what was your longest night?

The nights are getting long here… the winter solstice is coming up soon. We’re doing a basement space on June 20. We’ve been sticking notices up around melbourne inviting people to ring and tell us - anonymously - the story of their longest night.

If you would like to tell us your story too, we’d like it to be part of that night. If you’re local, you can ring 03 9018 7217 and leave a message on the voicemail, otherwise, you can skype us on thelongestnight and tell us your story on voicemail there…

We’d love to hear it.

the psalms of life

morefocus - May 31

NEW DAY! NEW TIME!

This morefocus we?re taking it to the street with 2 options for taking action in the arvo session?

• Join us for some flash mobbing action to raise awareness about people trafficking. Flash mobbing is a really fun, dramatic and non confronting way of getting people?s attention and letting them know about issues that are important to you. Check out an example of flash mobbing in action here.

?

• Be a part of a tour of the streets of Melbourne City with the crew at Urban Seed, hearing about the gospel in a city context and learning about the issues occurring in the city streets today. Winding up with a game of Laneway Cricket!

You might have heard about these activities or been involved in similar actions on Submersions Day at NCYC. Well now is your chance to get active if you missed out or stay active if you did participate at NCYC. Both options will not only give you an idea of various issues affecting our world today but will also give you the opportunity to think about how you can make a difference in your own community or congregation using the skills and talents you already have and the people and organisations that are already around. Plus they?ll both be really fun!

Meet at 2.45 at the front of the stage at Fed Square for a 3pm start. (Check out the map of Fed Square here.) If you get lost give Tess a call on 0419 530 903 or Drew on 0438321872

End the evening by coming to the Centre for Theology & Ministry (1 Morrison Close, Parkville) for a worship service. The multiple space service starts at 5:30pm and is being organised by some fantastic young people on Pentecost.

The whole event will finish around 7pm.

Email uym@ctm.uca.edu.au or call 9340 8815 for more information

Facebook event link here

world peace on north terrace

ch..ch..ch..ch..ch..changes

fitzroy

I’m at Fitzroy Uniting Church on Sunday at 10am.

I wasn’t going to do spaces, but i have lost my voice [as has most of melbourne], and though it will be back by sunday, it won’t survive a service. So spaces it is…

It’s Pentecost Sunday. We’re using Ezekiel 37:1-14, Rabbit Proof Fence [by special request of someone in the congregation], lots of music, silence and the spaces. i’m kind of hoping that they’re not in the mood for some grand celebration. It looks dark, but it ends on a gently optimistic note [well it will, the blessing hasn't been written yet]. And i wrote it with this little community in mind, so hopefully it reflects their story and context, and might not make sense anywhere else…

The spaces go something like this…

1.
[images, large mound of sand]

The bones lie dry in our valley too
telling their stories of discarded dreams
and broken trust;
disillusionment, fear and tiredness.

If this is a story you know too well
or if those you love are living it,
take a handful of sand.
Let it trickle back into the ground
in the shape of your prayer
for yourself,
for the church,
for the world.

If you can speak with Ezekiel?s faith
into these stories with the promise of life,
take a handful of sand.
Let it trickle back into the ground
in the shape of your vision
for life,
for the church,
for the world.

pray for God to breathe life
into all that is lost?

2.
[sandpaper, images]

The world fights for breath.

We hoard our last gasps of oxygen
for fear there is no more to come.

And as the world slowly dies around us
our fear is that our lifelessness is too much
even for you, God,

that there is nothing more you are able to do.

Rip the shape of those things
you are unable to trust to God
into the sandpaper

if you can, leave them here,
to be held by the faith of this community.

3.
[bread, wine, images]

surrounded by the desolation and tiredness
we search for what keeps us alive?

the hunger for god
the memory of jesus
the promise of the spirit

take the bread and the wine
let their story of faith
be your story of life

4.
[black card, black pens, white pens]
in the valley
when everything is stripped back
to bare bones
it’s hard to tell which are ours
and which are theirs

we realise how fragile
the things that gave us shape and colour,
uniqueness, diversity,
- that defined us against each other,
are.

the most resilient part of us
- what’s left when everything else is gone -
are the things we have in common
with everybody else.

write your grief for what has been lost in black
and your celebration for what remains in colour?

5.
[newspaper, black markers, written onto black card]

you do not give up
on the broken and the lost

you do not give up
on the fractured
or the shattered
or the dying
or the dead

you do not give up
on the fearful
or the hateful
or the impossible

you do not give up
when there is no heartbeat left
or no heart at all

you do not give up
you do not leave us for dead

thank god.

when you ready
and if you would like
add to the newspaper the situations in your life and world
that you need God not to give up on?

a community-serving church

communal justice: changing the goal posts, changing the game

I love the whole area of systems thinking and organisational / cultural change [it was a large part of the study for my masters, which ended up focussing on intuition as a valid form of knowledge, and it's place within organisational learning]. The ‘pop’ version of this can be found in Margaret Wheatley’s writings and Peter Senge… the more theoretical research begins with Argyris and Schon, and Beckett and Hager, and others like that.

Complex change theory holds that you can’t ‘fix’ one part of an organisation by focussing only on it - the reason being that a single part of a system or organisation is always influenced and affected by its part in the whole. Until this school of thought came along, organisations were treated largely like machines [if the car's overheating, it's probably the radiator; fix that and the car runs fine]. Complex change theory treats organisations like organisms - and if the organism is overheating, the results and solutions are often far more complicated.

And in semi-functional and functional systems [like churches], that’s a really helpful approach. But in fundamentally flawed and broken systems - like the justice and prison systems here in victoria - it’s becoming obvious that it’s overwhelming and impossible.* We pick an issue to focus on [post release employment, for example], and then realise it’s impossible to work on that without working on the issues that complicate that [mental health; low levels of literacy; housing - you can't apply for a job without an address...]. Each of those areas is massive and overwhelming in its complexity, and are themselves directly implicated by a stack of major issues… And the thing with the prisons is that there’s no part of the system that’s stable or healthy enough to be able to work from… In a church, business or organisation, there’s something core that we can agree on, and build out from, something that can be a reference point; something inherently good or valuable. It’s hard to find that in the prison. We can’t even decide what the fundamental purpose of the prison system is: are we separating people from the community, or are we rehabilitating them so they can be part of the community? You can’t do both simultaneously. And it’s funny - everyone in the system, from government ministers, department heads to prison officers and inmates, says that the system is flawed - but the task is beyond impossible.

I don’t know that we ever thought we could fix things. I think we’ve realised though that the systemic approach we have been taking just overwhelms and paralyses everyone involved. Sick systems do that.

This week we’ve been having some ’state of the nation’ conversations about the communal justice project. We know more now, and the picture’s not pretty. I think we’ve done good stuff this last year, but we’re at a turning point. Our sphere of concern is massive, our sphere of influence is, in all honesty, negligible. We’re not the only ones working on this area - but everyone seems to be throwing up their hands in despair at the immensity of the task. So today we’ve decided that we’re starting to work on finding a third way to approach this [and if that doesn't work we'll look for a fourth].

The justice unit here will continue to do research on the broader issues. We’re not going to keep meeting with department heads to hear the issues or get the bigger picture. We know enough. And for the rest of this year we’re simply going to host roundtables with uniting church agencies, ministers, involved lay people, prison chaplains, presbytery ministers who are directly involved in post-release support, with no other purpose but to get them together and hear what’s happening, and unearth the inherent wisdom around the table. We’re not going to solve the issues [i so wish we could], or commit to doing more. We’re not going to talk about how we need to reform the area of mental health, sentencing, indigenous justice etc. at the same time, although we need to and i wish we could… we’re not even going to talk about what the broader issues are. We’re just going to create an environment where people can learn from each other, and find ways of working differently together. We’re working within our circle of influence…

And secondly, we’re going to gather a group of ministers from congregations that find emergency relief a core part of their life and work, and hold a peer-led workshop about how that happens, what it means for congregations, and the wisdom they’ve learnt in the process. I think this particular idea has great possibilities on a range of areas.

It feels counter-intuitive, not to mention silly, to be doing such tiny things in the light of the massive problems that need to be addressed. I read back over what i’ve written here and i want to delete it, writing in its place world-changing policies and actions… mostly so i can convince you that we’re doing something good. But we are learning that the system will beat us if we play the game on the system’s terms, and we know we have to play the game differently, trusting what communities do when they’re at their best: unearthing their own wisdom, finding links among themselves, knowing what they are capable of, and trusting the rest to someone else. We’re changing the goalposts, we’re hoping to change the game…

It’s a little fragile, as plans go. I guess the alternative would be that all of you who are the praying types could pray that pentecost this sunday would do its chaotic, subversive best; dismantling the systems that oppress etc,. And I’ll keep working on the roundtables just as a backup.

* An afterthought: the really good thing about doing this project is that i no longer think that the church is fundamentally screwed. You think the church is irredeemable? Wait until you see the justice system… It’s kind of like when you’ve had the real flu, you realise that everything you called the flu before was actually just a pathetic cold…

what are you waiting for?

you do not give up

ezekiel 37, again

you do not give up
on the broken and the lost

you do not give up
on the fractured
or the shattered
or the dying
or the dead

you do not give up
on the fearful
or the hateful
or the impossible

you do not give up
when there is no heartbeat left
or no heart at all

you do not give up
you do not leave us for dead

thank god.

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