Can you Crowdsource Vision?

Yesterday I was given an hour to talk to new MK ministers at a Mission Partnership Orientation Day. I think I was there to talk about fresh expressions, but combined my input with something about local shared and supported ministry - and then drew the conversation off onto collective thinking.

I argued that we need fresh ways of expressing Christian faith in an emerging culture. In other words, like Paul before us, we need to re-make church so that it is able to challenge the people who live in this culture and help them to become authentic disciples of Christ. Hence the term "fresh expression" should not be capitalised since it defines a phenomenon rather than a movement or programme. A fresh expression is any form of church activity or community that follows a journey from radical listening through community and discipleship to some form of Christ focussed existance.

On the other hand, fresh expressions can only flourish in our age if we have an alternative model of ministry. We need to view ministry as something primarily derived from the local disciple-community; in which ministry and decision making are shared; and which is supported by the wider church. As with fresh expressions I am increasingly keen to see local shared ministry as an emergent phenomenon rather than a strategy, programme or structure. In other words, it is not possible to direct, manage or govern the development of a local shared ministry, but it would be possible to recognise, nurture and encourage its development.

In conversation this innevitable led to questions of authority, organisation, power and decisicion making - as I fully expected that it would. I was interested to see how readilly concepts of local collaboration flowed from the participants. We talked about the self-organising power of the hive - and the need to release people to explore their own calling.

At this point we started to get theological - exploring issues of boundaries and the role of the Spirit. We spoke about the need to recognise God at work in all people and the difficulty this causes with tradtional concepts of a boundaried church. We recognised that the concept of the Holy Spirit means that the voice of God must be listened for in all people - particularly members of the community. Everyone seemed to find it easy to grasp that both local shared ministry and fresh expressions can only flourish if there is a clear understandning of the church as a spirit-filled, collaborative community.

One of the organisers raised the question of power and organisational structure and we could have begun a conversation about collective intelligence and so on, but time was short. I have been thinking about this since then and have been wondering (as I have been recently) about the interplay between conversation and action...

The question that this raises for me is how a group is able to make authentic decisions without resorting to formal business structures. It stikes me that the key to this is a shared vision and purpose - but is it possible for a group to generate these without having them impossed from above in some form. Hence the question: Can you crowdsource vision?

And this drew me back to thinking of a small forgotten element of the SHIFT process in 2001. We asked each church member to write three ideas on a small piece of paper. These could be their hopes or dreams for their church - although they often expressed a fear or a simple statement. When we anlysed the slips we found there were some remarkably common trends. These were then used to create a list of six values - which reflected, as far as we were able, the common mind of the community.

Now some of these values would not have been chosen by those in power - I mention "tradition" in this category - but that is exactly why this process was so interesting and so useful.

Can you crowdsource vision? I would say yes - although it probably requires a very large sample group.

Tuesday

Long day... Got up early to work on the new CtS web site. Hoped for a break between 9 and 10 but Liz turned up - she'd got the venue for team space wrong so we had our monthly supervision session early... I was therefore a little late for the communion at Holy Trinity Wolverton - or rather I was two minutes early...

The afternoon involved some more work on fresh expressions publicity and a coffee with Andrew Gale the new chaplain of Oakhill STC...

The evening involved a Mission Partnership Exec meeting and I finished the day with a major redesign of the FXMK Web Site - finishing the day as it begun - ish...

Appendix D: Meetings, Teams, Groups and Committees

Appendix D: Meetings, Teams, Groups and Committees

These are the meetings, teams, groups and committees scheduled for 2010:

Deanery Synod: Representatives of all parishes, churches and clergy in the deanery meet three times a year to pray, share information, dis-cuss ideas and make decisions about strategy and policy.

Deanery Mission and Pastoral Committee: Representatives of the parishes and clergy in the deanery meet three times a year to make decisions about deployment and other operational issues.

Deanery Chapter: Regular meeting of clergy for mutual support, sharing and prayer. Some meetings take place in the evening and are open to non-stipendiary, authorised and licensed ministers.

Deanery Leadership Team: Office holders meet six times a year to plan agendas and implement the policies and actions required by the diocese and the deanery.

Deanery Finance Committee: This group meets as required to discuss the allocation of parish share and other financial issues.

Deanery Strategy Group: This will be an open group which will meet three times a year to review the progress of our deanery plan and suggest further action.

In addition the deanery has an active involvement in:

Mission Partnership Assembly: The assembly acts as the deanery synod when it meets and is empowered to act as such.

Ecumenical Pastoral and Sponsoring Committee: This acts as the “sponsoring body” and has formal responsibility for the oversight and review of LEPs in north bucks.

Ecumenical Oversight Group: This is a meeting of local denominational leaders which meets to share news and discuss joint activity.

There are many other meetings, teams, groups and committees on which the deanery is represented directly or indirectly but these are the ones through which deanery business takes place.

Home - Back

Finance Sponsiring Board

The Finance Sponsoring Board met to receive the annual accounts of the Mission Partnership. Treasurers were congratulated on meeting the increased demands that are placed on them and we are reasonably confident about the future, although there will be challenges to meet...

Gearing up for a Recession

This evening was one of those classic first-day-back-at-work days with activity throughout the day and multiple meetings in the evening... what fun...

This evening's meetings were both worth while. Mary Cotes skipped the Mission Partnership Exec and gave a presentation to the Watling Valley about the Mission Partnership review - which seemed to focus on vision and was well received.

Although I did pop into the second half of this meeting I decided to go to the Exec - largely because my name was on the agenda a few times... mostly for reports from project groups...

This meeting did give me the opportunity to raise an issue that I've been thinking about for a few weeks...

I've been pondering the credit crunch and the oncoming recession and wondering what we should do about it. It seems to me that it would be easy for churches in MK to drift through it as bystanders. On the other hand there are some real issues beginning to emerge and there may be some useful things that we could do to prepare or respond as the economic downturn begins to affect people around us.

What we're going to do next is arrange a day at the end of January when four or five of our specialists do a bit of information gathering and speak to some of the key experts and authorities in the city. This day will hopefully give us a chance to take a snapshot of the situation in the city and give us some indication of the potential needs. My hope is that we would then be able to advise the churches about what appropriate action they could take locally or collectively.

I'm mentioning this on the blog, partly to let people know what we're up to, but also to invite responses - and start the process of information gathering - so if you have any factual or anecdotal information about the effects of the downturn on Milton Keynes please drop me line.

Supporting Clergy in LEPs

In the past the Mission Partnership carried out reviews of ministers in LEPs. They were usually linked to licence renewal (in the case of Anglicans) and similar time frames were adopted by the other denominations. The reviews asked two questions:

1. Is the post still needed?
   
2. Is this the right person for the post?
   

These would probably have been good questions to ask if the Mission Partnership (or its predecessor) had the power to make decisions about deployment on behalf of the denominations - and many people assumed that the Mission Partnership had such powers - or should have. 

Unfortunatley the reality was somewhat different and all of the denominations had their own processes - the Methodists, of course, planned everything at circuit level which really annoyed people who wanted to decide who they had in their team. In fact, all of the denominations had their own processes and decision-making bodies, but it was sometimes possible to forget this...

As for the questions?

Well, the first is a bit of a no-brainer. No-one is going to say that a post isn't needed, are they? It might not be possible to afford it - or it might be more sensible to use the resource elsewhere - but these are different questions. Ask a church if their post is "needed" and they'll generally say yes...

And the second is a really difficult one to ask if you don't have clear criteria to asses a person against. The danger is that you open the door to disafected (or manipulative) people who use such a process to stick the knife in or apply presure for their own agenda...

The truth is that neither question are appropriate for the Mission Partnership (acting as Churches together in Milton Keynes) to ask. This was made particularly clear in a couple of reviews when clergy pointed it out!

In the meantime, denominations (and partnerships) have developed their own systems of review and appraisal. Oxford Diocese has just launched its own process of annual ministerial review - and we've explored a process of peer review in Watling Valley, inviting ministers to reflect on their ministry on the basis of our agreed vision and values.

So, old fashioned reviews are dead in Milton Keynes. Some may say "hooray!" but others are conscious that these reviews provided an opportunity for our ecumenical body to ensure that clergy are properly supported - and to gather information which will help the long-term planning of churches and denominations working together in the city...

Hence a small group was formed to look at the issue. This group recognised that it is no-longer appropriate for the MP to "review" clergy but there is a duty of care. The suggestion was put forward that the Mission Partnership set up a system of regular "pastoral conversations" by a team of "visitors" who will meet clergy six months after arrival, every three years thereafter and as soon as an individual has indicated that they are about to leave. These conversations will focus on support, asking questions about practical and experiential issues and will also give clergy an opportunity to raise issues which churches, partnerships and denominations may need to consider.

The group met today and did some work tidying up its proposal. It will now be presented for people to consider. It may be, of course, that this is still regarded as an interferance in proper denominational business - or it may provide a mechanism for ensuring that our key "assets" are cared for and heard...

What do you think?

Community Organising in Milton Keynes

At the Mission Partnership Assembly this evening Tim Clapton talked about community organising - a topical theme given the previous employment record of Barak Obama - on the day of the US election.

Tim has been working on this project for over a year and is hoping to bring the Citizens project to Milton Keynes. Things seem to be developing nicely and this could be really exciting.

Community Organising began with the work of Saul Alinsky in Chicago who wrote, "Rules for Radicals" which was published in 1971.

Tim described the process that the Citizens project will probably follow. It begins with the construction of a community alliance, made up of groups like churches, mosques, schools and other local groups. These groups then meet and engage in a process of serious listening through which key community issues are identified. There is then a democratic decision (with each group given one vote) which identifies the key issues that the alliance wants to address. The alliance then identifies the people who have the power to address these issues and acts to persuade these people to enact change.

He gave us a range of great stories including that of some nuns who helped persuade a bank to pay its cleaning staff a living wage by depositing small change from a large number of collecting tins on a Saturday morning...

This project could be really significant and I look forward to seeing where it will lead...

Tuesday

Brief Summary:
Sainsburys opening
Work with Yvonne Yates at Oakhill to review her time here and talk about a new job description
Lunch with Phil Wason to catch up
Local Shared Ministry Project Group - looking at priorities, professionalism and promotion...
Ecumenical Pastoral and Sponsoring Body with discussions about the Mission Partnership Review, ecumenical confirmations, and more...
Up late trying to write a new job description for an Oakhill chaplain...

Not much time for blogging - sorry

EOG

Members of the Ecumenical Oversight Group looked at the Mission Partnership Review this morning. This was a good opportunity to flesh out some of the details...

The Exec and the Review

This evening the Mission Partnership Exec received the Review Report. This recommends some fairly major changes to the way the Mission Partnership is run, which may sound quite scary but may actually be really good news:

1. The Mission Partnership is going to become a partnership of diverse groups who are working together in mission - rather than an attempt to build an alternative ecclesiastical structure. This may sound like "deconvergence" and on some level it will be, but it's fundamentally about widening the circle so that more partners can join in.

2. The LEPs will continue and there will be some form of "sponsoring body" but decisions will be made by those who are legally empowered to do so, rather than by big MK wide committees. There will be a new "trustees" group which will include the presidents and will have defined powers.

3. There will be a new "mission strategy" which will consist of those ecumenical projects that we agree to support together. There will be some form of coordinating group which will make sure that things happen.

4. The Assembly will become an annual event rather than a burdensome converged council. This will be an opportunity to come together, celebrate, learn, tell stories, etc...

5. The denominations will need to take more responsibility for their own affairs. This means that there will need to be a revamped deanery synod (meeting more than once a year) and the URC/Methodist joint district will be formalised.

I think this is a brief summary of the salient points - we had a large document to look through. There will be more presentations over the next few months and a lot of tidying up to do.

Basically the exec thought that the thrust of this proposal was good, but more work would need to be done.

Deanery Synod

Tonight we had our annual meeting of the Deanery Synod. Synod only meets once a year because the Mission Partnership Assembly is regarded as a Synod meeting - since the denominations chose "convergence" a few years ago.

Although this is fine in principle, there are some issues about representation - as this evening showed. Many Deanery Synod members only find out what's going on once a year - if they attend the meeting. A number of churches don't feel that they have anyone to represent them at all and some people miss the opportunity to be Anglican.

We spent most of the evening explaining how the deanery works, which I think was really important for new members. It also enabled more established members to reflect on things a bit...

I don't think I could be accused of being non-ecumenical but it does strike me that the principle of convergence has some weaknesses. It obscures very real distinctions and requires people to deny part of their own identity. It makes it difficult for people to have real relationships since relationships are dependent on their being more than one party involved. It also encourages us to downplay representative decision-making bodies like Deanery Synod and emphasise converged bodies where only brief reports are possible.

We are still waiting for the final draft of the Mission Partnership review, but I hope that this will address some of these issues...

Ecumenism is good, but it's a journey of pilgrims drawing ever closer to one another as they follow Christ. When it becomes an obsession with structural unity, it is very easy to loose valuable Spirit filled life in order to gain very little.

The LEPs are, on the whole, functional Christian communities with multiple allegiances. Tearing them apart would be a denial of authentic Christian community, but the way forward is not (necessarily) the creation of one pseudo-denomination in Milton Keynes. The reality is that new expressions of Christian community will continue to evolve and spring up with whom we must learn to live and work. We are one - whether we like it or not. Structures don't create that unity, although they sometimes facilitate it...

And the future for the Deanery of Milton Keynes? Watch this space...

Supporting Clergy in LEPs

Had a good session this afternoon with some colleagues from the Mission Partnership. We were discussing the thorny issue of Ministerial Review in LEPs. In the past the MP has asked two questions: 1) Is this post needed, and 2) is this the right person for the job - and these reviews have been tied to licence/term renewal.
The only problem with this is that these are the two questions we really can't ask. No one is going to say that a post isn't needed - it's up to the denominations to decide what posts they can afford and where best to put them - and there are a huge range of employment related problems related with decisions about renewal of posts...
We got to a good point in our discussion when we agreed that the main concern of the Mission Partnership is to provide support for clergy working in LEPs where the issues of different denominations intersect. I'm going to write this up as a concrete proposal for the exec...

The business of the Church

Today I attended a meeting of Team Space, a meeting to discuss plans for Area 10 and 11, the Ecumenical Pastoral Committee and the Watling Valley Ecumenical Council. These were all meetings at which a huge variety of things were discussed. Here are just a few subjects:

• Expenses for ministers - in particular NSMs and ministers in training...
• What resources do we need for mission in the new areas?
• What is going to happen at the Covenant Service? (smoke and mirrors by the sound of it...)
• Ecumenical Confirmations - particularly the date of...
• Review of ministers in LEPs...
• The appointment of a student Youth Worker in Watling Valley...

and much more that I couldn't (or shouldn't) mention. No one could acuse us of being inactive, but I am also beginning to feel that this activity is achieving something. Sometimes I feel that we (I?) have spent the past eight years on crisis managemant, trying to get us out of a hole - preferably before the hole appears. I am increaingly hopeful that good things are beginning to happen and some of the seeds are beginning to sprout.

Wednesday

Managed to run this morning. I really must get back into a good rhythm. I find I need to run three to four times a week to actually make any difference - and there's good scientific evidence for this. I managed to trot round the wood in three ten minute miles, which is OK but nowhere near my best... I must prioritise exercise, since exercise seems to healthy eating and a more relaxed me...

Did some work in the study, answered a few phone calls, signed some papers for St Mary's. Went to Bletchley to get the tyres done...

Spent most of the afternoon in All Saints' with the Patronage Board for Stantonbury and Willen - a very long meeting - talking about the appointment procedures for a new Team Rector. This is relevant to Watling Valley and elsewhere since whatever happens in Stantonbury will be a model for everywhere else...

In the evening we had the first joint meeting of St Mary's and All Saints' councils...

Wet Tuesday

We had our weekly Team Space this morning, during which we planned the Pastoral Care Meeting in January. We came up with quite an exciting plan with brief sessions with Liz (and Derek?) on the Theology of Pastoral Care, with Yvonne on referal and myself on overall strategy... tied to practical input on listening skills and the creation of a contacts list. Should be a good session...

Then I met with Phyllis and Jeff to talk about Holy Cross. This was a great session and I feel I should say more, but I'll check with them first...

In the afternoon I had a fascinating conversation with John Punshon who's the conveener of the Worship Forum and an expert on Quaker History. The Theology Commission are going to do some work on Local Shared Ministry - which should be enormously valuable! There are so many issues connected with local ministry where denominational differences become problematic... I look forward to seeing what they produce...

This evening's Exec Meeting was in Simpson Church - which was a nightmare to get to since the road was closed. In the rain and in the dark I found myself driving round in circles... I found parts of Milton Keynes I'd never seen before - and eventually found the church...

Tuesday 4th December

This was a fairly busy day...
Preparation for Taste and See - Advent Labrynth. The intention was to do something fairly easy given the team were likely to be stretched. Not sure what sort of team there will be...
EOG - the Ecumenical Oversight Group - met at Our Lady of Lourdes in Coffee Hall. Mary was keen that all churches discuss the "Christian Presences" report... Good news from the Hospital - a second chaplain is going to be appointed...
Supervision Session with Liz - spent two hours working through the list of gifts and competancies for curates. We've agreed a list of around half a dozen "training opportunities" for the next few months...
Visit Saxon Clinic - popped in to see someone. Was good to see them.
Bought Confirmation Register - trip into Wolverton to St Andrew's Bookshop to buy the new confirmation register - which had arived after the last confirmation...
Shot off to Oxford for the Fresh Expression Oversight Group - a new group to oversee the development of Fresh Expressions in the Diocese after the end of the Cutting Edge project. It was interesting to note that fresh expressions have been launched in deaneries with high electoral roles per population - not suprising therefore that MK hasn't had any... It'll be interesting to see how this group develops. I haven't been involved in this since the discussions in 2001... but MK is definitely important strategically and there seems to be an understanding that fresh expressions can't really take off until we've tackled the issue of ministry and church... so this might be a useful discussion to be part of...
Oxford isn't exactly local, so I didn't get home until 7 and then had to rush straight out to...
The Mission Partnership Exec - which received the report from the Local Shared Ministry Group. There was a discussion about the underyling theology of ministry and the Theology Forum agreed to explore this from an ecumenical dimension. The document will now be forwarded to the presidents - and the Project Group has been provissionally recommisioned...
More work on Taste and See in evening. Still up at 1.00am - glad I'm not counting hours this week... although I had a good conversation with Yvonne in the car this evening and we agreed it would be wise to shift all meetings to 7.30 - 9.30pm. I think this may be essential to survival...
Have posted out a new set of dates for St Mary's and All Saint Church Councils... Am hopeful that we will have an agreement soon...

Another Busy Day

Another busy day. Team Space, meeting, pastoral committee, Curiculum committee, Mission Partnership AGM. Didn't stop to eat until 11:00pm. Made pasta and tried to sleep.

Mission Partnership AGM included a great presentation from Marcus about his trip to Chernobyl. Very interesting and challenging."