Mutual Ministry in Bristol

I had a super day in Bristol today. It involved getting up at five o'clock and spending several hours in a car, but it was worth it.
I met with a very interesting man called Alister Palmer who is working in one of the estates in South Bristol where he's doing some really interesting work with "transformation" - particularaly with the non-church community.
He was instrumental in setting up Enabler Supported Ministry in Tasmania with a group of six (now nine) congregations, and has recently been back to review the life of these communities as part of a sabbatical. He was particulalry interested in looking at the missionarly life of these communities (which he thinks is developing) and at their leadership. I've already seen the first draft of his report which is fascinating...
Alongside Alister I also met a group of people, most of whom had been part of a visit to Auckland a couple of years ago to take part in Enabler Training. We had a really good conversation about Mutual Ministry which I hope they found encouraging...
A couple of issues came out of the day. First, there is the whole question of leadership/mission. This visit confirmed my suspicion that the Church of England is currently focussing on a model of leadership which is primarily individualistic, heroic and inspirational - and laying this model on vicars, priests, LLMs etc... who are to be "Leaders in Mission". This tendency has some major weaknesses, not least that it doesn't recognise the richness and diversity of call - the Spirit may have other ideas... It also reafirms the traditional identification of clergy with ministry - if we are to have churches which are thriving as missionary/ministry fellowships we need to encourage collaborative approaches rather than heroic leadership.
I mentioned the book Wikinomics which I've been rereading recently - "How mass colaboration changes everything". As churches we often think that we need to learn the "command and control" techniques of business, when, in fact, there are people in the business world who are promosting and exploring a very different way of doing things... There was a rich strand in this conversation about chaos theory, self-organisation and collaboration. Some interesting stuff here...
The second lesson I took away from today was the need to do more work on helping people to understand the underlying theology of collaborative/mutual/local shared ministry. The Bristol group were plunged into enabler training in Auckland without first taking part in the AMEND course which is normally used in NZ to introduce the concept to members/ministers etc...
This fits in with some of my recent reading, e.g Thew Forrester's "I have called you friends..." and David Robertson's very helpful book, "Collaborative Ministry". Both of these contain some very deep and moving theology, which is probably needs to be grapled with before people can begin thinking and acting in a collaborative way. I've begun toying with the idea of a short course which I'm going to propose to the LSM Project Group...
We all agreed that this had been a good day and we'd like to keep the link alive. Maybe "mass colaboration" will help us all...

So back to MK and time for a bit of sleep...