Understanding the past
By Tim | June 23, 2009
Somethings are so hard to explain to your kids. Life without yogurt, orange juice only available in bottles and usually only bought for special occasions, the test card, no recordable audio tools pre the cassette and so on.
This is in that vein – brilliant!
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Abandoned places
By Tim | June 22, 2009
![san2[1]](http://www.working-faith.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/san21.jpg "san2[1]")
You know how you (used to) sign up for the next new thing to arrive on the web, get a few emails and then it seems to disappear. Well for me StumbleUpon was like that and soon forgotten. Then a few months back the emails started again, recommending sites to look at. Mostly I’ve been unimpressed with the recommendations but out of each edition there’s usually one worth exploring, and this link is that.
A fascinating photo journal of abandoned places and well worth exploring. What strikes you is the size of some of these locations, and how haunting they now appear which leaves you wondering how quickly your own home area could change if conditions changed in the way(s) that afflicted these places.
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Mediocrity
By Tim | June 21, 2009
If I have any fear in life it is the danger of slipping into mediocrity, of going for ‘good enough’. The older I become the more this grips and influences decision making. So reading Seth’s post on the subject struck a chord with me. As he says “You don’t have to settle. It’s a choice you get to make every day.”
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We feel fine
By Tim | June 21, 2009
![wefeelfine[1]](http://www.working-faith.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/wefeelfine1.gif "wefeelfine[1]")
Now this site both attracts and to some extent repels me at the same time. The voyeuristic aspect is the negative but you can’t help but be impressed by the technical skill in producing the site, and the ability to in real time undertake searches of feelings across the world, and seeing that mapped in several inspiring ways. Give it a try….
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A world in a drop
By Tim | June 21, 2009
![2083919850104237032S600x600Q85[1]](http://www.working-faith.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/2083919850104237032S600x600Q851.jpg "2083919850104237032S600x600Q85[1]")
Sorry for the absence this week of entries – a very hectic time including preparing a major presentation (using a different method of working with PowerPoint called pptPlex), eldest’s final week of GCSE exams and the impending threat of a swine flu outbreak at youngest’s school.
As light relief (!) take a look at this marvellous image from Environmental Graffitti. The world captured in a drop of dew – fabulous.
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Caught
By Tim | June 11, 2009
In this historic moment, we live caught between a worldview that no longer works and a new one that seems too bizarre to contemplate.
Margaret Wheatley (Leadership of Self-Organised Networks – Lessons from the War on Terror)
(Her essay mentioned above is well worth reading!)
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Getting to excellent
By Tim | June 11, 2009
I regularly read Seth’s blog as I find most posts interesting, but this one really started me thinking about how I go about projects that involve collaboration with 3rd parties. The basic premise he puts forward is there are three types of approaches: 1) collaborators whose goal is to please you and give you whatever (they think) you want; 2) collaborators who are working to produce something they love and are proud of and 3: those who work to make something excellent.
His point is that there is a difference between 2 and 3, and having worked in consultancy for others I can appreciate the difference. It is amazingly easy to slip into a mode of seeing yourself as the ‘expert’, receiving a client’s brief and then helping your client by producing something you think is brilliant. The problem is that quite often this can err into providing beauty or style or whatever your goal is and actually miss the mark of what the client is trying to achieve, or what the users of the product or service will actually engage with and want.
The third option requires a more humble attitude on the part of all engaged in the creative process, to pitch their own thoughts but allow those ideas to be shaped by the views of others. My experience of design training certainly gave me a very positive experience of constructive criticism, but it is a way of team working that hasn’t until recently been very popular.
His closing point is about how you create an environment across a varied team that enables constructive dialogue – I thought the suggestion of having almost a pre working environment where together you can look at an allied subject and all bring critical views to bear seemed a good one, as then all parties have a chance to build respect with the others.
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A deeper truth
By Tim | June 10, 2009
I really enjoyed reading a good article from George Monbiot yesterday in the Guardian Online which cast the idea that the reason behind the uproar over MPs expenses is actually rooted in something far deeper – our country’s history of extortion through use of its empire both physically and more recently the powerful impact of its financial business to effectively export its problems elsewhere. The problem now is we have run out of empire, of place and substance, to provide any more bailouts with the current financial situation.
Worth reading to get an insight into our troubled past – certainly an excellent source of ideas for intercession and repentance. Not comfortable reading but then real history rarely is.
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Systematising community
By Tim | June 7, 2009
I caught this quote following a tweet from Dougald to an article yesterday, and couldn’t help thinking of the parallels with how people have tried to systematise church over the centuries.
Share this Post[?]"No administrative system is capable of representing any existing social community except through a heroic and greatly schematized process of abstraction and simplification…officials took exceptionally complex, illegible and local social practices, such as land tenure customs or naming customs, and created a standard grid whereby it could be centrally recorded and monitored…
They did not successfully represent the actual activity of the society they depicted, nor were they intended to; they represented only that slice of it that interested the official observer…Categories that may have begun as artificial inventions of cadastral surveyors, census takers, or police officers can end by becoming categories that organize people’s daily experience precisely because they are embedded in state-created institutions that structure that experience."
James Scott, from ‘Seeing Like A State’.
Topics: Community, Organisation | No Comments »
Working by hand
By Tim | June 6, 2009
I’ve just completed (finally, after a nearly 3 year wait I’m ashamed to say) building a new garden fence on one side of our rear garden. Those that know me know that I’ve done quite a lot of DIY although in recent years this has diminished due to levels of work, to the point of paying for someone else to convert our loft at the start of 2008.
Despite in some ways not looking forward to doing the job (with experience knowing the problems you’ll encounter before you even start can depress you before a tool is lifted in anger) I actually found it to be a very satisfying diversion from work activities (which tend to be sedentary and verbal in nature).
Just after completion I read a fascinating article in the New York Times entitled ‘The Case For Working With Your Hands’ by Matthew B Crawford which looks at the stereotypical way many ‘knowledge’ or service industry workers tend to view those who work using manual skills as somehow being inferior, and contrasts this with the author’s own story of academic and professional success giving way to eventually setting up his own motorcycle repair business, and how he has found greater fulfilment on all levels through this work. He notes how many see any work that involves you in getting ‘dirty’ as somehow unskilled or not engaging of the intellect. But it is not a rant against cubicle work per se, and uses personal stories very well – do take the time to read it.
Having recently read the Transition Handbook where Rob Hawkins comments on how the current and up and coming generations in our nation are possibly the least manually skilled of all time I’ve been provoked to reassess using my own manual skills. It might also have something to do with my wife’s desire for a fairly complete revamp of the garden 
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Focus
By Tim | June 4, 2009
I’ve been mulling over how often I have defined things by drawing lines to separate one thing from another, as though something can have a fixed state of understanding to enable such a delineation.
I suspect I do it to be able to get a grasp on how things fit together, to be able to perceive value and so on. But often the result is to box things up into understood categories, carefully constructing a framework of comprehension.
But what has drawn my attention is focus. Focus can be seen as a very definite state, e.g. once something is in focus you see what is is clearly. But actually it can also be an infinitely variable thing. For starters how much something is in focus is a perception. All the time things around us are in states of focus, whilst our attention (focus ring?) draws particular things in our surroundings into clearer view. Whilst I am focusing on something in the garden as I write this to the edges of my vision I am aware of things there but are not in sharp focus. Yet they are still understandable. Focus is driven by what I want to look at.
Then too there is one’s own ability to see. As someone recently turned 50 (I know, hard to believe…) I’ve found since 48 that my eyesight that had remained clear at all focal lengths started to weaken when looking at things close up, to the extent that now I need reading glasses to type this blog comfortably. The use of glasses is wonderful but also limiting – now I have a certain field of focus but guaranteed non-focus if I try looking beyond the working range of the glasses. I gain clarity but lose flexibility.
Being me I then began to relate this concept to how I understand and know Jesus. At various stages of life through different inputs I’ve constructed ‘views’ of Jesus, quite naturally to gain a better perception of him and how I need to relate to him and what he stands for. And yet looking back whilst each view has drawn together an amount of focus at the same time it has hardened the view and captured it into a still picture, something that is (all too easy) to simply look at and move on from.
Whereas these days I am finding that Jesus is best looked at through variable focusing. As you look to find justice in him certain things come into focus, but you can smoothly refocus onto grace and mercy and swing across to joy and freedom and all the time every part is refocusable. It doesn’t have to become a set view, a still image. In fact he will actively ensure he keeps moving to break down any set view of himself, because we haven’t seen it all yet.
The other strand of thought about focus relates more directly from the idea of a dioptre lens on a camera view finder. You can have the best camera in the world, a phenomenal zoom lens and yet not actually see whatever you are looking at in focus because the dioptre lens is not set to optimise your view of what the camera lens is seeing. For me this speaks of my inner sight, for the things that I choose to see/value/miss. Of how I think, of the mindset I retain around any given subject, and this can have a huge impact on what I see, and how much I am able to judge whether something is in focus or not.
The challenge is to seek to adjust that inner dioptre lens of self to be able to focus on Jesus and who he is revealing himself to be. To be willing to lay aside what I find comfortable, acceptable, understandable and to seek to look upon who he really is.
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New songs need new singers
By Tim | June 3, 2009
The Guardian Online carried a very interesting article under its Comment is free section about Gordon Brown’s dilemma yesterday – not that the situation hasn’t been covered in gory detail elsewhere – but from the perspective that new songs that usher in unheard music absolutely require new singers.
Poor Gordon Brown could have any number of radical ideas about bringing change in the political setup of Parliament but the simple fact that he uttered them would mean their downfall. The old voice cannot fool the listener that something new is being sung.
This is not to say in this instance that Gordon Brown is a bad leader but that times that call for the new have ears for the new. This is why in any sphere of life there is almost always an inability for even old revolutionaries to bring new revolution – they are too attached in the minds of the public to known ways to ever be ‘new’ enough. Leaders of anything can be very capable managers to something but in managing seem over time to lose the ability to become radical change agents. Micro change is always a part of successful management so it is not that leaders cannot see the need for and implement change, but it is when times call for paradigm shift they tend to flounder.
Now I am not saying that once you’ve been involved in something, and time passes, you are then forever wedded to what you have been doing and cannot be involved in something new. But you inevitably accrue vested interests in the existing, the status quo, and even if you personally think you are capable of being radical those wider about just do not. I suspect that to become a fresh voice will involve some period of separation from leadership, to retune oneself away from current voices and pressures, and to find the music of tomorrow free from the stilting influence memory.
Funnily enough this thought also arose in the context of thinking about the new Transition Town initiatives and movement growing at this time. I’d been trying to find something locally to get involved in and picked up on a fledgling group nearby via a local Green Party blog. It left me wondering whether for instance the Greens, despite longing for radical environmental change for so many years would in fact be proven to be ‘old stuff’ in this new move, and might in fact have become so entrenched in their positions that they were unable to enter in to the new environment (sic) of co-operation and partnership that the Transition movement flows in.
A particular challenge for spiritual leaders too. In Christian terms all major new moves of God have happened outside of the existing church of their day. As the scripture says ‘”new wine comes in new wineskins”.
Sorry Gordon, it is time to move aside.
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Much in the window but nothing in the room
By Tim | May 31, 2009
Oft quoted I know but I came across this quote reading the Transition Handbook the other day and it just summed up so much of the madness going on at the moment…..
We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time.
We have more degrees but less sense;
more knowledge but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines but less healthiness.
We’ve been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble in crossing the street to meet our new neighbour.
We built more computers to hold more copies than ever,
But have less real communication;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods but slow digestion;
Tall mean but short characters;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It’s a time when there is much in the window
But nothing in the room.His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
Topics: Choice, Perception, Possibilities, Signs of the times | No Comments »
Red Riding Hood revisited
By Tim | May 27, 2009
Great re-telling of a traditional fairy story!
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Photocopies
By Tim | May 21, 2009
![images[1]](http://www.working-faith.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/images11.jpg "images[1]")
A quote from ReJesus by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch.
Sociologists recognise that the fading of the initial founding impulse of a movement is not unique to Christianity but is true of all religious expressions . (They) call this the “routinisation of charisma” and say it accounts for the decline of religious organisations and people movements. What happens in the beginning of a movement is that people encounter the divine in a profound and revelatory way, but with successive generations this encounter tends to fade like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. What begins as a revolutionary, life transforming, confrontation with Jesus eventually subsides into a codified religion and is subsequently incorporated into normal social life.
Topics: Discipleship | 1 Comment »
White knights
By Tim | May 20, 2009
![oct_23_association_news_spokesperson_training[1]](http://www.working-faith.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/oct-23-association-news-spokesperson-training1.jpg "oct_23_association_news_spokesperson_training[1]")
An article in the Financial Times (free in my gym before you ask….) caught my eye this morning, after having written the ‘What If…. we became politicians’ post a couple of days ago.
Whilst not the breadth and depth of what I’d been dreaming of it certainly marks the fact that these are potentially wide open times for those connected to their community, and willing to be a spokesperson for their group.
Topics: Politics, Possibilities | No Comments »
As genuine as….
By Tim | May 20, 2009
Is the church (any church, your church) “just about as genuine as tea made from a bit of paper which once lay in a drawer beside another bit of paper which had once been used to wrap up a few dried tea leaves from which tea had already been made three times”?
Søren Kierkegaard
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What If…. we became the politicians?
By Tim | May 19, 2009
I read this provoking article yesterday that focused not on the negatives coming forth from Parliament at the moment (seemingly hour by hour) but on what could the positives be.
Rather than the end of democracy as we know it, I predict a resurgence of political engagement. This story has done more to engage the public in politics than any screwy government initiative. From the hundreds of e-mails I’ve received, people are far from disheartened. Instead they profess a sudden resurgence of hope. Something I imagine many Americans felt when Barack Obama was coming into the home straight of the US election.
This could be the chance to revolutionise British politics, to create a new form of parliament that is entirely open to the people. This is the beginning of real democracy.
So what if…. we became politicians? What if we entered politics, put ourselves forward for election at local and even parliamentary levels? No, we wouldn’t form a party. No, we wouldn’t need an issue or 20 to rally behind.
What if people who were willing to talk and think and dream and work together actually came together. Together to begin to talk through issues as we see them in all their diversity, to think of a multitude of answers that could benefit all, dream of possibilities to overcome things that deeply concern us, and to actually work together…..
How stupid, thinking naively that could ever happen. After all, we wouldn’t have the backing and stability of a political party behind us. We wouldn’t have gone through the ranks, learning the craft of politics from experts. We wouldn’t have much if any experience of wielding power, and almost certainly no background of managing huge budgets.
Hmmm…. actually sounds quite a benefit to me at the moment. So what if?
Topics: Change, Dreams and visions, Leadership | No Comments »
Extreme Shepherding
By Tim | May 18, 2009
This is completely daft and yet a remarkable piece of work by those concerned. You’ll always take notice of sheep being herded in future…..
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Ice Age antics
By Tim | May 18, 2009
![images[1]](http://www.working-faith.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/images1.jpg "images[1]")
Some of us had a fascinating conversation at a cafe on the Southbank a few weeks ago about the last Ice Age, and how traditionally this had been viewed as taking a huge span of time to arrive and eventually disappear, and that the coverage of the ice had been complete. However recent research is beginning to reveal that the story might actually have been very different. That the change from normal to ice and back again could have happened within as short a time span as 10-30 years, a single generation.
Also discovered has been evidence that far from complete coverage there were in fact pockets of ‘normal’ or true life, hidden away in reserved protected spaces often halfway between the heights and the valleys in shielded gorges or similar locations. Trees and plants still grew there as before, nurturing a former potential for life and health that once melting came acted as explosive bases of recolonisation of the land masses, relatively quickly restoring the earth to fruitfulness and vibrancy.
The conversation quickly moved on to the parallels that could be drawn of communities of faith that could accurately sustain the life of Jesus through difficult times, and yet be strong and sufficiently full of his life to be able to act as sources of rapid repopulation of that life at an appropriate time.
There must have been something added to the lattes that morning……
Topics: Community, Possibilities | No Comments »