mountain masala

henry lawson

I stumbled across John Schumann's "Lawson" album today - the poems of Henry Lawson set to music by Schumann. A great album for lovers of Redgum, Schumann's old band. The melodies are all very Schumann, perhaps a little too much so at times. The album is full of friends - Shane & Marcia Howard from "Goanna", former bandmates Michael Atkinson & Hugh McDonald, Russell Morris, also Aussie 'folk' legends Broderick Smith and Mal Logan on keyboards. And Rob Hirst...

We've seen Schumann live twice - once with Redgum & the Bushwackers in Avoca, NSW on their  "Up Here For Thinking, Down There for Dancing" double bill. Then on the Sunshine Coast at Alexandra Headlands performing his own stuff. Mal Logan played piano, Louis McManus was on mandolin and Mel Pike was one of the back up singers... remembering some who have passed on here...

go to the website.

very Aussie and good. Schumann's former solo work is brilliant too. and he's an Adelaide boy.

joy of joys

my G4 laptop is seriously sick and I've just ordered a new MacBook Pro..... now I'll have 2 to play with....

the G4 will get passed down the line, so Maddy is jumping for joy that she'll get the old G3 'Lombard' laptop - that cost me $6000 about 6 years ago!! the new one will be less than half that (education pricing...)

back to the serious posting shortly...

apology!

just found out that one of my sidebar links is now a hardcore porn site! the person in question had changed their domain name, and it had obviously been taken over by someone else!

so how many of you knew that and didn't tell me....

[the link has been deleted. you'll just have to guess what it was!]

more events

here are some more things happening....

reel spirituality is our faith & film series - with our answer to Margaret Pomerantz & David Stratton - Sandy Boyce & Phil Gardner. it's hosted at Spicer UC by mark hewitt. sandy & phil have wonderful and quirky movie tastes.
details here: reel-spirituality-www.pdf

thriving church is rob stoner & I working at transforming "church as we know it", helping congregational teams focus on mission. this will be hosted at blackwood by leanne jenski and the folks there. this is a really good opportunity for us to try out some of the more recent thinking from around the place. so we'll be including community development, fresh expressions of church, the "pathways" process, and some other things. details here: thriving-church-www.pdf

exemplary ministry is a visit from Dr Roland Martinson from Luther Seminary, Minnesota to talk about children, youth & family ministry. Roland be talking about a national research study on youth ministry that works as well as a number of areas in which he has great wisdom and expertise. details here: martinson-www.pdf

healthy families, healthy communities is a half-day parenting seminar that I'm running for one of our Adelaide Hills churches based on Search Institute's developmental assets. details here. balhannah-www.pdf (say what you like about the photo but it suits their area and purpose very well!)

in the meantime our semester 2 courses are up and running...

of course, you can also check it all out at the Parkin-Wesley College website.

[re]generate

the next [re]generate will be on monday 13 august at the usual venue - the colonel light hotel, 141 currie street. since the last two gatherings  have involved overseas guests, this time we'll be allowing the locals to tell us what they're doing. so if you're involved in some 'fresh expression' of church, come along and be prepared to talk for 5 minutes (and then answer questions). and if you're interesting in learning how to start being fresh, you're most also welcome to come and listen and chat!

it's $20 for a filling 2 course meal plus tea/coffee. buy your own drinks. on the verandah under fairy lights overlooking the square (they put down screens and turn on the heaters in winter!)

PLEASE RSVP if you plan to come. Click on the image to see details.

"tribal community" post will be along shortly...

industrial community

this is post #2 of lenses on community. let me say again that these are not meant to be 'categories.'

'industrial' community
modernity, the industrial revolution, and baby boomers sum up this kind of church (yes, how's that for pigeon-holing!). while the word 'institutional' would be an unhelpful use of the word, it is true that baby boomers have taken to 'organised' church, not like ducks to water, but like olympic swimmers to 100 metre pools with lanes and stop watches... industrial community is ordered, purposeful community.

people
industrial communities not only have members, they have staff, clients, customers, team leaders, and departments. people need to have a particular place in such communities. they are helped to identify their gifts and match it to a particular role. because industrial church is purposeful (driven...), all of the parts of the body need to work together seamlessly, efficiently and well. the best worship leaders, etc etc.  this is one of the great strengths and weaknesses of industrial communities - team-work and productivity by many names. there's something almost socialist about the way that the organisation helps you to find your place within it. (says he as a policital lefty...)

place
industrial community is not place-bound. it is regional, not local. provided that the right conditions are present, it can happen anywhere. unlike geographic community. we expect people to travel to a regional church (rather than expecting church to travel to them) it relies more on common interest than common location (or even common memory - what, or rather, how, is memory when it becomes place-less?). if agricultural communities are communities of location, industrial communities are half-way to being communities of affinity (see next post). The half-way is important, because industrial communities usually have more 'agriculturals' than 'tribals'. why? because agriculturals understand, in fact applaud, productivity. and because boomers are the children of boosters. hence the 'gap' with the more 'tribal' gen x.

space
yet industrials both choose and create a space. sometimes they inherit an 'agricultural' space, but ideally they choose. social mobility (with transport) is the big shift here. choose where to live, and then live in your car... geographically, place literally becomes 'my space': the front porch becomes the back yard. industrialists build factories. they renovate, remove memorials, and indeed memory (and then seek to recreate it). all spaces ought to be functional, as efficient and effective as ministry teams. one result is that the church becomes, not so much a gathering centre but an activity centre - a seven-day-a-week program place.  In a very real sense, place is secondary to space, and space should be variable. Spatially, home matters less than before, unless it's hosting a small group. In a real sense, purposeful church doesn't know what to do with non-church-member households, since they can't be a place for church programs.

time
industrial time is structured time. clock time. tick tock tick tock. schedule time, deadline time, planning time. time is purpose-driven, goal-oriented. hours, minutes and seconds are counted in ways that agriculturalists never imagined. time can be 'lost'! for agriculturalists, time has a slow, regular rhythm. for industrialists, time is measured, incremental, intentional. so industrial churches tend to fill up time, not release it. church households feel pressured by the time demands on their members. for industrials, time and space must both be ordered, and indeed  order is needed to make the new place sacred.

purpose
industrial church is 'effective' church. not merely called, but driven. (remember when driven was the opposite of called?) the booster generation built the foundations, the boomers put a factory on it. John Drane has called it 'mcdonaldisation'. it must be said that the 'boosters' knew how to replicate - MYF, PFA, CE, BYF - youth programs were everywhere.  but the boomers created national staff and curriculum. today the internet has given us global, purposeful church. this is not all bad, but the problem with the factory is not so much its orderliness, but how it is and isnt a product of a local community of interest-bearers. and also the extent to which many people discover that they just don't fit such an ordered world.

leadership
most church leadership books for 20 years have been about industrial church, albeit often working on more organic than mechanistic systems. industrial leaders are managers and CEO's, they are also persuaders and innovaters - change agents who care about transforming what their parents built. they are at the top of a pyramid of staff (= 'team') -  that's how you build and effective large organisation. they strive for excellence, and either achieve it (5%) or feel inadequate (95%).

industrial churches and industrial leaders, like those before them, have worked within their time, and in a very real sense, sought to grab hold of a 'boom period' of productivity in the face of major sociological and economic shifts. what seems clear is that success through this lens is almost always about growth, effectiveness, resources and results. what is this saying, I wonder?

hmm... this post got a lot longer as I went... I seem to be making some of this up as I go along...

'agricultural' communities

recently I revisited some thinking about community that I'd done a couple of years back about various lenses or metaphors through which we might understand 'community'. here's a short version. this is not strictly meant to be a typology: the categories are not rigid. the aim is to help community leaders think about what kinds of sub-communities, if you like, exist, and how their characteristics might differ. this thinking is fairly 'western', as has been most of my experience of community. and I have not sought to speak of community in terms of our indigenous (Aboriginal) people. the four 'lenses' are not necessarily generational, but I think that you can broadly link some generations to them. and yes, it's a caricature - just hang in with me and it may prove worthwhile...

there's no particular theoretical base, although I'm a big fan of Edward Hall and have found John Urry fantastic. I hope to dig into some more anthropology and sociology to make this more rigorous. so here we go - one lens each day and then some overall reflections.

'agricultural' community
this is the kind of community that I see when I visit the country town where my wife grew up.  farming people, but not limited to farms - I've seen people like this in most city churches.  'agricultural' communities are communities of kinship and place. in terms of gererations, I think of the 'boosters', born pre WWII.

people
in agricultural communities, folk all seem to know one another well. everyone is related somehow. you're a local or you're a newcomer, or worse, a ''blow-in' or 'feral'. people are family, kin and clan. this is the 'family' church, the CWA. kinship bonds are strong and enduring. you can walk down the street and know everyone: the shop owners call you by name. they see themselves as a welcoming community.

place
agricultural communities have a strong sense of place. these are communities of geography. streets are named after great-grandparents. familiar names on the war memorial. there is a strong sense of 'the land'; this place being our place. property is passed down from generation to generation. local landmarks have stories. people live in a neighbourhood, walk to church and the shops. of course, folk like this don't only live in the country.

space
agricultural people build spaces that last - for centuries even. why? because they don't plan to move! and also to mirror the solidity of the land beneath them - and maybe even to defy it. they construct sacred spaces from stone and mark them as sacred with plaques and memorials. of course, there's a contrast here between clearing ancient trees and trying to put timeless building in their place!

time
agricultural time is slow time. the calendar works in months and seasons. these people are patient people - hopeful when there's a drought, stubborn when someone wants to change too quickly. folk like this  sense the movement of the seasons, are aware of  the earth and the sky. in this way they are perhaps most like the indigenous people who lived on the land before them.

purpose
agricultural purpose is about maintaining what is good, both for its own sake and to pass on to the next generation. context and identity go together: there is a unity between who you are, where you live and what you do. purpose and season go together. on a farm, you don't stop planting a crop because someone says "we tried that before but it didn't work!" agricultural people are ultimately profoundly hopeful - they have learnt to trust that next year might be better despite all evidence to the contrary. in many ways, this is precisely why they resist change in the here-and-now - because God's goodness is more about providence that invention.

leadership
agricultural leaders are determined by history and kinship, whether matriarchal or patriarchal. there are tacit lines of authority. to some extent, leadership also reflects the old "pioneer" and "settler" distinction. in our recent drive interstate, I spent time thinking about how young 'european' Australia is - my parents-in-law were the very first to farm their acres in NSW, their parents the first to farm their acres in SA. i think that we have failed to see how recently rural people have become 'settlers' in our land, with all that being recent settlers might involve.

and of course, the tendency is for church leaders to be seen as the chaplain to the church and the town. I wonder how much of that is actually a carryover from pioneering rather than settling...

I'm sure all of that sounds painfully obvious, and, as I said, a caricature. well wait for the next bits - because my main point is that there are differing kinds of communities with different notions of space, place, time and purpose and both seeking and needing differing kinds of leadership.

stay tuned...

four kinds of communities

at our gathering of ministers undertaking the 'mustard seeds of mission' community development, I spoke about four metaphors for community - agricultural, industrial, tribal and virtual. I'll start posting about that tomorrow...

slow dance

this is very nice

http://www.apple.com/pro/profiles/michalek/

The result: an experience that is “akin to meditation,” Michalek says: “art that doesn’t merely beautify, but beatifies, or makes blessed.”

nice quote!

at the Adelaide Festival we once saw a japanese theatre group do a slo-mo mimed play of people getting water from a water fountain. it took each character 10 minutes to walk across the stage...

you just had to be there..... boy was I thirsty by the end of it

random stuff....

have started watching HBO's "Deadwood" series on loan from our local library. just loving it. a really nasty wild west thing - the Sopranos in the 1800's. all gambling, murder and hookers... really, it's very good.

listening to new Crowded House, Wilco, Joni Mitchell and Terry Pratchett's "The Light Fantastic." when we stopped at Horsham I persuaded a friend to let me use her library card to borrow it. that library has stacks of TP audio books on tape - they kept me sane (?) when I was driving all over western Victoria a few years ago.

It must be said that most of the TP audio books are read by Nigel Planar of "the young ones" fame. once you've heard him read one, the whole discworld universe makes sense. (I have 'heard' about 12 TP books and read 3. I hear Nigel's characterisations when I read now). if you've never hear of "granny weatherwax" or "magrat garlick" ....

Nigel Planer is just brilliant. I suspect that people who couldn't care less don't watch Dr Who either... it's ok. we can still be friends.

back home

back after a week interstate visiting my mother-in-law who had a stroke. more stuff soon.