Jon Rogers

discovered prezi – awesome presentations, I made http://prezi.com/36495 for a staff seminar

I discovered Prezi today (via lifehacker) – quite simply the Awesomest Presentations Ever. Capitalisation is necessary. Check out the presentation I knocked up for tomorrow’s twilight staff seminar that I’m leading.

[iframe http://prezi.com/36495/view/ 500 375]

At Spring Harvest this year one of the most interesting and helpful talks I’ve listened to has been Roger Sutton on “Preaching is Dead?” He gave an interesting critique of the monologue (in a monologue) and its failures to connect with society and then looked at some of the reasons that it still has relevance for today’s Church. A book I need to follow up on is Walter Brueggemann “Cadences of Home”, which he gave a little quote from about what the job of preaching should be in the new, post-Christendom context the church is waking up to the reality of. Preaching should:

1. give voice to loss
2. Facilitate remembrance
3. Rhetorically render imagined newness

or in other words acknowledge what was for the church but has passed, remember who we truly are now, and create an image of what we could be. I like the idea that in preaching we almost start to make the imagined newness start to be real with our words, that it begins to appear in minds, then physically.

So seventeen ways to save the sermon. These were Roger’s 16 (+1) ideas he shared with us with some comments and link that might be helpful.

1. Get creative – in your approach, in your style, in the images you use, in the topic you preach on.
2. Stop being a lone ranger – this is an era where there are few generalists and many specialists. I may not know much about a specific topic but someone in my congregation might be an expert from their job or previous life experience. Find some way to bring in their expertise, and if they can’t/won’t preach, interviews, whether live, scripted or filmed could draw out what the church needs to hear from them.
3. Preach less often
4. Move from a deductive to an inductive approach – deductive uses the fallacy that we can always logically construct a conclusion from the facts before us. This is faith, not logic that we’re expressing, there needs to be space to question and grow into an idea. Inductive approaches don’t set up a conclusion and work to it with data and evidences, but “go beyond” the raw facts to a suggestion. Difficult, not what we’re used to in church, but better suited to the culture we live in.
5. Use storytelling – a narrative approach to a topic or using story symbolically to show what you’re going really helps with engagement. Story resonates with any age group – look at what is popular on TV – soaps and “reality” shows, stories of “real” people and their struggles.
6. Watch good communicators – Use the news, youtube, films, where ever you can get examples.
7. Arouse curiosity – push people to find out for themselves, to try out or dig deeper.
8. Create space for creative artists – perhaps linking to number 10 or giving time to reflect or just as a thing in itself, make a place in a service for a singer to share his talent, or to watch an artist draw out her idea of what it means. Spring Harvest is great for this kind of creative expression, but why shouldn’t church be too?
9. Create space for dialogue and interaction – Monologue should not be the only way forward. Dialogue is valuable. Q&A or discussion can really enhance learning, which is after all the purpose of teaching in church.
10. Preach for response – at Spring Harvest they’re good at responses. One evening service, the sermon ended with the idea that God had set an open door in front of us, an opportunity for us to take. The response was four physical doors in the Big Top for us to go up to, touch and pray. That’s a response that calls for physical action as well as “spiritual” action and perhaps change. Lighting a candle, moving, standing up to be prayed for, any kind of response that needs a deliberate choice and action engages the learner.
11. Accept some sheep are fat and need exercise – how about doing before some more learning. An active “service” where we serve rather than being served?
12. Let the apostles and prophets loose – Roger calls on Andy Hawthorn of the Message to come talk at his church when his congregation needs “waking up.” He’s an evangelist and gifted with the kind of energy and passion that connects with people to stir them up. I don’t know people right now who could do that, I will have to find some!
13. Spend time on communication as well as content – thinking about what to say is essential, but figuring out how to say it is just as important. Communication is what people hear, what they learn is dependent on how you teach it to them. Planning the way you will explain the passage or topic goes far beyond comprehension and on to the way you present, techniques you’ll use, rhetorical devices, even powerpoint!
14. Don’t do it every week – not a problem for me right now, but burnout is a killer in any area of work. In schools we have holidays at regular intrvals which helps to combat it, how do preachers cope?
15. Use cultural signposts – Paul did it, we looked at it at Spring Harvest. Linking to ideas in the culture does not mean endorsing them or agreeing. It gives a chance to reclaim the good and re-direct the minds that are seeking to connections and meaning that would be hard to grasp otherwise.
16. Try some short sermons – Concentration spans for most adults are less than 15 minutes. How long between ad-breaks on TV? There is a place for an extended lecture, but perhaps a series of shorter talks that deeply affect the hearers would be greater.
17. Try to team-teach – split the content of a sermon, perhaps with someone else who is more specialised, or just someone you respect and think could do a great job of explaining parts of the idea. I’ve heard it done to great effect by Ed and Kent Dobson on the Mars Hill podcast, but it doesn’t have to be father and son teams. As a young preacher, being asked to share with someone would be a huge honour.

So what do you think? Do these help to point in a good direction? Are there more we should add? How can this conversation continue to the benefit of our congregations?

BBQ mackerel – yum! Stick of rosemary & garlic inside, oil, bbq for 5 minutes on each side

is a twit

See the QEMS Superman Comic Relief video on youtube httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1d0n81k9koA

I’ve been reading Tribes by Seth Godin. It’s great to be pushed a little to think about leading, especially in a culture that he beautifully describes as “sheep-walking”. That culture is especially prevalent in schools, in my experience, and one that is dangerously easy to slip into without realising – the clock your hours, do just enough, us-vs-them attitude that keeps the status quo. And by the way, as Dr. Horrible said “the Status is not Quo” – it’s not hard to see from inside or out that education is not working as we want it. (tanget: Joss Wheedon is totally a leader in the Tribes sense of the word!)

Education isn’t working right nationally,  locally, in my school, in my classroom. There are flashes of it going well, but I’m sure a whole week can pass, even longer, when a pupil at my school is not a learner, is not engaged in the process, is not led to grow in their skill, understanding and excitement in any single lesson. The buzz from a crazy day like our video on Red Nose Day was palpable. Only a few people were cynical enough to really believe it wasn’t a great day. How can I change things so that experience happens on a daily basis in my room?

Taking a moment to think about leading is giving me a chance to explore some ideas. How can I lead that in school, at a classroom level and with my colleagues? I think L2 has given me a lot of answers for the classroom side of things. Using the accelerated learning cycle or another active learning model puts the emphasis on students to understand and get on board with real objectives. Using that approach and the pace it almost generates works across the board – IT, L2, RE, wherever. How can I lead that change in the school (paid  responsibility or not…)? Suddenly a Teaching and Learning newsletter seems like a useful and valid idea to do. Not on paper, that’s backward looking; an email newsletter that I can track. That will help me to connect with the tribe that will emerge and craw them in closer to the aim.

First task – write a manifesto: what do I want to lead at school?

Peace is a funny thing. The angels never understood why it was such a big deal, but there’s a lot of things the angels never understood. They watched God make earth from  the seething waters, watched His spirit hovering over the turmoil and crafting such beauty. Oh how they sang on that day – it was amazing what He had made from the darkness. They thought that song would last for ever, but they were wrong. It was an incredible song, but they had to stop.

Turmoil crept back in. it seemed to infect humanity. The angels had thought that humanity was God’s master stroke, the piece-de-resistance in creation, but now it seemed like such a huge mistake. The turmoil spread and spread and the angels kept wondering how it could be so different there, when heaven was so… calm. They whispered to each other, wondering what God would do about it, how he could rescue peace from planet earth. So much pain, so much hatred. Angels can’t empathise or even sympathise – they just don’t feel those things, but they saw the effects and scratched their heads.

They watched, amazed as God went down to the seething waters and touched them. He became part of the turmoil and as he lived among the hurting people, he made just a little ripple. Angels don’t understand ripples, so they just watched. No more whispering for a while, they wanted to see what would happen. As Jesus’ effect was snuffed out, they started to murmor again. Was this the end of the ripple – it seemed so small and faint? It was a huge lake of humanity and only a few had even seen the ripple. God said “Shhh, just watch.”

You should have seen their mouths drop open as the ripple kept on spreading. First a handful of people were touched, a dozen here, twenty there, then more and more. As the ripple touched some of their lives, more ripples came from those drops of peace. The ripples kept spreading, round and round the lake, touching more and more people. As the angels watched the Spirit hovering, the wind from his wings gave energy to the ripples. The angels found a new song now, they got louder and louder as they saw more ripples.

This story was written for, and used in my talk at Canley called “Peace with Others”. Ripples became the extended metaphor for spreading peace through humility, and I felt that there were peace ripples through the service. I pray it helps you too.