mountain masala

Research Interviews

I've just started travelling all over Australia over a 6 week period interviewing about 20 congregational leaders, ordained and lay, about Christian education - for the research project that I'm undertaking for our national Assembly and as a PhD thesis through Flinders University. Last year I conducted pilot interviews with several people. Now I've started the formal reseaerch and interviewed six people - all excellent conversations.

My research question is: What dynamic characteristics of educational leadership and of learning communities are significant for effective education for Christian discipleship in the Uniting Church’s postmodern missional context?

A question for you to ponder: Do faith communities and their leaders see lifelong learning in the beliefs and practices of Christian discipleship for the mission of God as central to their ‘reason for being’?

For the purposes of the study, Christian education is defined as the theory and practice of teaching, learning and formation in life-long Christian faith and discipleship, both for individuals and communities of faith. (Thanks to John Littleton for the suggestion of the last phrase).

The term "Christian education" seems problematic for the Uniting Church at this time, hence I am using it as an umbrella concept, and inviting people to speak in their own terms about growth in faith and discipleship.

I wrote a catch-phrase for an interim report that went: Fostering life-long discipleship through informed practice in intentional community for missional living in postmodern society.

That might sound like a bunch of cliches, but it summarised a number of aspects of the study.

This is the first of two rounds of the qualitative study, of which I'll say more. I'm travelling to every state and territory in order to interview church leaders whose congregations are diverse in terms of location, size, theology, culture, style and mission emphasis.

It's a wonderful privilege, and i hope to share some of the journey with you. Stay tuned...

messing with Tim's head

yeah, in case you don't know, I've been playing with the head of my colleague and friend Tim Hein. It started somehow with a comment of his late last year about liking The Pet Shop Boys. So now Tim gets to appear occasionally in classic album covers... He has tried to get me back a couple of times but I have vastly superior Photoshop skills. Of course, part of the beauty of this is starting with the same photo of him each time... (I now like to call him "the pet shop boy" behind his back... just kidding fatboy...)

I'm taking orders for birthday cards... and yes my college colleagues, I already have ideas for the rest of you...

Communities of Practice and Church Councils

"The most distinctive, valuable knowledge in organisations is difficult or impossible to codify and is tightly associated with a professional person's identity. Developing and disseminating such knowledge depends on informal learning much more than formal - on conversation, storytelling, mentorships, and lessons learned through experience. This informal learning, in turn, depends on collegial relationships with those you trust and who are willing to help when you ask. Informal learning activities amd personal relationships among colleagues are the hallmark of communities of practice. Hence, we see an increasing focus on informal community structures whose aggregate purpose is to steward the learning of an organisation and its invaluable knowledge assets."

William Snyder and Etienne Wenger 2004, 'Our world as a learning system: A communities-of-practice approach' in Conner, ML and Clawson, JG (eds), Creating a Learning Culture: Strategy, Technology and Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp35-58.

While the above quote focuses on informailty and relationships, I see another aspect to this. There seems to be a fundamental tension between the trend toward executive leadership by a few and the goals of forming 'reflective practicioners' and reflective communities of practice. The more that discussion about the critical challenges of life and faith are removed from the life of a community, not only is the capacity to learn together from experience undeveloped, but the personal and interpersonal practices and disciplines that might make such learning and discernment possible lose their power and purpose. The less that a synod or presbytery meeting or a church council is allowed to have deep and ongoing conversation about those things that matter most (and instead 'rubber stamp' the thinking done by a few people), the less the whole group is able to function as a self-transforming entity. Not only is an unhealthy trust and dependence built, those who see the dichotomy are likely to withdraw their participation, thereby depriving the whole of their own critically reflective capacities.

In this regard there is a fundamental problem in the notion of church councils dealing with a lot of busniess efficiently. Might we instead choose wisely about which few issues we will wrestle with deeply and prayerfully over time. Let us choose to frame our gatherings around ongoing conversations about those things that are most critical to our life and mission, and thereby build our capacity as a community of faith to make learning and discernment part of our lives.

Alive@5 in May

God's Future, Our Purpose

Here's a quick and simple video of people from my church as part of our visioning process... In an ideal world I'd gather more views from the margins... pick the key themes.

Lay Preacher Report released

The report of the national review of Lay Preachers in the Uniting Church is out now. You can download a copy here. I'm glad that bit of work is over for now!

interactive easter

coming soon to a church near me...

 

 Download Interactive Easter Poster (A4 low-resolution) 900kb

Download Interactive Easter Poster (A4 high-resolution) 8 mb

Lay Preachers in the Uniting Church

well I've just finished the final draft of a report and discussion paper on lay leadership in worship and preaching in the Uniting Church. It's the result of a couple of years of work and a year of research involving presbyteries, lay leaders, ministers and church councils. we've had a small working group, and my main collaborator has been Lynne Taylor who has worked with us as a researcher and been excellent.

the report is 21 pages and 14000+ words (its very fine print!) and will hopefully be online next week, so then I can comment on it (although my role is not to make comment until the responses come back in).

it's mainly an interesting exercise in how you help an interconciliar church that thinks its is resource-poor attend to the fact that it is resource-rich in every sense, including people. but given the growing role of lay leadership in small, rural and isolated communities, it does seem trite to speak of 'resource-rich' when people feel they are struggling.

the big challenge this week has been to summarise what we think we've learned from the research, and then provide some statements to which people can react, prior to making concrete recommendations in a couple of months time.

i don't know whether I got the last bit right, but I went from writing "needs" and "should" statements to talking about what might "benefit" people, particularly lay leaders. it will be interesting to see if there's a way to agree on desired outcomes, and then help the church be creative in seeking them. far too easy instead to tell various sectors of the church what they "should" do. i now have to think about what/how/who this might involve, and whether indeed its possible to pull off that kind of different approach. there's no question that our discussion paper looks NOTHING like any UCA report that I've ever seen...

so my PhD thesis is only about 6 times as long as this? easy peasy. (I just wish these words had all been for my thesis...) at least now I can get back to it!

 

Christian education field interviews

I'm in the process of setting up interviews with local church leaders (ordained and the other type of Christian... just kidding. we're all lay people.) who are exercising the kind of leadership in Christian education/faith formation/spiritual growth that has a discipleship and mission edge that we can learn from. i'm going through a peer recommendation process. it's been exciting to receive more suggestions than I can include from some parts of the country and bewildering to have complete silence from others. but then, i look at the flood news and figure that some presbytery people are busy with other things... since i'm trying to do this as a PhD I can't tell you much else just yet, except to say that the Assembly Project is broader than my PhD, so I'm hoping to undertake a bunch of interviews that can be shared sooner and wider. I've done some trial interviews and I've loved it (not so sure about the subjects), so I can't wait to finally be doing this. The PhD process has involved learning more about qualitative research methods (I have done some in the past and my first degree had a quantitative research major) which I've really enjoyed and hope to continue and carry back into my work at the College in 2013.

reviewing lay preachers

I'm trying to finish a discussion paper that's part of a national review of the ministry of accredited lay preachers in the Uniting Church. last year we conducted national surveys of presbyteries (21 responded), lay leaders (979), ordained ministers (about 100) and church councils (about 2000. a massive amount of work and data and Lynne Taylor was been sensational to work with on this. so now there's a 20 page report with some questions about the future. it will hit cyberspace next week (available from the UCA Assembly website), but for now I'm trying to get the last few pages sorted. writing the 'options' part is the hard bit. what do you reckon should happen with lay preachers?