharing work and parenting in a marriage, what to do about the 8 churches in a deanery, 6 families stressed out on work and paying the bills exploring how they might live differently together.

Future present is a play on a tense. It says something will have happened. The future is present. Life gets so busy and focused on the immediate that it’s much easier to live and act in the past continuous tense unable to change or shift out of old ways of doing, thinking, being. It does take some kind of intervention, space and intentionality to have a different kind of conversation. That was the idea behind a day we held where we invited contributors to take an area and do this kind of imagining. This is what we said on the blurb for that day:

“Everything created was at some point an idea, a dream of someone somewhere. Another world is always possible, always dream-able. Always right in front of us. How can we realise the future now?

Join us for a day of imagining together how we can make God’s dreams for our world come true: for our planet, for our cities, for society, for the church, for our neighbourhoods, for us. Now…

We are currently looking for people who want to contribute creatively to this conversation. This could be in relation to any area – mission, the workplace, the economy, education, sexuality, community, you name it. We’re calling on speakers, poets, artists, photographers, filmmakers, writers, musicians, storytellers, architects, activists, prophets, theologians, builders, social entrepreneurs, community developers, advocates for justice to gather, present ideas and dream together. 

The day will be built around our dreams. And our dreams will build our todays. The future is at hand. It’s time to change tense. “

There is a great tradition of this sort of thinking in theology. It’s what the prophets did. They grieved for the way the world was broken enabling the shedding of tears where people had become numb to the reigning empire’s way of dong things. Grief leads to newness. Then they imagined a different future through their poetry and art – another world where swords are beaten into ploughshares, where there is no sorrow and sighing, where the healing of nations takes place, where justice dwells, a banquet where all are at the table together and there is no exclusion, there is a new heaven and earth. Jesus called this future the kingdom of God and announced the future present when he said ‘the kingdom of God is here’, and proceeded to live life in the light of that incoming future. 

Whilst this all sounds pretty easy and straightforward, the bad news is that Jesus got killed! It turns out the empires and systems have plenty of people who have vested interests in the way things are, in the status quo and they do quite nicely out of a world of business as usual. So making the future present is difficult. There are lots of accounts of inspiring people – innovators, entrepreneurs, prophets, artists, saints – who changed the world. In almost every case the ideas that they had got rubbished at the time and they are effectively labelled as heretics within whatever community or institution they are in. They saw something that others couldn’t see. And yet they somehow persisted to give those ideas legs and make them reality. I have been reading ‘We Do Things Differently: Outsiders Rebooting Our World’ by Mark Stevenson in which the author has sought out people who have come up with solutions to some of the crises the world is facing. They range from methods of growing rice that increase yield without use of chemicals that erode soil to designing an engine that drives a piston based on going from liquid gas which is really cold to air and has a bi-product of refrigeration. The latter has the dual benefit of helping food be refrigerated so there is less waste and emitting zero carbon. In every case you would think that the farming community or scientific community would welcome these brilliant innovations. But I found the book a sobering reminder of how particularly change that has to imagine a different paradigm or world in which its innovation makes sense is invariably fraught with opposition initially. 

So for the future to be made present as well as the dreaming and imagining there is likely to need to be some nous about process of change. Alongside imagination there will need to be some tactics and strategy to navigate the building of whatever is dreamed alongside some tenacity. And there is a sort of received wisdom in anthropology which looks at change that the new is often best done with some distance from the old. Gerald Arbuckle suggest that the new belongs elsewhere and needs some distance and protection from the powers that be if it is likely to have a chance to succeed along with some institutional advocates who fully get and support the innovating pioneer. Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze in ‘Walk Out Walk On: A Learning Journey Into Communities Daring To Live The Future Now’ similarly map a change process where those seeing new worlds need to not be in the old system if they are to have the space to embody a different kind of world out of the future they imagine. And very much like the process in the Radical Imagination it is the friends on the journey with them together who provide a community of supportive pioneers that creates a different kind of ecosystem where new possibilities and imagination run freely rather than being resisted.

This is not to devalue the present or the past. There is great gift and treasure in both. And of course newness or change for its own sake is not worth much. And it’s by no means everyone’s task to dream the future. But there are those seers, artists, prophets, poets, pioneers, innovators, entrepreneurs, whose gift and call is to dream new worlds and make paths where there are no paths that others will be able to follow later.

The reflections here are really inspiring and varied. We hope they catalyse some conversation and new ideas for others. But above all we hope that it might lead to some small groups who get together over a meal or a drink for some friendship and conversation who dare to imagine future present in a whole range of areas of life and culture. The process we are suggesting is pretty simple and could be summarised in three steps

1. Get some people together
2. Pick something you want to see changed and imagine a different future
3. Design the present on the basis of that future to make the future present

Bon voyage!