consider the ways of the ant…

(Click the image to link) A great article on swarm theory and how bees and ants can tach us about organizations. (HT to Mike Jentes)
“Consider the ways of the ant and be wise” Proverbs 6:6
We will eventually get onto organic systems and this stuff will become standard fare. But I thought this useful now. [...]

spiderman v. batman

Debs and I are in the final stages of packing up our goodies and tying up our countless loose ends so that we can move to the US in June. What a pain! I suppose one of the benefits is that one gets to clean out all the ’stuff’ one collects over the years. Well, [...]

adaptibility and order

In reading Jacques Ellul recently, I came across this gem of ecclesial wisdom…
“No doubt some will reply that God is not a God of disorder, incoherence, or arbitrariness, but a God of order. Of course he is. Unfortunately the whole of the Old Testament shows us that God’s order is not that [...]

holy rebellion?

Probing our ecclesial assumptions in this way ratchets up the level of discomfort because to do this we must explore, indeed critique, the inherited institutional configuration of church from which the majority of us operate and from which get our legitimacy. In doing this, are we are not doing something alien to our faith? [...]

Changing the story

Although we hear about successful attempts to revitalize existing churches, the overall track record is actually very poor. Ministers report again and again that their many attempts to revitalize the churches they lead do not yield the desired results. A lot of energy (and money) is put into change programs, with all the usual communication [...]

Let the master speak…

At this point in our discussion, I thought it might be worth referring to the seriously insightful, even prescient, Asbury Prof, Howard Snyder. (Let this inform our disucssion below–lets keep going.) The following ten “Theses on Renewal” from Liberating the Church summarize Howard Snyder’s most basic convictions about the nature and calling of the [...]

going to the roots of the matter

No-one looking at the situation of the church today can say that over the last century or so things have not fundamentally changed.  The reality we deal with is that after around 2000 years of the Gospel, we are on the decline in just about every western cultural context.  In fact, we are further way [...]

risk and adaptation

Edward de Bono, no theologian, but definitely the leading specialist in creative learning processes, remarks that if there is a known and successful cure for an illness, patients generally prefer the doctor to use the known cure rather than seek to design a better one. Yet there may be much better cures to be found. [...]

Church growth and discipleship

As I narrate from my story at South Melbourne Restoration Community (now simply called Red), one of the paradigm changes I/we had to undergo was to be to break the hegemony that church growth thinking held over our imaginations and practices. I say this not because God has not and does not use church [...]

Control freak or chaos freak?

Seth Godin, marketing guru and generally creative dude, posted this blog recently….

Sitting behind the pilot on a tiny plane today, I was reminded how important, difficult and tedious this job is.
Pilots have to get it right every time. They have to follow a myriad of procedures. They must be calm and focused and consistent, and [...]

Some serious learning going down!

I and a colleague Lance Ford, are developing a fantastic online training course using a ‘learning cafe’ environment. It will be a great resource for missional/apostolic leadership. Seriously, I have just been introduced to the technology involved and I have honestly never seen anything like it. There is a virtual classroom with data projection, [...]

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