mountain masala

New Ministry Role for 2014

I can finally tell you that I have a new ministry role from the start of 2014. I will be the Uniting Church's National Director for Formation, Education and Discipleship. This is a five year appointment in a new role arising from the national review of Christian Education. I'm very excited about the role, although the decision to leave Uniting College has not been an easy one. I started at the College 9 years ago, and after a long and complex journey of change, it feels like we are starting to hit our stride, so to speak. I have tremendous respect for my colleagues there and for what they will continue to do for the sake of the mission of God.

I will be based in SA and working from home (no move to Sydney in case you wondered.) There is a new Working Group on Formation, Education and Discipleship with Ian Price as Convenor and a bunch of excellent people on board. It's a developmental role, which I love, and I believe that I can bring my full range of experiences, skills and learning to it. At the same time, there are some significant responsiblities here and I have to grow in the job to be able to do it faithfully and well. And that's the way it ought to be.

I hope to continue as an adjunct faculty member with the ACD, Uniting College and Flinders University.

Regrettably, the decision-making process has been drawn out which has resulted in a very short departure window at the College. So I finish up next week before some study leave and annual leave. That has not been easy for all involved and its seems rather sudden and unfinished at College.

I feel a sense of call from God to this role. I am deeply passionate about helping the church hear and follow Christ's call to transformation, personal and social. I have a vision of congregations as lifelong learning communities of discipleship for the sake of mission, and of church leadership as enabling this. I think that there is a new, strategic opportunity for collaboration across synods and presbyteries. And I believe that the Assembly could and should be more focussed in how its work helps congregations through all of the above. I am also a resourcing junkie, so I hope to help shape how the church can resource congregations well in our changing media world. Hopefully I am finally at the stage when I've realised that I can't save the church by myself (hoping...), so it has to be about recognising, building and learning from the gifts and capacities that exist across the church.

Here is the position description if you're interested. I'm partly putting it out there because the Assembly is often a mystery for people.

A Very Mitchell Menu

The first copies of the Mitchell family cookbook arrived today from Lulu.com. 200 pages, hard cover. Over a year in the making. Full of iPhone pics. Family favourites like "Aunty Judy's Meatloaf" and "The Mitchell Sausage Special", the Melmoth Pastie recipe, Yvonne's amazing Christmas Ice Cream Cake. Mitchell-designed pizzas and other concoctions. Christmas dinners at "Ristorante Mitchell". Plus our take on favourites from our many cookbooks. And pictures of us and our garden. No it's not for public sale for copyright reasons, but family members can hope to see one eventually. It looks terrific. Now we wait for the girls to say "Can you teach me how to make this one?"

 

Moroccan Chicken Bake with Couscous

Here's a Moroccan take on Bill Granger's Coq Au Vin recipe. Chicken is covered in moroccan spice mix (I used bought stuff) and drizzled with lemon juice. French shallots, garlic cloves, cherry tomatoes, garlic oil, lemon slices, baby fennel, rosemary leaves, salt and pepper. Baked for 20 mins at 220C. Then added a cup of white wine and drizzled honey on top and baked for another 25 mins (It was starting to burn so I put alfoil on top for the last 5 mins.) Coriander leaves on top. Served with couscous with toasted pine nuts and pomegranate seeds. Home-made harissa and zhoug on the side. Fabulous.

Beetroot Soup

Beetroot soup made with beetroot from our garden, french shallot, garlic, chicken stock and thyme. A big dollop of creme fraiche mixed with goat's curd. Plus parsley flowers that I wouldn't use again (my idea...). From Jason Atherton's "Maze".

A Moment's Grace

An Exhibition of Photography and Prose
for the Adelaide Fringe Festival 2014
Pilgrim Uniting Church,  Flinders St, Adelaide.

Glimpses of the sacred. The wonder of the human journey captured as moments in time. Images of life, love and loss seen through the lenses of SA photographers. Each image will be accompanied by an original piece of reflective prose. A contemplative journey across the unpredictable and precious stepping stones of life.

Pilgrim Arts invites South Australian photographers to submit mounted photographs for this exhibition in March 2014. In accordance with the theme, the aim is to portray snapshots in time of the human journey, to shed light on the beauty, strength and frailty of humanity, to glimpse sacredness and grace through life’s ups and downs.

More information here. Download A Moment's Grace

Photo by Maddy Mitchell.

Potato Tartin

OK I didn't get this right. We ate at 10 pm after I tried 3 times to make the caramel glaze thing. i didn't succeed. Here's what we did eat along with baked chicken wings and steamed silverbeet from our garden. The recipe is from Ottolenghi's fantastic "Plenty", which is all vegetarian.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups cherry tomatoes
2 tbsp olive oil
500g small potatoes, skins on
1 large onion, sliced thinly
3 tbsp sugar
2 tsp butter
3 sprigs of oregano
150g goats cheese
1 sheet puff pastry

Cut cherry tomatoes in half. Bake them on baking paper with salt and pepper and some drizzled olive oil at 140C for 45 mins.

Boil potatoes in salted water for 20-25 minutes. Allow to cool, then cut off tops and bottoms so they are 2.5-3 cm long.

Saute onion in olive oil and some salt for about 10 mins until golden.

Brush a 22cm cake tin with oil and line the bottom with baking paper.

Now this next bit didn't work for me, even though I tried to make it three times! In a small pan, cook butter and sugar on high heat, stirring constantly, until it forms a semi-dark caramel. Pour into cake pan and tilt to spread it evenly over the bottom.

Each time the caramel was too thick. I learned to melt the sugar first and then add the butter bit by bit but it still didn't work. Next time I'm inclined to try melting more butter and then add sugar bit by bit.

Since it didn't work, I decided to put the puff pastry on the bottom rather than the top (as is usual with a tarte tartin, which you bake and then flip upside down). Obviously if you make it properly, the butter caramel becomes a glaze on top once its flipped.

Cover the base with shredded oregano leaves. Lay potato pieces close together and push the tomatoes and onion into the gaps between the potato.

Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper, then crumble the goats cheese on top. Normally you'd then add the puff pastry and bake on 200C for 25 mins, then 15 mins at 180C. Let cool for 2 minutes, place a plate on top and flip the tart. If you do it properly like this, the cheese will be at the bottom of the pie. Because I put the pastry on the bottom where the caramel was meant to be, the cheese ended up on the top.

Anyway ts tasted great as it was and I'll be trying again to make it properly!

Two new pizzas

Arrived home yesterday after an overnight flight from 10 day holiday in Malayia (commentary and photos to come). It was like coming home hyper after a speaking trip, so instead of sleeping, I ended up adrenalin-baking, so to speak.

Roast Beef and Veg Pizza (funky Photoshop filter version)

This worked much better than I expected. Tasted brilliant and was gobbled up. Leggos pizza sauce on the base, then Coon Pizza cheese (why? because we had it leftover from church camp... ), slices of rare roast beef (from the supermarket - rare made all the difference). Then added thin slices of baked baby turnips (from supermarket - first time I've seen them there), baked parsnip, and baked red and gold beetroot (home-grown and picked on the day) and crumbled goats cheese. After it came out of the oven I added more goats cheese and parsley. Then drizzled a sauce that I made up. It went something like this: a large handful of parsley leaves, 4 cloves of roasted garlic, a tablespoon of garlic oil (from the roasting), 1 tbsp lemon juice, a large tsp of Dijon mustard and the same of wholegrain mustard, 1/2 cup of sour cream, some wasabi (or use horseradish) 1-2 tsp - whizz it all in a food processor. Add salt and pepper to taste. Seriously, this was one of my better creations.

Vegetarians - this would be quite fine without the beef. You could substitute thinly sliced eggplant.

Smoked Salmon and Fennel Pizza

So, brush the pizza base with garlic oil. (What is garlic oil? Well, you bake a whole head of garlic, unpeeled, in olive oil, and then put the garlic and the oil in a bottle in the fridge, and you have amazing garlic and oil for weeks.) Added halved, small bocconcini cheese. Then halved, baked cherry tomatoes (I had red and yellow ones on this occasion, cooked with salt, olive oil and basil). Then slivers of pan fried baby fennel and crumbled feta cheese. Cook the pizza, and afterwards add smoked salmon, more crumbled feta, parsley, and this other drizzle sauce that I made up - 1/2 capsicum, sliced and sauted. saute a handful of sliced leek (in this case, our first from our garden), add a handful of halved cherry tomatoes, then 1/2 cup of vermouth - simmer and reduce. Whizz the capsicum and leek-tomato mixture in a food processor along with 1 tbsp lemon juice and a couple of cloves of roasted garlic. Top with parsley leaves. Just excellent.

Malcolm Gordon & Songs That Unite

Recently I played guitar and mandolin in the worship band for our synod meeting. Jenni Hughes and Sean Gilbert did an excellent job of choosing great music (OK, maybe one or two exceptions.) The worship resources are listed here on the website of the Centre for Music, Liturgy and the Arts. I've been pondering why some songs seemed to work for this particular community and why others didn't.

Malcolm Gordon, a musician and minister from NZ (Presbyterian) was visiting Australia. He's an accomplished musician and songwriter, though not in the mould of 'famous' Christian 'artists'. His website, One Voice, is less a personal blog and more a broad project about music and the creative arts.

 

Malcolm shared some great music at our Synod meeting (see above video) and spoke about "Songs That Unite", the music and image website that was set up recently by the Uniting Church's National Assembly. The site has some excellent Australian and NZ music and images. Check it out.

First pick

Arrived home from 10 days away to find our first beetroot ready to eat!

Living Into the Bible

Ben Myers recently presented two excellent sessions at the annual Synod meeting on the Uniting Church SA on living into the Scriptures. His first session drew on the "Festal Orations" of Gregory of Nazianzus, a 4th century theologian and preacher. Gregory's remarkable sermons retell the Gospel narratives in the first person, with the hearer being imported into the story, reliving it in the here-and-now. One of Ben's observations was that four gospels are required to provide the fullness of the biblical world that might in a sense, encompass our world, our place, our time.

His second session drew on Athanasius' fourth century exposition of the Psalms. In this instance, Ben invited us to reflect on how we sing our way into faith, and on the Psalms as a canon for the whole of human experience.

This notion of being a people shaped by the Word has long been a theme in Christian education. In his excellent book, "A Pilgrim People" (now available on Kindle), John Westerhoff says "Our identity is dependent on having a story that tells us who we are; our understanding of life's meaning and purpose is dependent on having a story that tells us what the world is like and where we are going... The church is a story-formed community." In this particular book, Westerhoff traces the liturgical seasons of the Church Year as the narrative arc of Christian faith and identity.

In a different sense, Walter Brueggemann, in "The Creative Word", describes how the canon of the Old Testament by its nature is educative in terms of both substance and process: "how the biblical material reaches its present form (canonical process) and the present form that it has reached (canonical shape) are important theological matters that tell us about the intent of the biblical community." Bruggemann then examines the role of narrative, prophetic poetry and wisdom literature as three strands or modes of biblical education. The narrative of the Torah states the community ethos, the prophets disclose the pathos of God and Israel, and the wisdom literature frames the logos, or the sense of order and meaning in life.

 Samuel Wells (with reference to Tom Wright) sees the Christian life as improvisation on/within God's story, a narrative theo-drama in five parts. ("Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics") "It is not the church's role to make the story end well. The church lies within the story, rather than at the end of it." He quotes Gerard Loughlin as saying "When a person enters the scriptural story he or she does so by entering the Church's performance of that story; he or she is baptised into a biblical and ecclesial drama." ("Telling God's Story")

 In his book "Biblical Perspectives on Evangelism", Brueggemann describes evangelism as "doing the text again." There is a wealth of insights here about education as learning to live into and live out of the biblical narrative,  and about learning to acquire a scriptural imagination (see an excellent collection of essays in Duke Divinity School magazine here.) How do we teach in ways such that the biblical narratives form and frame our imaginations? How might we craft learning experiences that derive from "doing the text again" with our own faithful improvisations?

I'll let you know if/when Ben's sessions go online. Ben's excellent blog is here.