sustain:if:able kiwi

September 2019 Europe visit

I am England bound today. I had to delay my outside study leave at the start of this year. As a result, I lost two weeks of outside study leave and so my workplace agreed that I take the two lost weeks in September, joined to a UK conference I had already been planning to attend. So my September 2019 plans are as follows:

Friday, 30 August, fly to Auckland and participate in Lighthouse 2019. The Lighthouse is an innovation incubator KCML began in 2016, as a way of trying to encourage discernment in mission and innovation in local community contexts. This year we have 35 people who are in 10 teams, working on a range of community mission projects. I will be providing a welcome and some teaching, alongside the excellent leadership team that has been developing over the last three years.

Leave Auckland, Saturday 31 August to fly to Durham Sunday 1 September. For the week of Monday 2 September to Friday 6 September, I will be a Visiting Lecturer in Practical Theology participating in the Doctor Theology of Ministry Residential School.

I will be presenting a 90 minute seminar based on my outside study leave research into craftivism, in exchange for library access, accommodation and the excellent company of those in ministry doing a high level of reflection on their practice. It will be an excellent networking opportunity, plus some space to write and offer my research.

Friday, 6th September, I fly to Germany, initially for the weekend to connect with my daughter, followed by a final week of outside study leave, writing. I want to turn the craftivist research into a couple of accessible pieces for Candour and SPANZ.

Friday 13th September, I return to Scotland, for a weekend with the Gay Morley family. I then return to Durham on the Monday, to participate in the Ecclesiology and Ethnography 2019 conference, where I give another paper, also on my craftivism research.

Where #christmasangels tread: Craftivism as a missiology of making

The church is formed by witness. A contemporary ecclesial embodiment of witness is craftivism, which combines craft and activism. One example is the Christmas angels project, in which local churches are encouraged to knit Christmas Angels and yarnbomb their surrounding neighbourhoods. This paper examines this embodiment of craftivism as a fresh expression of mission.

Given that Christmas angels were labelled with a twitter hashtag, technology was utilised to access the tweets as empirical data in order to analyse the experiences of those who received this particular form of Christian witness. Over 1,100 “#christmasangel” tweets were extracted and examined. Geographic mapping suggests that Christmas angels have taken flight over England. Content analysis reveals a dominant theme of a found theology, in which angels are experienced as surprising gift. Consistent with the themes of Advent, this embodiment of craftivism was received with joy, experienced as place-based and understood in the context of love and community connection.

A Christology of making will be developed, reading the layers of participative making in dialogue with David Kelsey’s theological anthropology. The research has relevance, first, exploring the use of twitter in empirical ecclesial research; second, offering a practical theology of making; third, challenging missiology in ‘making’ a domestic turn.

Around this is a number of networking conversations, including with folk involved in Christmas Angels (could we do it in Aotearoa I will be wondering), a colleague to explore doing empirical research on faith-based governance, plus a meeting in Edinburgh with folk from the Church of Scotland, to explore ways we might learn from each other in mission and innovation experiments along with other connections.

I’m grateful for a workplace that provides this type of resourcing opportunity, excited to be presenting some of the work from the first 13 weeks of outside study leave, looking forward to what words might emerge in a different space and thrilled to be seeing my daughter after quite some months apart.

Dave Dobbyn dropped into class (again) singing Nau Mai Rā (Welcome Home)

Dave Dobbyn dropped into my Listening in Mission class again this week. I am teaching a Listening in Mission (intern) cohort. There are 4 sessions over 2 months:

Mission as gift, call and promise
Being present and listening in neighbourhood/context
Cultivating congregational spaces for conversation and shared practices of missional attentiveness
Discerning and understanding local narratives

These four online Listening in Mission sessions support an action-learning project in which folk gather a group and work with them in listening in their local communities. So the online experience provides support, encouragement and resources. We offer this online support in mission to ordinands training for ministry. We also offer it separately as life-learning for the wider church – a taster Thursday 29 August and first class Thursday 26 September.

Last week, Dave dropped into Mission as gift, call and promise to sing “Waiting for a voice,” from his 2016 Harmony House album. It worked really well – providing a different way of engaging, offering a change of pace.

So Dave dropped in again this week to Being present and listening in neighbourhood/context to sing Welcome Home. First in English, Welcome Home

Second in te reo, Nau Mai Rā (Welcome Home).

It is inspiring to see an older Pakeha man learning a second language. That in itself is an example of listening in mission, stepping as vulnerable into new spaces.

There were also really helpful links to be made from Nau Mai Rā (Welcome Home) as a song to the theme of the class. Reflecting on welcome, as guest and host, the grace of being able to “offer my hand” and how the Jesus story might resource the challenge of “maybe we’ll find a new way.” The ways that the notion of home and hospitality work in different ways

• to belong – “woman with her hands trembling, and she sings with the mountains memory”
• to enfold – “see I made a space for you here”
• to extend – ‘I offer my hand … I bid you welcome”

Now the pressure comes on for the next class. What song from the Dobbyn catalogue might Cultivating congregational spaces for conversation or Discerning and understanding local narratives?

Craftivism across cultures

Preparing to speak in Durham, UK, in the next few weeks, I’ve been in the Hocken Collections, researching the history of knitting in Aotearoa. Here is some of what I discovered yesterday:

“In Aoteoroa, knitting arrived with the missionaries. Hannah King, who arrived in 1815, was a gifted knitter and over 200 years later, examples of her craft still exist in the Waimate North Mission House, including her husbands beautifully stitched preaching shirt and a baby gown. What is interesting is how from the 1820’s, knitted garments from Scotland were imported and then purchased by Maori, who unpicked them, recycled the wool and wove it into the borders of their garments – kaitaka (flax coats) and whatu kākahu. When painter and travel writer George Argas visited Aotearoa in 1844, he wrote (Savage Life and Scenes in Australia and New Zealand, 1847, 324) that brightly coloured wools had replaced feathers of the kaka bird. “[W]ool of the gayest colours has long been preferred by [Maori]. Blue and scarlet caps, and the variegated “comforters” brought by the traders, find a ready market amongst the women, who pick them to pieces to from the tufted ornaments of their dresses.” It is a fascinating example of creativity across intertidal zones of cultural contact, and the tactile ways in which indigenous agency can re-make, as the artefacts of another culture are unpicked, unravelled, and woven into the existing cultural forms” Steve Taylor, Craftivism as a missiology of making, Durham, 2019.

Welcoming Dave Dobbyn to Listening in Mission

Dave Dobbyn, Waiting for a voice, from his 2016 Harmony House album, made it into my Listening in Mission class.

Dave Dobbyn – Waiting for a voice from Sebastian Beyrer on Vimeo.

I was teaching a Listening in Mission (intern) cohort. There are 4 sessions over 2 months:

• Mission as gift, calling and promise
• Being present and listening in neighbourhood/context
• Cultivating congregational spaces for conversation and shared practices of missional attentiveness
• Discerning and understanding local narratives

The four online Listening in Mission sessions support an action-learning project in which folk gather a group and work with them in listening in their local communities. So the online experience provides support, encouragement and resources. We offer this online support in mission to ordinands training for ministry. We also offer it separately as life-learning for the wider church.

The sessions is online, because we want to work with participants in their context, not in the artificiality of a lecture space. The online sessions go for about 90 minutes. So it needs some sort of break, to briefly stretch legs. So at the 45 minute mark, I announced I was going to play “Waiting for a voice” by Dave Dobbyn twice. Folk were invited to listen once, and take a short stretch the second time. It was a nice way to break up a class. It engaged senses other than talking. The cycle of a song makes it easy for participants to know when to return.

And of course, the lyrics are fascinating. The theme of the class was Mission as gift, call and promise. Prior to class, folk had been invited to visit a local body of water and read John 21:1-19. This is consistent with the ethos of the learning, wanting to work with participants in their context, to read Scripture in their communities. In John 21:1-19, when Jesus appears by the Lake of Galilee. Jesus is Gift and offers gifts in breakfast cooked. Jesus is Call and calls Peter at the same lake where Peter was first called to follow. Jesus is Promise and promises a feed of fish if they will just put their nets on the other side.

Returning as class, with “Waiting for a voice” ringing in our ears, links were made from the song to the theme of the class.

• Mission is Gift – “I saw a stranger on the opposite shore; cooking up a meal for me”
• Mission is Call – ‘waiting for a still clear voice’
• Mission is Promise – ‘and sure as I’m living, i dined with the one; his words were brighter than a billion suns; he sent me running i never get tired, back into the valley where the world had died’

I have no idea whether Dobbyn would make these connections. But the lyrics make so much sense of John 21. It was an excellent way to pause a class and a great seque back into class. Thanks Dave, for your input.

Listening in Mission 2019

Knox Centre for Ministry and Leadership introduces Listening in Mission 2019, cohosted by Steve Taylor and Jill McDonald. Listening is an active process, a “double listening” to God and people. Online technologies will support leaders in undertaking a practical project in their community. As a result, a spirituality of presence, community building, attentiveness, discernment, experimentation is encouraged.

Online taster August 29, 4:30-5:30 pm, followed by five Thursdays, 4:30-6 pm – September 26; October 10; October 31; November 14; November 21. Bookings and queries to principal at knoxcentre dot ac dot nz.

For a jpg, download this.

For a flier, go here – PDF.

For a video introduction, shot in my friendly local cafe, click here …

listening in mission from steve taylor on Vimeo.

formative process and summative assessment in teaching theological reflection in ministry

I teach a course on Theological Reflection. It is a vocational setting. All participants have done an undergraduate theology degree and all are preparing for ministry in a mainline (Presbyterian) context. This trajectory needs to shape the course and two graduate outcomes in particular: one, being attentive theologically to the questions of another in the wider community and two, being able to help a community reflect theologically.

For the last few years, in seeking to attend to these graduate outcomes, I have developed a summative assessment which involves peer review. Students grade (50% along with me) each other’s work, providing both comment and a grade, which I moderate. This attends to the vocational aim of helping a community reflect theologically, which includes being able to assess theological reflection.

However, peer review does not come easily and so I need to provide some opportunity for rehearsal. This includes myself as lecturing doing the assignment. Each year I choose a recent issue and do the assignment (for a 2018 example of reforming ecclesiology in Oceania see here). I provide this “fresh” piece of theological reflection to the class. I give them time to read my model answer and check they are still clear about the assignment. I then ask them to “grade” it. This allows anxieties, fears and understandings to be clarified in community, before they attempt a peer.

Overall, the formative process and the summative assessment has been very generative. It makes clear the vocational endpoints and creates an energy as the class rehearses together. It allows a far greater attentiveness to each other’s work and uniqueness of contexts. While there are anxieties, the interns appreciate engaging more deeply with each other. It’s a really worthwhile process of engaging in capacity building.

Here is a video

explaining Theological reflection assignment Recording from steve taylor on Vimeo.

which explanations more of the why and how, the process and the resources used. The resources and handouts I describe in the video are

• The Christian Theology Reader

• Inquiring After God: Classic and Contemporary Readings

• Assessment marking guide – marking schedule Assignment 1 Theological attentiveness2019

• Case study – of Church as Cathedral of Living Stones – here

For more on theological reflection in this particular vocational space of ministerial formation

• theological reflection as integrating the journey’s of life go here

• theological reflection as decolonising through place-based methodologies go here.