From this past weekend….
- All you ever needed to know about Leadership Development by Jim Henderson:
* Catch – Catch people doing the right thing
* Blame – Blame them for being successful
* Tell – Tell on them
“Small, Slow, and Local” – do things this way. via Brian McLaren
* Very applicable to Pleasant Ridge and VC as a whole
I had a great lunch with the always thoughtful, intuitive, and provocative Dr. Dwight Friesen (who is part of an “un-impressive community”, I think those where his words, that I am actually quite impressed by), a really smart person named Anne (who has a PhD in Human Development) who is part of a church that was birthed out of Church of Our Saviour about 30 years ago, a passionate emerging leader named Stef (who graduated from Miami Univ. in Oxford, OH and is soon to be counseling student at Mars Hill Seminary in Seattle. We ate at a great local sushi place, yummmmmmmmm.
What would it look like if our congregation that was a “place from which good news overflows in good action” (from Newbigin) …. a vision for VC?
Thoughts on conferences, learning, conversation, and BloggerCon ala St. Patrick’s….
I’d love to put together a gathering… a conference I suppose, but unlike typical church conferences where you have “famous” people pontificating to overloaded sponges. I’d love to create space for deep conversation with a multiplicity of people. Basically – I’d love to have a “BloggerCon” for the emerging church specific to this region called the Mid-West.
From BloggerCon.org:
“BloggerCon is an unusual conference. We don’t have speakers, panels or an audience. We do have discussions and sessions, and each session has a discussion leader.
The discussion leader
Think of the discussion leader as a reporter who is creating a story with quotes from the people in the room. So, instead of having a panel with an audience we just have people. ….
Think of it as a weblog
Think of the conference as if it were a weblog. At the beginning of each session, the leader talks between five and fifteen minutes to introduce the idea and some of the people in the room. Then she’ll point to someone else. She may ask a couple of questions to get them going, then she’ll point to someone else, then someone else, then make a comment, ask a question, etc. Each person talks for two to three minutes. Long enough to make a point. About the time someone would take if they called into a radio talk show. ….
Since every person in a session is considered an equal participant, everyone should prepare at least a little. ….
This is a user’s conference, it’s non-commercial, you may not promote products. …. Wireless Internet access will be available. …. You are welcome to bring your own recording equipment, cameras are allowed, basically the rules allow Grateful Dead/Phish style recording.”
So, wouldn’t it be cool to do something similar for folks involved in being the Body of Christ? What if we had a StPattyCon … where we gather to talk about St. Patrick, the Celts, Celtic missional monasticism, Celtic spirituality/music and how they inform and can form our mission/ministry/ecclesiology in the 21C? Small conversations over a weekend with 10-25 folks at a time. No long monologues or lectures. Topics of mutual interest where we can engage the ideas and one another. And lots of good food, drink, and hanging out with friends both old and new.
hum……
