“How are we going to cope with this?” or “What on earth can we do about that?” is so often the starting point for a relevant and exciting piece of theological work, even though it begins on a negative and worrying note….. It is a fact that good theology is more likely to derive from a problem rather than a statement, more likely to arise in a prison than a palace.
Laurie Green
“Home is the place, where when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Robert Frost
Lord, you have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”
St Augustine
The whole team are leaders
Leadership is not the personal responsibility of the team leader. It is to be exercised by all both collectively and individually. So the role of the team leader is to encourage growth in leadership in your colleagues. Just as a cricket captain seeks to bring out the best in bowler or batsman, so the team leader encourages, motivates.
Geoffrey Cornell – How to become a Creative Church Leader
People deprived of self-organisation and self-governance are inherently ungovernable.
Dee Hock – Birth of the Chaordic Age
>Now can you see over the wall?
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How we need each other! This celebration of cooperation is enacted in Catalan at various festivals.Besides the people who actually climb, many are also needed to form the the base of the castell. They help sustain the weight and act as a sort of safety net. How about this as a team building exercise for our clergy conference, or something for our all age worship?
Dee Hock agonised over what makes an institution or organisation and has this to say: “Healthy organisations are a mental concept of relationship to which people are drawn by hope, vision, values and meanikng, and liberty to cooperatively pursue them.” (p120) Healthy organisations induce behaviour whereas unhealthy organisations compel behaviour and are destructive. He adds: “Without a deeply held, shared purpose that gives a meaning to their lives …. communities will disintegrate, and organisations become instruments of tyranny.”
“People deprived of self-organisation and self governance are inherently ungovernable.” (p121)
A free image from wikimedia commons
Nature
The striking of a match is every bit as wonderful as the working of a brain; the union of two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen in a molecule of water isevery bit as wonderful as the growth of a child. nature does not class her works in order of merit; everything is just as easy to her as everything else: she puts her wholemind into all that she does … she lives through all life, extends throaugh all extent, spreads undivided, operates unspent.
Stephen Paget
from Dee Hock
Without an abundance of nonmaterial values and an equal abundance of nonmonetary exchange of material value, no true community ever existed or ever will. … When we attempt to monetise all value, we methodically disconnect people and destroy community.
True community requires proximity; continual, direct contact and interaction between the people, place, and things of which it is composed. Throughout history, the fundamental building block, the quintessential community, has always been the family. It is there that the greatest nonmonetary exchange of value takes place. It is there that the most powerful nonmaterial values are created and exchanged. It is from that community, for better or worse, that all others are formed. The nonmonetary exchange of value is the vary heart and soul of community, and community is the inescapable, essential element of civil society.
Birth of the Chaordic Order – page 43
>Dee Hock
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A soul-friend discovered, and the launch of a new book prize – Jogger’s Read of the Year with the top prize going to Dee Hock’s “Birth of the Cahordic Age” discovered by me 10 years after its publication.
Dee Hock describes his relationship to insitutions – and it rings an eight bell quarter peel in my mind. he writes of his teenage rebellion:
“My rebellion was persistent, stubborn, at times stupid refusal to accept orthodox ideas, be persuaded by authoritarian means, or seek acceptance by conformity.”
He asks: “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 actualy do to them?” (p37) Among them: schools that can’t teach, unhealthy health-care systems, welfare systems in which no one fares well, farming systems that destroy soil and poison food. (p28)
I could ask in similar vein why it is that the church which is supposed to offer life in all its fullness induces such boredom and is seen as a “turn off” instead of a “turn on”, and why it is that the good news of salvation has to be cloaked in disguise in order not to frighten people off (according
to my reading of a recent PCC discussion on our parish magazine.
from R S Thomas
“It’s a long way off but inside it
There are quite different things going on;
Festivals at which the poor man
Is king and the consumptive is
Healed; mirrrors in which the blind look
At themselves and love looks at them
Back; and industry is for mending
The bent bones and the minds fractured
By life. It’s a long way off but to get
There takes no time and admission
Is free, if you will purge yourself
Of desire, and present yourself with
Your need only and the simple offering
Of your faith, green as a leaf.”(Later Poems: 1983. p35)
“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful implanted in the human soul.”
Johann Wolfgang Goethe
Grits and Grains 