Keith Straughan, the Dean of the University Centre Milton Keynes (UCMK), invited a few of us to a two day Master Class in Sustainable Development led by the Homes and Communities Academy. Paul Desborough (New Life West) and I went along - largely because of our interest in new areas and our concern for making connections with local communities. The first day of this course, however, proved to dirrectly relevant to our own church communities and our pursuit of sustainable, mission focussed congregations.
The workshop began with a session on Rich Pictures in which we attempted to model our communities using only visual representations of conflicts, problems, interests and actors. In my group we drew and owl to represent collective wisdom, a rainbow to represent life, a river of opportunities and a connecting circuit diagramme representing the explosive formula 1+1+1+1=100... and more besides... (If you're lucky I may be able to upload our diagramme with my owl and Keith's rainbow later...)
We then spent some time extracting tasks and issues which are crucial for the communities. This was quite tricky but we looked at leadership, communications, involvement, inclussion and so on...
The tricky bit was to formulate a series of indicators and proxy indicators which would help us understand how sustainable our communities might be. This can be quite tricky since it is hard to think of measurable quantities which indicate enabling leadership - but if that is crucial to the life of your community you need to know how to measure, or at least indicate it. The key concept here is that our results provide a map to focus conversations rather than real world data which can be used to assign resources.
The concept of a proxy indicator was particularly helpful to me in this. You may not be able to measure enabling leadership, but you could measure the number of people taking on new tasks - which might help indicate how enabling the leadership is...
Having established some indicators, the next, and even more difficult task, was to look at actual figures to indicate the ideal level of each indicator - and the upper and lower limit of sustainability. For instance, and island might need a number of hotels. There might be a lower limit which makes it difficult to support a tourist industry - but there will also be an upper limit after which it is impossible for tourism to take place because you have nothing but hotels - and nothing worth visiting...
In church terms this is a really interesting concept. A Christian community might have an upper and lower limit on its size - too small and it can't function - too big and it looses the intimacy and ability to engage with new people - or fit its venue, etc... A Christian community might also have an upper and lower limit in authorised ministry - too little and it can't function - too much and lay ministry is quashed... interesting....
The last stage of the day focussed on YouScope diagrammes which are amoeba-grams which can illustrate this visually - more on this tomorrow with any luck...
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