The Complex Christ | Signs of Emergence

Real Snail Mail | Slowed Down Technology

The people at 'Boredom Research Labs’ have designed ‘the world’s first webmail service using real live snails.’

Yes you read that correctly.

Actually, the thinking behind the project, or at least post-event justification, is to slow technology down, as a form of discipline or meditation. You send your email in the normal way, and this is then stored in a device in the snail’s tank. When a snail, fitted with a RF chip, crawls by, the data is loaded onto the chip. When that snail eventually passes another device, the information is passed from the RF chip, and the mail is delivered as usual. You therefore have no idea when your message is going to eventually be delivered.

Completely barking. But rather nice.

Technorati Tags: snail,mail,slow

Top-Down | Bottom-Up | Powers

An excellent week away, helped by the fantastic sunshine that rayed on us every day, while the South got soaked in rain.

Reading material for the train/ferry/bus etc. on the way up/down was this month's Prospect, which contained an article from some old Blairites challenging Brown to move away from top-down centralised governance to a more liberal bottom-up approach:

Labour politicians too often see a social problem—obesity, children at risk on the internet or declining interest in high culture—and make two assumptions: first, that the problem is amenable to a policy solution; and second, that this solution ought to involve the establishment of a council, commission or task force. But many of the issues facing modern society are too complex and too cultural for such a wooden approach.

Coming back I've just received an email from an organization struggling from within over whether they should be taking one or the other approach, and many of the discussions we had on Iona related to the same issue.

In other words, the debate continues to rage, and usually follows the same line: those in power want to preserve power structures because, from their perspective, it's the only way to get things done, while those outside those structures see the world very differently and realise things aren't working as well as those in power think they are.

I've been into this in detail in the book, but, to summarise: power and leadership are about facilitating communication or, in the governance situation, creating environments within which the best possible outcomes for people are likely to emerge. You can't legislate for decency, but you can create the kinds of frameworks within which people are more likely to be decent to one another.

I think this is the tricky situation which both our Labour government and certain wings of the church find themselves: they feel so threatened by some external power (terrorism / biblical liberalism) that they panic and want to legislate hard in an attempt to protect us. I currently feel that I'd rather enjoy freedom and decent human rights / civil liberties and be blown up a free man, than be safely cocooned in a tight-assed, Orwellian world.

Technorati: Liberal | Prospect

"If It's On Google, Why Teach It?" | Intel | Education

At a recent education conference I was at, one of the big-wigs at Intel gave a keynote about the future of technology and education. He talked about Moore's law, and some of the probable developments in educational tools, and also about the effect connectivity is having / will have on our lives.

Holding up his Smartphone, he gushed 'look at this thing! Who a couple of years ago would have thought that I would be able to have 300 emails waiting for me on a mobile device this size!'

And I thought, 'who the hell would want to have thought that?'

But it was one comment that interested me in particular. 'If it's on Google,' he said, 'why teach it?' And I just thought that displayed perhaps the poorest understanding of education, and technology's place within it, I have ever heard.

Just yesterday, as I sat reading in the evening light, the laptop shut, kids in bed after a day in the park, I pondered this.
Books and people make me a better person, I thought; the internet does not.

I think this is something to do with space and time. It is not internet access people need to be educated.
It is space and time to think and read and talk to people, and to be guided by a teacher. One cannot educate children by loading them with a smartcard pre-loaded with information. One might as well say 'If it's in the Bible, why preach it?' But that's a whole different can of worms.

Technorati: Education | Google | Intel | Smartphone

In Praise of Eccentricity

Just back from a wonderful weekend in the depths of Wales. I didn't find RS Thomas, or any great rural epiphany, but, in keeping with the joys of weekends in other people's houses, had a great time dipping into some books.

The most enjoyable was Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics*. It's an eccentric volume itself, but delicious for that difference. The Folio edition I was perusing began with a quote from John Stuart Mill:

"In this age the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."

The quote comes from his 1859 book 'On Liberty', where he regularly rages against 'custom', believing it leads to conformity, and thus lack of freedom:

"Even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes."

Eccentricity simply means 'having a different centre'. For this reason alone, and with no thought for wanting to be 'quirky' or 'different', I'd like to sing in praise of being eccentric. Within this definition it is only the eccentric who can speak prophetic criticism. It is only the eccentric who can, by the gravity of their thought, draw close and change the orbit of the masses. Bauman writes in Liquid Life of "the mind-boggling quandary of having to mark oneself out as an individual, while also remaining obviously an acceptable part of the group" and it is this pressure that draws us into predictable, one-dimensional orbits. Being such a satellite around such a large mass is safe, yes, but cold and life-less.

The force to break away from this comes in two forms. The greater force, perhaps, is the gravity of the a-centrics, the vacuous cult of celebrity that tempts us with ideas of total freedom: responsibility-free sex, rootless trans-atlantic existence and the exultation of form over content. But nothing can have no centre, save nothing itself.

So it is down to the eccentric, the differently centred, the 'dirty trickster' as my book would have it, to provide some alter-orbit. The physics is clear on this: the closer this eccentric orbit swings to the other mass, the greater its changing effect. Eccentricity is not an excuse for seclusion or flight, but an invitation to challenge the prose-flattened, cathode-ray world with some vital poetry.

[* The book. Not the online fashion store. Urgghhhh.]

Technorati: Eccentricity | Eccentrics | Mill | Sitwell

Why I'm Bored with Blogging and the 'Emerging Conversation', and Why I'm Switching to Conch

It'll be pretty plain to see that I haven't been posting that much recently. Stuff happens, and, on top of that, I've been feeling a little faded/bored with it. By it, I mean blogging. And by blogging I mean, in this context, stuff connected with the 'emerging conversation'. Perhaps it's just me.

I've just written a piece for Third Way - coming out in November - about Facebook, and other social networks. In the article I quote two things from Bauman's Liquid Life. Firstly Bauman himself who writes that:

"flattened into a perpetual present and filled to the brim with survival-gratification concerns, [the world] leaves no room for worries about anything other than what can be consumed and relished on the spot"

Secondly, Bauman quotes a Stasuik, another cultural commentator, who notes that:

“it is highly probable that the quantity of digital, celluloid and analogue beings met in the course of a bodily life comes close to the volume which eternal life and resurrection of the flesh could offer."

And what I'm feeling at the moment, springing out of these thoughts, is just the volume of noise in the blogosphere. I've likened it in the past to being at a party where everyone in the room is shouting, but no one is actually listening. Conversation is thus impossible. To converse we must be quiet and listen, and digest what others are saying, and reflect and then reply.

(By the way - welcome to those readers who've made it past the 240 word mark. You've done better than most web-readers do, according to studies)

For me the 'emerging conversation' has become too much like a whole bunch of people mouthing off... Pretending to listen, by occasionally quoting others, but, for the most part, just yabbering on about their little world regardless of what others are saying. In the book I mention some of the conditions under which a system might become 'emergent', or 'self-organizing', or 'a learning system', to use different syntax. One of the key conditions is an ability to sense and respond to its environment. And this requires careful listening. I think we've lost the art.

So I'm moving over to a new blogging-style system called Conch. The creators say that Conch is "designed to emphasise the connectedness side of being part of a network, not unlike sitting round a dinner table, where certain rules about listening before speaking are important."

You thus start by creating what they call a 'table' of other members. Once your table is set, you can begin posting, just as you would with any other blogging system. The difference is in the discussion element. Conch uses an algorithm to detect how the conversation around any post is going, and table members can rate other members' comments. These ratings are then used, along with the algorithm, to invite a member of the table to post a new thought once discussion around the previous one has died down. This member can then either: post a new piece or defer to someone else in the group who they feel ought to 'have the conch' that time round - the allusion obviously being to Golding's Lord of the Flies. Such a deferral gains a member ratings; members can force a new post themselves, but doing so is ratings-costly.

Of course, for the small part of the bell-curve who made it to the end of a post this long, you'll realize Conch doesn't exist. But sometimes, amidst the noise and haste of a movement that appears to be whirling around in hyperspace like a dervish, constantly spinning and going nowhere fast, I wish it did. Thus ends, according to Technorati, the 17,754th post on 'emerging church', the 100th in 24 hours, and that's including a Sunday, when good bloggers like TSK don't even post ;-)

Technorati: Bauman | Blogging | Conch | Emerging Conversation | Golding | Lord of the Flies | Stasuik

Emergent, emerging, emergent? | Is Signs 'Just Another Emerging Church Book'?

No this isn't a lesson in Latin conjugation... but language and its evolving meanings are important.

With the release of the book, people have been wondering if this is just 'another emerging church book'. I'd like to answer that with an emphatic no!

Part of the reason for that is, I feel less and less confident about the use of the term 'emerging church' anyway; like verbal spun sugar it appears to mean something, but on closer analysis, appears to shapeshift into anything you like.

Two points to make: firstly, when I wrote the original version - 'The Complex Christ' - back in 2003/4, I had never heard of the umbrella organization 'Emergent'. I think what Emergent is trying to do is, in many ways, fantastic, but my use of the term 'emergent' (lower case) in the book actually refers to the science of emergence/complexity/self-organzation.

Secondly, then, the book is not about the emerging church, but it is about how the church could 'emerge' - it is, as the opening sentence says, a book about change. I strongly believe that all arms of the church need to change - to listen to and adapt themselves to meet the challenges of their local situations. The thesis of the book is that this is what we see God doing in the incarnation, and that 'theomorphosis' gives us an archetype for how we too might change.

So the book is for all Christians who feel the divine itch of dissatisfaction with their church - Anglican, Baptist, Pentecostal, Alternative... I've had some wonderful feedback from all corners. It offers no 'off the shelf' solution for what the perfect church should look like, but rather some DNA code to take and evolve into some wonderful beast totally suited to the local environment the reader may find themselves in, whether that be South London, South Bronx or South Africa.

In other words, it's for you, so click the link and purchase now ;-)

 

Technorati: Signs of Emergence | Emergent | Kester Brewin

Arbuckle: Refounding | Common Roots of All Religions | Why Do We Always Screw It Up?

Thanks to Mark for a great post around Gerald Arbuckles "From Chaos to Mission - Refounding Religious Life Formation".

He includes this diagram, which prodded me to think not only about how renewal occurs within religion, but more generally about how religions are founded.

Mark notes: "Arbuckle talks about three stages; 1) Initial unease, the separation stage. One could talk about a sense of disconnection and a growing awareness of the dissonance between the action and the foundation story of the community/group. 2) The liminal stage or reflection stage "that moment between old patterns of reality and new ways of looking at reality". In this stage Arbucle says there is a point of choice; do we seek to retreat, to wallow in nostalgia, to cling to past securities, do we try to stand still and maintain the status quo, to be paralysed by the chaos or do we "move forward with risk and hope in an uncertain world"? 3) Re-aggregation, or re-entry. A new application of the vision and story of the community."

I wish I'd read it before - it resonates well with the Advent/Incarnation/Emergence path that I identified in the book. More generally, If we think about Abraham, and his unease at life in Ur, and Jesus and his unease at the way Judaism had gone, or about Mohammed, and his dissatisfaction at the way the Makkan's were living, or about Guru Nanak, coming back out of the river after 3 days, claiming 'There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim'... We could go on.

All of these people had some sort of 'epiphany' and saw beyond the local claims of a bounded worship to something unified. All of them radically went through Arbuckle's stages as outlined above, and all of them suffered for it.

And in each case, those who have come after them claiming to lead and carry on their movement have solidified that boundary, have 'kept order' once that place has been found, and made it difficult for renewal to continue.

Why? Why do we always screw it up? Why do we always have to tie things down and bind them? And how long before this happens to the Emerging Church?

Technorati: Abraham | Arbuckle | Hinduism | Islam | Judaism | Mohammed | Nanak | Sikhism

Finally Teleportation is Possible ¦ So That's How Philip Did it

I've always gawped in wonder at the bit in Acts 8 where "the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus".

The only teleportation reference in the Bible?

Anyway, seems like they've finally worked out how to do it. A brilliant paper by a top US defense scientist on practical teleportation can be found here

Best quote from it:

A traveler stepping through the throat will simply be teleported into the other remote spacetime region or another universe (note: the Einstein equation does not fix the spacetime topology, so it is possible that wormholes are inter-universe as well as intra-universe tunnels)

In other words, we can teleport you. But we've no idea where you'll end up. Could be somewhere in this universe, could be somewhere in a parallel one.

Volunteers? If Apple release iTeleporter, who'll use it in a service first, Grace or Moot? My money would be on iKon turning up at Greenbelt and causing havoc with it ;-)

Before you can love thy neighbour, you've got to meet them first... | Social Networking

Which is where Peuplade comes in. (You can read the BBC's article on it here.)

It's a Parisian social networking site that is helping people to meet their neighbours.  Which is great. Sort of.

Of course it's a positive thing that people are meeting up. But it worries me that it has taken the mediation of a website to do so. The proof of the pudding will, of course, be in the eating: will the site reinvigorate community and neighbourly feeling so effectively that it won't be needed in the future?

I hope so. I am currently reading The Challenges of Ivan Illich - a series of essays by some of Illich's collaborators - and there is a piece there entitled 'Hospitality Cannot be a Challenge' which I think is pertinent...

In Conclusion: Love thy Neighbour

So here's the first proper post of the Signs blog. The book itself comes out in July, but why wait that long - I'm hoping we'll be able to engage in some discussion way before then. (If you really can't, you can order a copy of the UK version or download a sample chapter ;-)

Having written the book and reflected on it for a while, I've been wondering what the essence of it really is. In a world where brutal dictators are hung, with violence piled upon violence, where the birthplace of our faith rips itself apart in acts of frustrated self-harm, and - as the BBC reported the other day - in a country where four fifths of the population don't think that good relationships with neighbours is important... In such a world as this, what possible relevance could a book paralleling the theory of emergent systems with the gospel have?

As 2007 begins, I'll begin with the only conclusion I can come to: love thy neighbour.

Complex, emerging systems such as you might read about in the book - or in more depth in Steven Johnsons Emergence - rely on the local, neighbourly connection. The grand designs of our minds, the viral web of the internet... neither of these rely on high-level connection. They work because at the low level they are interconnected.

In 2007 what can we do to stop the global violence, to prevent climate change, to improve our cities, to build bridges across the divides in and around our beliefs? Only one thing: make low-level connections. Walk, don't take the car. Be kind. Show love to those who disagree with you.

A recent commentator on the radio highlighted the problem of dealing with anti-social behaviour in a world where there is no neighbourly relationships: the only route is to call the police, which ramps up the tension and solves little in the long term. It's very hard to be antisocial when you are in good relationship with your neighbours.

So perhaps we are left with this single resolution as we head into 07: try to love our neighbours more. Why? Well, as the aboriginal leader Lilla Watson said,

"If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us walk together."

This interdependence is, I believe, at the heart of the gospel, and at the heart of what I've tried to write about.

Peace,

Technorati: Civilization | Emergence | Emerging Church | Love | New Year | Neighbour | Saddam

Off to Soliton | Nomadic Faith | Spiritual Cartography | Vx 'Suicide'

Off tomorrow to Ventura, CA, for the Solition Sessions. Big thanks to the generous guys there for offering to fly me over. What with being off there and other recent trips, it's felt like a bit of a busy, travelling summer. But it was great to catch up properly with Nic the other night.

One of the things we got talking about was Ben Edson's post about rites of passage and the 'Vaux Suicide'. He had rightly picked up on research linking high levels of adolescent male suicide with the lack of rites of passage. Denied any well-trodden paths into adulthood, they struggled to find their own way. Ben had then suggested that this might have some bearing on the lack of longevity in alt.worship groups, and that the Vaux suicide was a good case in point.

It's a great thought, and may well hold some truth, but Nic and I both agreed that a better understanding would actually be to see our ending of Vaux as precisely such a rite of passage: to hold on to that manifestation would be to remain adolescent. This reminded me of the video I'd created for the very end of the last service before our ending meal - a piece that I suppose stands as a suicide note. Part of the text:

Technorati Tags: Art, Bede, Cartography, Merton, Mofokeng, Race, Soliton, suicide

When Web2.0 Doesn't Work | Blogging 2.0

Perhaps I'm being professionally defensive here, but having looked at RateMyTeachers.co.uk I was left wondering whether this was actually a project that had any use. Part of the beauty of the 'ratings' section of sites like Amazon and Flickr is that they actually allow you to make decisions - which seller is reliable, which photos are 'interesting'. But there appears to be no end use for rating teachers. Children cannot decide who is going to teach them, and parents' choice about which schools they send their children to is often very limited.

There are also other problems. For ratings sites to work there needs to be an element of trust in the rating. Having messed about with RateMyTeachers (ie putting stupid comments and shockingly bad ratings about other teacher friends ;^) it appears to be a total free-for-all. No questions are asked to prove you were actually taught by the person, nor could any proof be given. Sites also rely on the number of 'negative' users being outweighed by the number of 'positive' ones. And as [ this ] article in the Telegraph recently showed, there are naturally a lot of mischievous kids out there looking to have a bit of fun. Who wouldn't. (Then again, when a parent logs on and writes that a teacher is 'evil' there is perhaps something more worrying.)

Connectly, I had a very interesting conversation with a guy (a psychologist by trade) who works in the web research department of the Open University. He was saying that the stuff they are working on is 'Blogging 2.0'. What he meant by that was, how to create a system that goes beyond tagging and comments and actually allows interesting posts to come to the fore more easily - using some kind of distributed rating system. I think this connects very well to the previous posts [here and here] on the problems the blogging is facing: the massive volume of posts, and the enormous task of sifting through to find the good conversations. They are currently running initial experiments, but I look forward to the final product.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Blogs, Complexity, Education, Technology, Web 2.0

Ascension

Ascension Day
"He rose from the dead and ascended into heaven"

Words full of vectors. Above and below.
Travelling on this great y-axis.
Cutting into the earth, and rising above it.
And disappearing from sight.

We've got too Cartesian in our theology
And want to co-ordinate
To assign vectors and fix positions
"He was here!"
"The kingdom is this way!"

But we can't know his velocity
Can determine neither distance
Or time to divide into speed

Only this truth:
That his disappearance into the infinity
Of all directions and all places at all times
Leaves us looking along the plane
Of our own axis, asking
Where is he now, here, near?

And going there to follow.

Technorati Tags: Ascension, Ascension Day, Poetry, Cartesian

SwarmSketch

"Collective sketching of the collective consciousness."

Via Wired.

Emergence-y question: will the sketches get better and better with time, or will they need chasing down from local peaks to properly improve?

Technorati Tags: Art, cartoons, Complexity, Emergence, Swarm, Technology

Steven Johnson | Fed-Ex Planes in Thunderstorms

If you've read The Complex Christ, you'll know that I'm a big fan of Steven Johnson's book 'Emergence - the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software'. Turns out he has a blog, plus a new book launching in London this autumn.

The blog is well worth visiting if you're interested in emergence and complexity; on it he links to this amazing video - screenshot shown - of the paths of FedEx's planes landing at Memphis airport during a thunderstorm - watch them scatter when the storm hits! Like ants when you pour boiling water down their holes. Or shouldn't I admit doing that as a kid? ;-)

Technorati Tags: Blogs, Emergence, London, Steven Johnson, Technology

Leadership Day This Saturday

Looking forward to spending this Saturday discussing leadership issues at the first Blah... learning day, with Anna Draper, Jonny Baker and Paul Roberts. I'll be sharing some thoughts first published here.

Book [ here ]

Technorati Tags: Emerging Church, Ministry, Theology, Westminster

On Meaning [1] | Absolute Truth

A few weeks ago Nic and Jonathan and I had one of our occasional drinks at the Crown and Greyhound and ended up in a very politely heated debate on 'meaning', which we are planning to jointly thrash out here and over at Haunted Geographies (though not sure exactly when he'll be posting).

It had started innocently enough. Nic asked how Sigur Ros was, and I mentioned my thoughts about music being somehow 'beyond language'. He argued that without language there can be no meaning. And I want to try to explore why I disagree with that, and why I think that disagreement is important, rather than totally academic - which I'll probably get to in the next post. So bear with us.

My hunch that began the conversation was that there is a meaning behind language that we, very occasionally, get a glimpse of.

Technorati Tags: Absolute Truth, Emerging Church, Language, Meaning, Postmodernism, Post Modernism, Religion, Theology

The Judas I Never Knew

There has been some debate stirred over the discovery/translation of 'The Gospel of Judas'. For those of you who haven't read The Complex Christ (and why not?! Buy it here, now!), I wanted to outline some of my thoughts on Judas from the book.

We are often encouraged to meditate on characters from Scripture. To put ourselves in their place. To imagine we are Peter, by the fire, denying Christ, catching his eye, being re-instated. But Judas has traditionally been totally off limits. He is unredeemable. He betrayed Jesus. He is to be rubbished, spat on, despised, forgotten.

But I think he is closer to home than we might at first imagine. Judas was probably the most educated of the disciples. He was one of the few not from 'up North', and likely saw himself as a cut above, a bit special. He was the only one given a task: to take care of the money, and we can imagine he probably earned that by being more numerate. It is also thought he was likely to be a bit of a Zealot. He probably saw Jesus' mission - as most did - as a political one. Jesus would rise up against the Romans and chuck them out, restoring sovereignty to Israel.

Judas would doubtless have heard that the authorities were looking for a way to trap Jesus. They had also said that they didn't want him arrested over the festival, because they feared that after his triumphant entry to Jerusalem the people would riot. Perhaps Judas spots an opportunity. He will go to them, offer to betray Jesus, and persuade them that he can only do it now - over the festival. Perhaps he hopes this will cause a riot, and thus catalyze Jesus into his political takeover.

Judas attends the Last Supper. And when Jesus hands him a piece of bread - his 'body broken' - Judas leaves. Why did he leave then? Perhaps because he was the only one to understand the huge significance of what Jesus was doing in that first act of communion. If Jesus is going to die and become transcendent, he will slip through his political hands. The Complex Christ - dispersed, viral, networked - cannot be controlled. And he must stop this happening.

So he goes to the authorities. They convene hurriedly and agree to his plan. They go to find Jesus, and a crowd follow them - excellent! He approaches Jesus and kisses him. Perhaps he thinks Jesus will be pleased - he is offering him his golden opportunity on a plate to begin his political mission. Things start brilliantly: a fight breaks out, and swords are drawn... Then disaster - Jesus commands them all to stop. He submits, is led away, given a mock trial and killed, his followers dispersed. He has failed.

We know Judas was distraught. We know he threw the money back, and committed suicide. He repented.

So who is this Judas I never knew? It is me. It is you. Whenever we try to co-opt God into our own programmes, box God up and decide for God what God is going to do, when we kiss Christ, but more in lust for power than love of the Other, we are playing Judas, and betraying this complex Christ who will not be controlled.

So whenever we are offered bread and wine we must reflect on this choice that Judas had. To allow Christ this dangerous and free mission, or try to channel him into our own agenda. And as we take, eat and drink, we must commit to that holy freedom of God, and pray for the Judas in each of to be redeemed.

Technorati Tags: Easter, Eucharist, Good Friday, Judas, Religion, Theology

Self-Organizing Island Community informs Organizational Software

Article in Wired, here.

"If Friday's boat from St. Mary was cancelled, there might be six people in the village that needed to know. Armstrong found consistently they would all have that information within hours, even without a formal distribution system, and few uninterested people would be burdened with the knowledge."

Technorati Tags: Technology

President vs Archbishop | The End of Patriarchal Leadership?

A couple of recent posts I've read to link together:

In an excellent post here Will Samson explores the failings of the religious right in US politics.

"Beyond the public moral failures, however I believe that 2006 will be the beginning of significant political failures for the religious right. I believe we will begin to see an undoing of the last 30 years of political organization by this segment of the church."

And Jordan Cooper put me on to this post by Andrew Sullivan, which outlines the root belief of this 'political organization by this segment of the church':

"The key element that binds Christianism with Bush Republicanism is fealty to patriarchal leadership. That's the institutional structure of the churches that are now the Republican base; and it's only natural that the fundamentalist psyche, which is rooted in obedience and reverence for the inerrant pastor, should be transferred to the presidency. That's why I think Bush's ratings won't go much below 25 percent; because 25 percent is about the proportion of the electorate that is fundamentalist and supports Bush for religious rather than political reasons."

Finally, I noted a link on Sanctus 1's blog to this interview with Rowan Williams (Archbishop of Canterbury) in The Guardian in which he not only describes himself as 'comic vicar to the nation', but also replies to a question on whether an Archbishop should provide moral leadership by saying:

Technorati Tags: Anglicanism, Bush, Church, Democracy, Politics, Power, Theology

Emerging Church and The Hunch Engine

Article in Wired on an emerging software that combines hunches with mutations to take anything, from photo manipulation to postman route planning in new directions that have a individual touch.

"Our hunches tend to be repetitive and predictable, while mutation can take us in novel directions"

The parallels with new EC programmes are obvious. Keep the human involvement, but bring in other forces to encourage new mutations and prevent stagnation.
Keep it local, emergent, intelligent.

Technorati Tags: Technology

In Defence of Alt.Worship | We Haven't Even Begun to 'Emerge' Yet

I was disappointed to read on Jonny's blog that Graham Cray wanted to down-play the significance of alt.worship and emerging churches in the future of the church. And I'm glad Jonny attempted to correct him.

Just a couple of observations.

According to Jonny's notes, Graham Cray said:

"Mission vision not church angst. Emerging churches good but only part of picture. Alt worship etc part of picture but not future... Postmodern is passe - paradigm shift has taken place"

I agree with some of this. Alt.worship is not the future. But it has been a very vital catalyst. And catalysts rarely get the credit they are due when the history is told. They are the invisible spaces that allow reactants time to create newness. Without them the process of change would take much much longer. However, this energy they bring to speed up the process should not be interpreted as 'angst'. It is disingenuous to suggest it.

I would also want to take Graham to task on his view that 'Emerging Churches are good but only part of the picture.' If he is right that the postmodern is passé and a paradigm shift has already taken place, then the church that emerges from this shift is, by definition, all there is going to be. The big problem is that people are, I think, far too easy with the definition they are using.

The chapter I wrote on Advent in the book - about waiting for the old to pass and the new to come - is pertinent I think. And I don't think people in the institutions have shown enough patience to wait yet. They think the transition has already happened. That we are already 'emerging.' I don't think we are even close. Unless there is a proper 'wait' then what emerges will still be too much infected with the old forms. And I think this is happening now. People are tacking together programmes of café-style stuff and a few nightlights and thinking they are 'emerging.'

I'm afraid I'm sceptical. I just don't think that's going to work. We need a far deeper change to occur. One that reaches wide and deep. And given that this was led by the same old white men, I'm afraid I don't think that can possibly have happened yet.

Technorati Tags: Rebirth

A Party-less Politic? | The Emerging Church Shows the Way

Just been listening to a very interesting report on the BBC about The Power Commission's report into British democracy which has been published today. The parallels with Alan Jamieson's work on Churchless Faith were astounding and, as I mentioned in my book, the church really does have an amazing opportunity to model a mode of change and being to the rest of society, rather than copying it in twenty years time.

The Power Commission - funded by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Foundation (JR was a fabulous Quaker-Philanthropist-Chocolatier) - initially asked MPs why they thought voter numbers were down. 'Apathy' they said.

Rather like the ministers Alan asked, they reasons they gave for people not participating were totally wrong, and laid the blame at the wrong door. The Commission found very little political apathy. On the contrary, people are up and involved in politics all the time. It's just that Westminster don't call that 'politics', because it's not the 'Politics' of Downing Street in the corridors of power.

Their first recommendation then is that Westminster needs to realize that the solution is not to 'get people more interested in politics' - ie drag people to Westminster to see all the great stuff they do (cf. get more bums on seats in church) - rather, Westminster needs to get back out there and get involved in the issues people are involved in locally.

You simply cannot - whether in church or political parties - expect people to sustain membership of organizations they feel totally alienated from. Unless there is genuine opportunity for meaningful participation, why should people hang around? I have often argued with MPs - especially over the Iraq War - that they are in dereliction of their duties if they vote against the will of their constituents. Our democratic system is currently topsy-turvy. We vote for parties who set out an agenda for action. What the system originally intended was for people to elect a representative to send to Westminster to speak for them. In other words, the motivation for action came from the people. We have lost this original intention, and are poorer for it.

The solutions the Power Commission recommends? Unsurprisingly if you've read The Complex Christ, a move from the top-down to the bottom-up, greater low-level interaction, and feedback loops. . More power to the local, and mechanisms whereby dirt can be dished and people listened to and action taken. Interestingly enough, they suggest that more MPs should blog, but beyond that, they think that there ought to be a system whereby the public can force Parliament to debate an issue if a certain number of people get together and sign for it. Furthermore, they recommend changes that would allow people to stand for election more easily without being swamped by the big parties.

One commentator was an academic who commented that 40 years ago we were debated the role television might have in politics (see previous post). It clearly had a profound one, and he argues that e-Democracy will have similarly profound effect not only on our politics, but on the way we see ourselves as citizens too.

Clearly, the Emerging Church movement has made big steps forward in this area already. e-Spirituality and the emergent, underground blossoming interest in the spiritual has had a profound effect not only on our theology, but on the way we see ourselves connected as Christians too. Spirituality and theology are no longer the holed up in Ivory towers to which only the sacred few have access; what we must do is help politics move the same way. It is, of course, a movement that is irresistible because it's the way of co-operation, the way of inter-relation, the way of the divine. And it is, of course, a movement that will be always resisted by the powerful.

Technorati Tags: Democracy, e-Democracy, London, Politics, Power, Spirituality, Westminster

The Architecture of Happiness | Lost Worlds

Been doing a bit of work for Greenbelt, writing invites for speakers etc. One of the people I've been in contact with is Alain de Botton, who's last book Status Anxiety I quoted in the book.

He has a new book forthcoming, called The Architecture of Happiness. The blurb:

What makes a house beautiful? Is it serious to spend your time thinking about home decoration? Why do people disagree about taste? And can buildings make us happy? In "The Architecture of Happiness", Alain de Botton tackles a relationship central to our lives. Our buildings - and the objects we fill them with - affect us more profoundly than we might think.

To take architecture seriously is to accept that we are, for better and for worse, different people in different places. De Botton suggests that it is architecture's task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.

If it is architecture's task to 'render vivid to us who we might ideally be', then the spaces we create for our gatherings are very important. I've also been reading Bywater's excellent Lost Worlds, which is basically a taxonomy of loss. Melancholic, funny and outrageous in turn, his entry on churches particularly caught my eye:

Churches [...] no longer can encompass any human grandeur of aspiration. It only two models for any sort of ultramundane dignity are the Municipal Utilitarian and the Executive Hotel.

What have we lost, that this is what things have come to? Perhaps what we have lost is the model for our being. Once we aspired to the condition of Gods. Now we aspire to the condition of computers.

Having spent the last week doing DIY, I've been reflecting that sometimes the Emerging Church has been about creating personal spaces within which we try to render vivid who we want God to be. Rather than working to render public spaces of awe and mystery; cathedrals not low-ceilinged industrial units.

At Vaux we used to dub ourselves 'Worship Architects'. Encompassed in that was a desire to create spaces within which people could worship, but not direct them exactly how to. But the relationship between the architecture of a space and behaviour within it is more complex. And in future we'll need to bear that in mind in the spaces we create.

Technorati Tags: Architecture, DIY

Communal/Distributed Knowledge?

During a Skype with Jon:

Would you be able to write something on the ‘communal knowing idea’ that knowing is not simply contained within individuals, but has an important interpersonal dimension and also on the different natures of knowing “muscial, linguistic, logical-mathematical, bodily, kinesthetic, naturalist, interpersonal”

I think it needs expanding. And articulating, but I don’t think I could do it straight out without a bit of research.
It also relates to some of your last posts I feel. And that article I sent you might have some vague connections via quantum physics.

OK Jon. But seems illogical for one person to spout a post on communal knowing.
So how about it? What do people think?

Personally I think knowledge is shared more than we think. And, reflecting more on the comment I made in the last post, I think it's part of the battle for participation against domination that we a) admit it, and b) work towards it by sharing knowledge on a level playing field. For me that's a work of the Spirit. Anti-domination. Anti-centralization. Anti-gnostic. If there's such a thing.

Here's a link to download the article on Quantum Physics and the Rebirth of the Soul.
It's a scanned PDF, so about 2.5 Mb.

Technorati Tags: Complexity, Emerging Church

Neophilia [5] Subvert the Fantasy Church

Links: Neophilia [1]  |  Neophilia [2]  |  Neophilia [3]  |  Neophilia [4]

Anyone been finding blogging more difficult than it used to be? Lost the novelty a bit, and now what seemed so easy and freeing is more of a chore at times? Lots of people I've read seem to have done recently... Welcome to the fantasy cycle of the neophiliac.

I've linked to the other posts in the series above - and in the right bar under the series clicks - but to summarize, I've been fascinated by Christopher Booker's work The Neophiliacs - Revolution in English Life in the Fifties and Sixties and believe it has strong messages for us as an emerging movement.

Why? Because he identifies the potential pitfalls of newness: falling into a neophiliac fantasy cycle:

Technorati Tags: Books, Emerging Church, Fantasy, Rebirth, Sustainable Growth

Winning the War?

"I declare that World War III is now being waged by short-haired robots whose deliberate aim is to destroy the complex web of free wild life by the imposition of mechanical order."

Timothy Leary in his Manifesto, written on escaping from prison and fleeing to Algeria.

I think we're gradually winning now, Tim. We got tags on our side.

Technology: Fight the Power

I've been musing while away. Wondering: what is technology? It struck me as we tanked along in a car about to seize up that it was nssothing more than raw creation re-worked by human hands. Forged to help us. Rock, sand and timber reined in wild like horses and bridled under our control. In other words, technology and power are intimately connected.

Technology, this taming of raw creation, created power imbalances. I looked from the car today, and saw a man breaking into a trot as he crossed a road, an SUV tanking deliberately for him. And I thought - stripped bare of tools, of technologies, what harm could we do to each other or our environment? So little. A man approaches, wants my wallet. Soldiers march. Criminals raid. Without the technologies they carry, we would be equals: knifeless, gunless, weaponless... Our slaps and fists able to scrap, but, as Lorenz has pointed out, probably unlikely to do much more.

When the first tools were made, the first weapons forged, the branch lifted and used to strike, the sharp stone bonded to make a knife or spear, a choice lay before all humanity: crush that weapon, or take up the same and fight on an equal footing. And so the arms race began. And so the finish-line for our species approached more quickly than we could ever imagine.

Emergent Church

Andrew has blogged a lot about the impact of Web 2.0 style thinking on the Church, and I would totally agree that we can learn a lot from the 'governing dynamics' that are making these new 'applications' take off.

Flicking around some sites on this, I came across this diagram, which holds some amazing parallels for us:

Just to highlight some of the balloons:

• Radical Decentralization
• Radical Trust / Trust Your Users
• User as contributor
• Rich User Experiences
• Play
• Emergent: User behaviour not predetermined
• Small pieces loosely joined
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence

This is precisely what I am trying to argue in the book, and expand upon here on this blog. All the above reads like a manual for Church 2.0 - or whatever you want to call it. For me, much of what links many Web 2.0 applications, like Flickr, Delicious etc. is the idea of the meta-tag. It's these tags that allow data to be sorted in multiple intelligent ways, and for radical cross-referencing of ideas that seem totally disperate on the surface.

Linking together some of the posts I've written about the place of the Spirit in the Emerging Church, and Leadership, I think there are very strong ideas to take from the principles the map above outlines. It's as if the Spirit is the Web which allows these mini-apps - our gifts - to run, and leadership - which I defined previously as 'disturbing and facilitating communication' is the database of tags that allows cross-referencing, and thus emergence, to occur.

And the core attitude that runs through it? Trust. Trust that the 'little people' out there in the congregation are not dumb, but wise. And their collective intelligence is better than anything one single person can be uploaded with at seminary. It's this radical trust that the Spirit enables in people. That's why the powerful hate it, and long to divide and rule. Well, thankfully, the web seems to be finally putting pay to that. And hopefully the body of Christ - the emergent virus of the Spirit - won't be far behind.

Emergent-US Article

At Will'z invitation I recently wrote this post for the Emergent-US blog, reflecting on Forster's epigraph 'only connect', and his diatribe against the city of 'anger and telegrams'.

Abstract: blogging isn't enough to keep anyone connected to 'the conversation.' We need physical networks as well as virtual ones.

The Dialectical Approach | Advent and Newness

I'm a big fan of McSweeney's and The Believer magazine. On subscribing they sent me a copy of The Believer Book of Writers talking to Writers. The jacket explains that "Believer books has collected, in alphabetical order, twenty-three conversations and correspondences between much admired writers and the writers they admire."

It's excellent. When people dialogue, rather than just answer questions from interviewers, conversations can go in interesting directions. They sharpen one another. The same principle worked brilliantly in The Meaning of Jesus where Marcus Borg - a liberal - and N T Wright - more conservative - bounced ideas off one another and showed that disagreement need not be poisonous. Prospect magazine have also used this dialectical approach in pieces, where correspondence between experts makes up an article on a subject (recently the benefits or not of nuclear power), or two books are reviewed against each other.

I wonder if this is one of the gifts of Christmas. God enters a dialectic with creation. Become incarnate in a man, and thus sharpening the senses of both God and humanity to the other's condition. It's that phrase again: the other. Dialogue, listening, the dialectic approach. It all helps us to see beyond ourselves and into the wider truth of who we are and what we have to give.

Small Is Beautiful | Cellular Simplicity

An article in this month's Prospect carries a review by Oliver Morton of Nick Lane's 'magnificent' new book Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life. His thesis is an

"antidote to the gene-centred view of life... Cells convert the energy they take in from the environment into a form that can be used to drive chemical reactions by a fundamental mechanism, which, Lane shows us, has a central relevance to questions that range from the astrobiological - how common is complex life in the universe - to the fundamental - how did life begin - to the world historical - how realistically can we imagine lengthening human life-expectancy by a century or two?"

One particular aspect of this hit me as I read the review:

"The amount of energy a creature needs in order to reproduce is roughly proportional to its volume, since it is the volume that has to be doubled in reproduction. But the amount of energy a membrane system can produce is proportional to its surface area. When things get bigger, their volume increases quicker than their surface area, so bigger bacteria will take longer to produce enough energy to reproduce themselves than smaller ones will."

When I read this I couldn't help think of the mega/micro church debate. As you will know if you've read the book, I'm a fan of the viral, self-organizing model of being. And what I think this argument affirms is that such a model of small, simple, local incarnations is more 'energy efficient.' Moreover, they have a better ratio of "surface area to volume"... In other words, they are more exposed to the environment they exist in.

Large mega-churches appear to have 'economies of scale', and this will be true in many economic contexts. But in this biological parallel they have poor surface area to volume ratios: fewer people in them are actually 'on the boundary' interfacing with the environment that hosts them. And they require a huge amount of energy to replicate.

Either way, the stark truth of biology is, whether you take a gene or energy-centred view, is that life goes on, even when individual cells and bodies die. To try to artificially extend life-expectancy can create monsters. Life is good. Death is a necessary part of that cycle.

Advent: Dirt and Creation

As we think about the coming season of A