Maybe not so dumb
I had this idea the other day about making a way for people to share stuff they own but don’t use a lot, tools, DVDs, etc. Enough local people have expressed an interest that I have decided to try to make it happen.
Hopefully, I will be sending oh-so-exclusive invitations to interested people who live in/near Conwy County by the end of the weekend. Hooray!
29 January 2010 Jeff Gill
tags: change,
community
This might be dumb but...
I think that most people have a decent amount of stuff like tools and DVDs and books that they don’t use that often and would be happy to lend out to friends and people they trusted. The biggest obstacle to this seems to me that people don’t have an easy way to tell each other what stuff they are happy to share. The obvious place for a here’s-what-I-have-to-share thing is online. Do you know of anything like this that already exists, or does it still need to be invented?
23 January 2010 Jeff Gill
tags: change,
community
The rules of my fight club
I watched Fight Club last night. I know this film has been out for a while, but as I was watching I was struck with a powerful, prophetic sense that it captured the zeitgeist of this generation of men. Now is the time for a paradigm-shifting change in the way we talk to the lost men of this generation. Now is the time to change the world. Now is the time for BREAKTHROUGH! That’s why I am starting a Men’s Missional Fight Club For Jesus. Here are the rules:
The first rule of my fight club is tell all your friends we’re starting a fight club.
The second rule of my fight club is here are some fight club leaflets you could put up in your office or village shop or whatever.
The third rule of my fight club is no hard punches. We don’t want anybody to get hurt.
The fourth rule of my fight club is you have to read and sign the health and safety statement and waiver of liability.
The fifth rule of my fight club is you have to sign up for the tea-making and mug-washing rotas which are taped up on the back wall.
The sixth rule of my fight club is the fights will last no longer than three minutes. You’ll be surprised at how tiring fighting actually is.
The seventh rule of my fight club is this isn’t about winning and losing. It’s just a bit of fun.
The eighth and final rule of my fight club is that there is no pressure to fight. You are welcome to just watch.
∗
And we wonder why our big ideas go nowhere.
2 May 2009 Jeff Gill
tags: change,
church,
failure,
silly
Look at my pretty paradigm!
John Michael Greer is at his best this week, writing about paradigm change. He writes about the difficulty of change, the way that our paradigms prevent us from eve being able to ask certain questions, much less answer them, and in describing the thinking of some dude called Thomas Kuhn he shares this bit of brilliance:
It’s standard practice for the new paradigm to include the value judgment that the questions the new paradigm answers are the ones that matter, and the ones the old paradigm does better don’t count. Nor is this judgment pure propaganda; since the questions the new paradigm answers are generally the ones that researchers have been wrestling with for decades or centuries, they look more important than details that have been comfortably settled since time out of mind. They may also be more important, in every meaningful sense, if they allow practical problems to be solved that the old paradigm left insoluble.
Yet the result of that value judgment, Kuhn argued, is the false impression that science progresses, replacing relatively false beliefs with relatively more true ones, and thus gradually advances on the truth. He argued that different paradigms are not attempts to answer the same questions, differing in their level of accuracy, but attempts to answer entirely different questions – or, to put it another way, they are models that highlight different features of a complex reality, and cannot be reduced to one another. Thus, for example, Ptolemaic astronomy isn’t wrong, just useful for different purposes than Copernican astronomy. (From the standpoint of relativity theory, please note, this is quite correct: since there are no fixed points in the cosmos, only frames of reference, it’s as meaningful to take an earth-centered frame of reference and calculate the movements of the planets from there as it is to take a sun-centered frame of reference and do the same thing.)
So basically, the paradigm you just threw away because it is old and useless still explains certain parts of life, the universe and everything better than your shiny new one does.
Go read the whole article, and while you are there dig into Mr Greer’s archives and subscribe to his feed. I know he writes about peak oil and ecology, but if you want to understand why the white western evangelical church is failing, why most of the church is stuck talking about the possibility of rearranging the deck chairs on our Titanic, and WHY the things that Alan Hirsch, Floyd McClung, Frank Viola and even Brant Hansen are saying are so important, then I can think of no better teacher than John Michael Greer.
24 April 2009 Jeff Gill
tags: change,
church,
humans,
john michael greer
Finding life purpose
A friend on Facebook is wondering what her purpose is and asked for suggestions. After my awesomely silly answer involving cetaceans, I started thinking seriously. How do you discover purpose in life? It is something I’ve spent a lot of time on over the years. Back in the days of my naive idealism is taught teenagers how to Get A Vision for their lives. Since then, I have discovered I’m a lot happier not having a vision for my life and a lot of other people feel the same way. But purpose is different. I want purpose. I want to feel that what I spend my days doing what Actually Matters. Probably you do too. So for the benefit of the public I present, helpful or not:
Jeff’s Quick and Dirty Very Christian Guide to Discovering Purpose in life
God’s mission. God is on a mission to redeem his creation – short version: John 3:16 – and God invites us to join him in that mission – short version: Matthew 28:18-20. If God made you and God made you to relationship with him and God is on a mission, a big clue (the big clue!) to what best suits you in life will be found in the mission of God.
STEP ONE: Devote yourself to understanding and living for the mission of God.
God’s process in you. The Apostle Paul wrote that God began a good purpose in the Philippians and God would be faithful to complete it. Jesus said that a fully trained disciple would be like their master. A life lived in God and following Jesus is a process of transformation. It is the journey towards becoming fully human, for that is what God saved us to be.
STEP TWO: Embrace God’s process in you with all its joy and pain and glory and hard work and transformation.
Your personality, gifts and interests. God’s mission is very big, and you are very small. Who you are as an individual will have a lot to do with where you specifically fit in God’s mission. An artist won’t play the same part as an accountant. (Duh.) If you haven’t done so, you should probably take a good personality and/or spiritual gifts test. When you know who you are and what your strengths are, you are better able to use them for advancing of God’s mission.
STEP THREE: Put your personality, gifts and interests to work in service of the mission of God.
What I don’t mean in step three is that you should go on staff at a church. What I do mean is that when devotion to God’s mission is connected with embracing God’s transformation programme and a real understanding of who you are, remarkable things start to happen right where you are. Ideas appear. Possibilities emerge. Opportunities open. You find that you very naturally begin to feel that your life is lived with purpose and meaning
STEP FOUR: Enjoy the ‘slow magic’.
It’s not really magic, of course. It is cooperating with God and being led in a missional direction and embracing everything that means and one day noticing that somehow along the way you have discovered a deep and meaningful purpose for your life. It’s simple. It’s not even slightly easy on a lot of days, but it is simple. And you can start right now.
23 February 2009 Jeff Gill
tags: change,
humans,
kingdom of god
Beware of bold pronouncements
Over the last few months I have enjoyed some serious world-rockage thanks to Surprised by Hope by Tom Wright, Starting a House Church by Larry Kreider and Floyd McClung, and The Forgotten Ways by Alan Hirsch, plus a bunch of podcasts from Greg Boyd and Rob Bell. Now it’s the bible’s turn.
Over the next three to five weeks I plan to read the New Testament. I will be looking specifically at what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus, both individually and as a community of Christians on a mission. The purpose of this is not to know more stuff, rather, I want to make whatever changes are necessary to orient my life around God’s mission on Earth (John 3:16) and my place in that mission through the new birth (John 3:3).
This is more of a read-and-reflect than a study, so I will be using my handy dandy TNIV Books of The Bible. I plan to write about what I read here. And I’m off…
10 February 2009 Jeff Gill
tags: blogging,
books,
change,
church,
community,
kingdom of god,
nt
Play
And we’re back.
9 February 2009 Jeff Gill
tags: blogging,
change
Pause
D Train is taking a break for a while. Hopefully we will be back fairly soon. Meanwhile, we’ll catch you on Facebook or something.
Happiness,
Jeff
7 December 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: blogging,
change
Not everything must change
I like change, but if EVERYTHING changed I’d end up sucking my thumb and rocking in the corner. If everything changed, I would lose my frame of reference. I would be lost.
A person with extraordinary capacity for change might be able to handle a change of nearly everything, but they wouldn’t be able to bring anyone along with them into their new world. One significant change that people can handle is better. After you make one change, you can do another.
When we started i61, (our church) we didn’t change everything. We didn’t even change most things. What we believe is unremarkably evangelical. In our meetings we sing songs at the beginning of the meeting, have notices in the middle, then a message (sermon) from a pastor or guest speaker, and a song to close. Just like lots of other churches the children go to their own time during the message. Just like lots of other churches we having smaller meetings during the week that cater to people of various ages and interests. On one level i61 is just like any other church in Britain.
We did change some things though. We decided to build a church that would be inviting to people who aren’t steeped in church culture. We rejected a traditional church meeting place in favour of a pub. We replaced Christian lingo that only a few people could understand with everyday language that most everyone can understand. We focus on talking about what the bible has to say about subjects that have to do with everyday life rather than what we have to say about our theological interests. We are relentless in our drive to make i61 a place where anyone can be supported in their own faith journey, even if they don’t yet have any faith in God.
We (and here I must give most of the credit for our foundational values to Steve and Gill and Lee and Sarah Houghton) didn’t change everything. We only changed some of the things that were keeping people away from church. The result is a church-in-a-pub that is stuffed to capacity with people who are excited about God or are open to the idea of being excited about God.
You don’t have to change everything RIGHT NOW.
You don’t even have to change the most important thing right now. The other day I was listening to a head teacher who turned around a badly failing school talk about what he did first. He sorted out school’s problem with bus, car and pedestrian traffic flow. That wasn’t the most important thing to change, but it needed to be changed. And that was what the head teacher chose.
Choose one thing. Change it effectively. Bring the people you lead along with you. Repeat.
25 October 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: change,
humans,
i61
I like Claire Richards
She runs parenting courses for Conwy Education Services, and she is a teacher. The courses are great. Christine and I went to one in 2006 and it helped us bring much more peace into our home and effectiveness into our leadership as parents.
The problem with the courses is that hardly anyone goes to them. Maybe not enough people know about them? Maybe there is a perceived stigma with attending a parenting course?
We know that that kind of stigma is silly. In no other part of life (except for maybe within the slacker crowd at high school) would you be stigmatised for wanting to get better at what you do. But calling stigma silly doesn’t get parents onto your course.
Claire knows that. Instead of shouting at the status quo…
Keep reading
23 October 2008 Jeff Gill
tags: change,
community,
leadership,
north wales,
parenting