forming, informing, transforming faith

Growing Disciples

Helping churches form lifelong disciples of Jesus Christ

Playing with Faith Formation: Digital Experiments in COVID-19

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Steve Taylor will be the guest at our next online seminar around Blended Faith Formation on Friday 31 July. I first met Steve through SA Synod and then we worked together at Uniting College for Leadership and Theology in Adelaide. Steve is a creative thinker, a prolific writer, and always stretching in the realm of practical theology. His personal blog is always stimulating and its here.

Every church leader finds themselves in a new space.
It’s a coping space, and also a creative space –
an opportunity to experiment with new practices, new ideas.
How are we playing with possibilities in faith formation in our digital world?

We’ll be talking about connection, interaction, contemplation, and engaging spiritual practices beyond Sunday worship.

Join us for a conversation about what leaders are trying and discovering about ways to form disciples in a dispersed community. We’ll also be talking about ministry as play, about creativity and risk and about how the Spirit takes us in new directions.

This conversation will blend stories, spiritual practices, theology and Christian formation.

Rev Dr Steve Taylor is the Principal on the Knox Centre for Ministry and Theology in Dunedin, New Zealand. KCML is part of the Presbyterian Church in Aotearoa New Zealand. Steve is a Baptist minister. He was formerly the Principal of Uniting College for Leadership & Theology in SA, and previously Director of Missiology and Post-Graduate Studies. He is the author of “First Expressions”, “Built for Change” and “Out of Bounds Church?”.

Friday 31 July, 10.00-11.30am EST Australian time

LIVE on Facebook at facebook.com/ucappep.org

Hosted by Port Phillip East Presbytery, Uniting Church in Australia

“Being With” in Mission

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I’m reading Sam Wells’ Incarnational Mission and immediately it resonates with our conversations with our Mission Pilot teams. Wells talks about “being with” as Jesus’primary way of being, and this as the church’s primary way of being in ministry and mission. (This is an companion volume to Incarnational Ministry.) Wells introduces and contrasts four approaches – working for, working with, being for and being with. The contrasts are about attempting to do good things for needy people without necessarily even consulting them – seeing people as objects of our charity, speaking on other people’s behalf without even needing to get involved, organising collective action that includes those being served, and being with people on their own terms and seeing their strengths, not their deficits. The latter, “being with” doesn’t seek to fix people’s problems but delights in them and accompanies them in finding fullness of life.

Wells describes eight aspects of “being with” :

  • presence – being in the same physical space
  • attention – focused interaction
  • mystery – exploring with appreciation (not problem-solving)
  • delight – recognition of abundance
  • participation – balancing our involvement
  • partnership – sharing of gifts
  • enjoyment – being with for its own sake
  • glory – God being with us in Christ

The book chapters explore what it means to be with a range of people – seekers, those of no professed faith, those of other faiths, neighbours, organisations, etc.

I’m just diving into the book now and will update this when I’ve finished it.

Here’s Sam Wells explaining the four approaches.

Digital Storytelling with Dr Mary Hess

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This week I hosted a conversation with Dr Mary Hess from Luther Seminary about Digital Storytelling in the context of lifelong faith formation and education. Mary is Professor of Education and Leadership at Luther Seminary, Minnesota USA. The online session was part of our new monthly series on Blended Faith Formation – how can the church grow disciples online as well as face to face. Mary has an extensive background in studying, writing and teaching about media, communication and religious education, including theological education. Her personal blog is here.

Mary is from Minneaoplis, and the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement provided a poignant but important starting point for talking about the power of stories to challenge and change. We talked about the central place of stories in faith formation and education, narrative pedagogies, personal stories, what it means to live in “the tragic gap”,  and why and how we can be teachers who collect, create and curate stories. It was a wonderful and generous conversation. Many people joined us on the day and you can read the chat comments here on on Presbytery Facebook page.

This version of the video has the audio looping glitch edited out! You can watch or download it from Youtube.

You can download the PDF of Mary’s slides here.

A number of resources were mentioned in the conversation. Here’s a list of them and there are more in the PDF.

Parker Palmer – The Courage to Teach, Healing the Heart of Democracy

Dr Frank Rogers

Irshad Manji – Don’t Label Me: An Incredible Conversation for Divided Times

Bryan Stevenson – Just Mercy, A Story of Justice and Redemption

Tex Sample – Ministry in an Oral Culture

Thomas Groome –  Christian Religious Education

Storying Faith website

I want to add in the Eight Aboriginal Ways of Learning which is a fantastic local resource for thinking differently than European mindsets about teaching and learning, and story sharing is key.

Huge thanks to Mary for an informative and encouraging session.

Our previous online conversation on Digital Discipleship was with Dr Bex Lewis from Manchester is here. Stay tuned for info about next month’s guest.

This was my first time using Ecamm Live for live vision mixing on my Macbook Pro. I skyped Mary in the US. Ecamm treats Skype video as a virtual camera source. Unfortunately I also had my iPhone connected wirelessly as a camera source, so there were two microphones picking up my voice and then they got looped through the computer system audio (as that was also turned on as an audio source. You live and learn. Having the iPhone as a second wired or wireless camera source (using NDI/HX Camera) will be really helpful in future.

Anyway, the output went to our Facebook page. I had three scenes set up – the pre-session countdown screen, the split screen with Mary, and a scene with Mary’s PDF and her video in the corner. I’m pretty happy with the ease of use and quality of output from Ecamm.

The Cynefin Framework

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Thanks to Ruth Harvey, the new leader of the Iona Community, I’ve just discovered Dave Snowden and his work on the Cynefin Framework.

Dave is a former IBM scientist who founded Cognitive Edge. His framework is based on real world analysis of how people respond to complex situations. It’s a fascinating piece of work.

Here’s Dave’s explanation video from his website. Note that he now calls the bottom right quadrant “Clear”.

So it’s a tool for thinking about how and why we deal with situations by approaching decisions in certain ways.

Here’s another one from Youtube which has several (just search on Cynefin Framework).

Fuller Seminary Introduction to the Bible

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Fuller has just released a set of short videos introducing each book of the Bible featuring it’s teaching faculty. Fuller Studio has produced some fabulous material – superb quality and editing. The production quality of these is great. The speakers are personable. The presentation is punchy. The explanations are actually invitations to experience the biblical drama and find out part in it. So the intros can be mini-sermons, but in a good way. Yes, they introduce interpretation straightaway – they’re not abstracted discussions. That’s a good thing for an introduction.

No I haven’t watched or reviewed them all yet….

The series website is here.

Here’s one I like for an obvious reason.