Organising a retreat/advance

Seth Godin's most recent blog post is provocative enough for me to consider putting it on all the blogs I write. This one for starters....

How to organize a retreat:

He prefers to call it an 'advance' because 'retreat' is too negative. [I won't tell him that I've been saying this for years....] He goes on to say:

There's a tremendous opportunity to create events where people connect. Unfortunately, it's also easy to turn these events into school-like conferences, not the emotional connections that are desired.
You can create an advance with a team that knows one another from work, or even more profoundly, with a bunch of independent thinkers who come together to energize, inspire and connect.

And this is where he really starts to jump in with innovative ideas, none of which I'm going to copy here: instead, go to the blog post and read it thoroughly, particularly if you're planning any kind of advance, whether it's for your leadership team, or your entire church. You'll find something amongst his mix of ideas that'll provoke you to be different.

Stifling innovation

Youngme Moon writes: Here's a question for you: If you had to come up with a checklist for your organization that was guaranteed to stifle imagination, innovation, and out-of-box thinking...a checklist designed specifically for people who want nothing to do with disruptive change...what would it look like?

You can find his slightly irreverent (only in the business sense) response on the Conversation, one of the Harvard Business blogs. I can't link directly to it, as it's a Vimeo video.

Why should anyone who reads this blog watch it? Because the same kind of thinking often (more than often) goes on in the church....

Putting the Christian back in YMCA

For many years the 'Christian' part of the YMCA acronym has been pretty much invisible. Go into most YMCAs in NZ - or YWCAs - and you'll be hard pressed to find much reference to things Christian. And it's been the same overseas.

However, slowly but surely, Christians are discovering that the YMCAs scattered around the globe can be mission fields in their own particular way. It may not be so easy in the YMCA system in New Zealand, where things seem somewhat different to the set-up in the States, but an article in the latest Leadership Journal online discusses how a vision to bring church to a particular Y has begun to grow into a vision to bring church to all 14,000 of them around the world.

What started as a temporary solution for a church that was without a home has turned into something altogether different. Again, the principle of going out where the people are instead of expecting them to come to you has born fruit.

Twitturgies

Gerard Kelly is the founder of the Bless Network with his wife Chrissie. They live in the Netherlands, where Gerald is Senior Pastor of Crossroads Amsterdam, a church of 40 nationalities. Gerard also writes poetry (see Spoken Worship) more recently he has shared some of his verses through twitter under the name twitturgies.

Kelly coined the name Twitturgies, asking "Why not use Twitter as a means of prayer, all the time accepting the constraints of communication in less than 140 characters? In essence I simply took the Twitter question “What are you doing?” and translated it as “What are you praying?” taking the prayers I was praying in any case and crafting them into personal liturgies."

240 Twitter prayers later, he's found that not only do hundreds of other people appreciate the prayers, but that being disciplined into 140 characters makes his prayers very focused.

Meanwhile, Ireland’s top Catholic Cardinal Sean Bray has urged his flock to use Twitter as a means of prayer. In a speech in honour of the late Father Patrick Peyton, the Priest famous for coining the phrase “the family that prays together stays together,” Cardinal Bray insists that a new movement of prayer can arise using new technology and social networks.

Photo is of Gerald and his wife, Chrissie. Courtesy of the Godspace blog

Mission/Innovative/Monastic/You Name It

A busy week on the National Mission front, with work started on enabling Supervision to become more of a reality for ministers and laypeople around the country. ('Supervision' as in the process where a person goes, about once a month, to discuss their work and life with someone trained to listen and enable them to keep moving forward.)
That's my excuse for not having posted much on this blog this week - it hasn't been for want of trying (!)
Anyway, just 'discovered' Urban Vision. No doubt they'll be happy to learn that they've been discovered after some 13 years (they 'began' in 1996). As they state on their website:
Urban Vision is a group of households and ministries in Wellington, Porirua and the Kapiti Coast who focus on building life-giving relationships with those on the margins of mainstream society, and doing justice in the midst of urban poverty. We’ve come to realise we’re a local expression of a global revolution of hope and transformation, worked out in the neighbourhoods of need we’ve relocated to.
You might consider it a church without walls, but in fact its members belong to a number of different churches and denominations. In the last couple of years however, Urban Vision has taken on a new form:
In 2007, we took the imaginative step of becoming a contemporary Order, following Jesus on the margins. In making this step, we’ve recognised Jesus is doing new things right now in Aotearoa/New Zealand (contemporary), and that we have some things in common with some of the monastic and missionary movements of old, specifically a spiritual rhythm to life (order). We have been students of history and experience: we wanted a durable structure, enabling the continuing vitality of our pioneering, prophetic and Jesus-centred threads.
There's more on their site, as you'd expect, and they're even debating how people outside Wellington can connect with their form of contemporary Order. And they're advertising some opportunities for those who are in Wellington.

Bowling Alone, Tribes and Facebook

Robert Putnam, in his book, Bowling Alone, claimed that Generation X people were disinclined to join community organisations. He said, ‘social capital has eroded steadily and sometimes dramatically over the past two generations.’

In an article entitled, Social Tribes: from Bowling Alone to Facebook, Tamara J. Erickson disagrees - at least in part. She says this generation is very closely tied to long-standing friendships, rather than becoming involved in social groups where friends have to be made. These are sometimes called ‘urban tribes.’ In fact, ‘tribes’ is the in-word (Seth Godin has written a book based on it).
So what about Facebook, Erickson asks? She has some interesting stats. You may not be asked to join as a ‘friend’ of one of your children, but the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is the 35-54 year olds, with a 276.4% growth rate. Not far behind is the 55 and over demographic with a 194.3% growth rate.

From my small experience of Facebook in NZ, I would say this is happening here too.

Yet again there's an opportunity for the church to be innovative.

Randy Pausch

"I'm constantly finding myself in situations where people are saying, well, it's never been done that way before, and I say, well, that's fine, and I guess that's an instructive piece of knowledge to share with me, but why are you saying that as if it's some sort of design constraint? You know, you said you wanted to accomplish something. And I suggested, well, why don't you do thus-and-such. And then you said, but it's never been done that way before! But I say that's not relevant to whether or not this is a good solution. Of course if you told me it had been done and it failed, that would be really useful data, all right."

Randy Pausch was an American professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

He gave his "The Last Lecture" speech on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon after he learned that his previously known pancreatic cancer was terminal. The talk was modeled after an ongoing series of lectures where top academics are asked to think deeply about what matters to them, and then give a hypothetical "final talk", with a topic such as "what wisdom would you try to impart to the world if you knew it was your last chance?" The talk was later released as a book called The Last Lecture, which became a New York Times best-seller.

Being Innovative 2

After yesterday's post on innovation, I came across an article today that had appeared in the NZ Challenge Weekly. (Unfortunately I can't link to an online version of it as they seem to be rather behind in their archiving. However, there's a slightly shortened version of it here.)

In the article we learn that Papakura East Presbyterian Church gave members of their congregation envelopes containing various amounts: $20, $50 or $100. There were two rules as to what was to be done with the money:
1. People couldn't just give the money back to the church; they had to use it to make a difference in someone else's life.
2. They had to link up with at least one other person in the congregation to combine their envelopes.

Thus the exercise served both the church by increasing community, and served the community by increasing church amongst them - you might say.

Apparently many of the congregation struggled with whether to take an envelope, and with the responsibility in using the money wisely. In the end 191 people took them and found a variety of ways to use the money: hiring a bigger vehicle for a family holidaying with a wheelchair-bound son; paying for a doctor's appointment; buying bike helmets for the children of a refugee family; giving money to a solo parent to buy shoes for their child; giving money to someone who had an unexpected vet's bill.

More than 90% of the recipients had no particular connection with the Church. The minister of the church, Geoff New, said that rather than expecting people to come to a particular church programme, this project met them where they were at. Furthermore, it gave the members of the congregation a sense of mission in ways they hadn't realised previously.

Innovative Church

Two ways of doing mission that have an air of innovation about them. We were alerted to both of these by Christian World Mission newsletter, dated 4.9.08

1.Church-goers in London's financial district walk up a gangplank for their weekly services in a floating church. A converted freight barge nestled amidst the skyscrapers of London's Docklands, St Peter's Church in Canary Wharf is the only boat-style church in Britain.
The barge was the idea of a handful of Christians working in Canary Wharf, who met at different venues to take part in Bible readings. Following this year's global credit crunch, church ministers have reported a significant rise in attendance amongst bankers, analysts and other financial workers at the lunchtime services.

2. Stressed-out London commuters were offered a moment of quiet reflection when the Church of England published a special prayer in their morning newspapers. The prayer for a "Moody Monday" was included in the free Metro newspaper after a survey by the church revealed September was a particularly stressful time for UK workers.
Of the 1,000 adults questioned, one in three want to make an improvement to their lifestyle and are expected to be "very busy" over the coming months. One in eight said they were "dreading" going back to work.
The prayer, which targeted 1.4 million commuters, asked for God’s help in dealing with everyday life and encouraged people to make the best of every new day. It also encouraged people to take part in Back to Church Sunday on 28 September.
The prayer printed in Monday’s edition of the Metro reads:

Dear God,
You know me. Don't you? I’m not just a person on a bus or a train. I’m not just another face on CCTV; or just another login name. I’m me, and I have stuff going on.
Love life issues; bills to pay. Egos at work to deal with; an overflowing inbox.
So please, give me strength. Guide me to focus on what's really important. And help me make the most of every moment of this new day in this new month.
Thank you.
Amen

The Rural Church

The Canadian Rural Church Network's latest newsletter encourages people in rural communities to be reslient and think laterally. From a section entitled RAVEing Rural, comes the following:

There is a virtual riot of lively innovation and adaptation welling up in the rural United Church. In 2007, the United Church solicited workshop proposals for an event called "More Franchises than Tim Hortons: Vital Ministry in the Canadian Context". The workshop proposals from rural leaders reveal something of the face of the 'RAVEing Rural' church. [Tim Hortons might be thought of as the Canadian equivalent of Starbucks.)

Many rural congregations are finding life through new forms of congregational partnership and innovative organizational structures. One group of 4 congregations in Northern Ontario is experimenting with a "Multi-site Congregation" model. This is not a multi-point pastoral charge, but seeks close cooperation between participating congregations with one governance body that doesn't repeat committees. It includes an organic structure, which allows for grafting on or removing existing communities as needed without changing the congregational structure.

Another congregation was experiencing the tension of a massive influx of ex-urban households in their community. They turned this into a ministry with the community by hosting discussions on what it means to be a 'new rural' context bringing healing to both church and village.

Some congregations are using reports of demographic and psychographic marketing style data to learn more about themselves, and build relationships with those outside the church. Other congregations are embracing lament as a biblical spiritual practice and are releasing energy for a new future, discovering that all change involves loss, so to change well means to grieve well.

None of this is a surprise really, since resilience and adaptability have always been the way rural communities have thrived.

Harvard Business Review

Podcasts available from the Harvard Business Review. The HBR IdeaCasts are mostly a few minutes long, delivered right to the computer – and free.

Some provocative titles: The Power of Unreasonable People; Disruptive Innovation; Don’t bother with the green consumer; Thinking inside the Box. There are some 80 titles available.