VICAR & WARDENS meeting this afternoon, reviewing last year and looking ahead to this year’s Growth Action Planning exercises. I’m blessed with marvellous (ordained and lay) colleagues here. We’re working together on what twenty-first century leadership in the Church is about, acknowledging a need for leadership whilst taking collaborative ministry seriously. There couldn’t be any other kind of ministry in this parish of ever-widening circles. Vicar-on-his-tod would have to be Vicar-with-no-time-for-God. So I’m not juggling precarious finances on my own (though they are precarious, even in this “larger” parish), and mine are not the only pair of ears trying to get attuned to the Divine word for our times.
My friend David Herbert shares my enthusiasm for a similar collaboration between mission minded people on the web, too. I check out his blog, and a dozen or so more, most days to see what friends and colleagues are up to. And I was rewarded over at David’s today by his Blackbirds and Hock from which I’ve nicked the following Dee Hock snippet. I’ll be taking this along to our next Growth Action Planning meeting. Cracking New Year questions as we begin to map out our aspirations for the next year or two. Thanks David. I’ve ordered the book … and we’ll doubtless swap notes …
What is this chasm between how institutions profess to function and how they actually do; between what they claim to do for people and what they actually do to them? What makes people behave in the name of institutions in ways they would never behave in their own name? Church, school, government, business – all the same…. Nothing in nature feels like church or school. There’s no ‘principal’ blackbird pecking away at the rest of the flock. There’s no Super frog telling the others how to croak. There’s no teacher tree lining up the saplings and telling them how to grow….
Nothing in the early years prepared me for the shock of institutions. With school and church came crushing confinement and unrelenting boredom … It was as though everyone began to shed wholeness and humanity at the door, along with coats and overshoes, and, one by one, to cut the threads of connection to the inner spirit, the world of nature and the humanity of others.
Dee Hock – Birth of the Chaordic Age via The Jog.
