Changing the way we approach failure and set backs

Having finished reading Black Box Thinking, it strikes me that there is a lot still to be learned about the way we deal with failures and set backs. Putting on the news this morning, the big talking point was the incident at Old Trafford. The response to the evacuation and abandonment of the game was full of the expected puns, Red faces at Old Trafford, and the language of instant blame. Apparently the local Police and Crime Commissioner has called it an "outrage" and there's going to be a full enquiry.

Well the enquiry is  clearly a good idea, but an outrage? Well I'm not so sure that's the right description, and what's more it immediately puts everyone in defensive mode. Why not start from lessons learned? Clearly the evacuation was handled pretty well, and the security obviously worked because they found the suspect package and death with it. Yes, a lot of people were very inconvenienced, but the system worked. Shouldn't we at least acknowledge that.

Somebody missed something after the training event. That much is obvious, but surely the way forward is to look at the protocols involved in accounting for the training devices and adjust them. Learn a lesson for the future, don't start getting outraged and look for someone to blame.

We've just got back from a holiday in Portugal. Yesterday was a long day of travelling, and while not in the league of an abandoned football match because of a suspicious package left by mistake, we had our fair share of frustrations along the way. It felt like we spent most of the day in a queue of some sort.

Faro airport is not the best equipped international airport I've ever travelled through, and it's not the worst, even of those I've experienced. Long delays getting people through passport control and security meant our flight home was delayed by almost an hour. There was quite a lot of British outrage at the "shambles" and "chaos" at the airport. We had issues when we arrived too, mainly with passport control again. Faro has about 5 of the new biometric passport readers on both inward and outward sides. Sadly only three were working, and one crashed. Anyway people got stuck at passport control and we missed our slot for take-off and had to wait for the delayed passengers and then for a new slot. I dare say there will be a few strongly worded letters and emails being written this mooring to the trail company complaint about all this and demanding compensation.

But who will be looking at the events and trying to learn lessons and then fix the problems? At Stansted there were 15 biometric gates and we still had to queue and there were still problems. While adding more terminals would clearly help, it's not the whole solution.

The interesting thing was that when we were on the aircraft waiting for the delayed passengers, the announcements made were very clearly blaming ground staff at the airport, just to make sure we understood who was to blame. It's nice to know it's always someone else's fault! Okay, so in this case the issue was with the airport, but I'd rather hope that the travel companies and airlines would look at how they can support the airport, perhaps with investment, to add more terminals, and to make sure they are working. Rather than blaming the people, look for a solution that will support the future use of the airport.

So Black Box Thinking is worth reading if it makes you change the way you see and deal with failure. If you are not willing to become a learner or if you're not interested in solutions that don't start with "who can I blame", then maybe you should seek out a book about how to complain instead.

Currently reading: Black-Box Thinking

I've just started reading Matthew Syed's "Black-Box Thinking" alongside Gray Cook's "Movement". Clearly two very different books, but it's good to be able to swap between them. In the past I've had anything up to 10 or more books on the go at any given time, mainly when I was researching and preparing. These days two is enough, although a new book dropped through the door today all about fascia and I'm tempted to have a dip into that. Oh, and I'm re-reading John Gibbons book about the glutes.

Black-Box Thinking is an interesting read so far. I'm only about 10% of the way through the book, so barely scratching the surface, but apart from maybe one too may anecdotal stories (I skimmed through the last on about WW2 bomber planes, but read enough to pick up the salient point of the story), I've enjoyed what I've read so far. The basic premise of the book concerns how we learn or don't learn from failure and errors.

The contrast is made between aviation and healthcare. Aviation has a very open culture that encourages the reporting of errors and failures and their investigation. The reason is simple enough: failures are data rich and learning opportunities for future failure or error avoidance. Through a series of stories this becomes very clear and very positive. Healthcare, by  contrast, is more inclined to conceal its errors and failures. The reasons for this are complex to the extent that they involve issues around litigation, perception of success and competence etc.

I'm not quite sure what you'd use to describe the opposite of Black-box thinking, but we probably all recognise when we see or hear. The other day I was listening the radio and they were discussing education. A report had suggested that the development of a northern powerhouse might be undermined by the apparent failures in education, particularly in secondary education. "Who's to blame?" was the question, a question typical of non-black-box thinking. It's a search for the scapegoat, and even those answering the question were guilty of the same pattern of thinking. One side says it's poor teachers, one side suggests it's poor leadership and eventually someone blames the government. Very little was said about solutions and opportunities to move forward. There was always a reason why it wasn't possible to do something positive. Maybe to was the way the discussion was arranged, maybe it was just a symptom of the kind of thinking the book describes as a closed loop approach.

It does make you think about your own approach to failure. As you know, I play tennis. Sometimes I play well, sometimes I don't. I lose a lot! I don't like losing, but it's part of the game and the simple truth is that there are a lot of tennis players who are very much better players than I am. I have played with and against another player who has been taking lessons for as long as I have and as regularly. When we first started playing we were pretty even. He would win some, I would win some. More recently I've beaten him consistently and, it has to be said, quite heavily (6-1, 6-0, that kind of thing). I've clearly improved more than he has. I think I know why.

Firstly, I own my errors and failures. I try not to make excuses, even if there's a valid reason why I played poorly. I know it's down to my technical execution of the shot and/or my choice of shot that lets me down. I also know when I'm playing a better player or a player who might not be significantly better, but who is certainly more experienced. I try to take my failure and process it into what I need to do in order to do better next time. It's a long process and it takes times, effort and application to practice the right things in the right way.

Secondly, I practice. I work as hard as I can to improve.

In contrast, my fellow student doesn't seem to play much differently now compared to how he played when we first met. He still makes the same errors, and he still makes as many as he did 4 or 5 years ago. When we talk about the game his approach is often to blame the court surface, the weather conditions, balls, the strings, his grip or his failure to "go for it", which usually means hitting it as hard as he can.

Perhaps that makes me more of a black-box thinker. I'll keep reading the book to find out!

The China Study

So, what is the China Study I hear you ask! Well, it's a reasonably long text about nutrition and heath developed from a series of studies over a number of years. The big question is: Is it true? If it is, then there are some very serious and potentially life-changing decisions to be made by all of us about what we eat.

The book details a lot of information, which is fine but it is only presented from one perspective as you might expect and that perspective soon becomes pretty clear. Animal protein is the enemy, go vegetarian to avoid the major diseases of a typical Western diet.

If you do a quick search of the internet you will find plenty of counter arguments suggesting that the conclusions drawn ion the book are far from exact and even possibly unreliable. In the end you will either have to decide for yourself, based on doing a lot more research and background reading, or you will decide to trust the authors or dismiss them.

But before you do, you might want to do two things. First, you might want to dip into the book and read it. Second, you might want to think about the broader issues of diet and lifestyle that seem to precipitate the health issues we face and ask your own questions. Perhaps the book's conclusion are too narrow, too unproven, but to deny that our way of eating is linked to the state of our health would be to bury our heads in the proverbial sand.

Some of the research quoted is fascinating, and if true it is certainly cause for rethinking our eating habits. Generally we al know that a diet needs to be balanced, that fibre is important, fruit and vegetable are essential and that calorie dense, nutrient poor foods are bad for us. We just don't know what data is reliable and who to believe. Even the 5-a-day principle has no discernible scientific basis that I can track down. There's even talk about it ought to be 7 or 10.

So if the China Study does only one thing and that thing is to make us all think more carefully about how and what we eat, then that's a good thing. Maybe the jury is still out about the veracity of the data and the conclusions, but the fact remains that we are dying from diseases that are directly linked to our eating habits and lifestyle choices. Something needs to change, and it needs to change pretty soon.

High Tech Tennis

I've been loaned this book (High Tech Tennis) by Jack Groppel, and I'm really rather enjoying the read. It combines two of my favourite subject: tennis and biomechanics! I'm five chapters in, and although the first two were useful, it's at chapter 3 that it starts to get interesting. At least for me.

Chapter 3 is all about footwork. You can't overstate the importance of footwork in tennis. In fact you can argue that if you're going to build a tennis player, the place to start is with footwork, then bodywork and finally racket work. Think about it for a moment. The last thing you do is hit the ball, the first thing you do is move into position to hit it. It's a simple principle, if you can't get in the right position to hit the ball, it really doesn't matter how good your stroke mechanics are, you're not going to make the shot. Footwork is crucial. Reading through this chapter, and the next one on power and control, just makes me want to practise more! The problem is, it's hard to find anyone who wants to practice.

One of the interesting things in the chapter on footwork is the way the drills are organised. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a drill, it's simply a pattern of activities repeated over and over again. For example, you might do a forehand drill where you hit cross court to a target zone and keep going until you make 100 shots in the target (or until you need oxygen!). What is interesting about the footwork drills is that they are done based on the average length of a rally with rest periods that reflect the average time between rallies and also average length of the changeover. So, for example, you might do one drill repeated 5 times for 10 secs for each cycle with 15 secs rest between the cycles. That simulates a typical game. I'd never really considered planning drills in that way. I could probably run 5k in 30 minutes, but you simply don't run like that on a tennis court. On the other hand, doing explosive movements with short recovery periods between is typical of tennis.

When I'm watching the rugby players at the club train, I'm often wondering why the backs and forwards are doing the same things. I can understand doing certain things the same, but forwards generally don't sprint the same distances backs run, so why would you train the same way?

Forwards are most often involved in rucks, scrums and mauls. They have to learn to pick the ball up off the floor and then run short distances with it. If they're not running with the ball they need to get back to their feet and follow the player with the ball to the next ruck or maul. Backs generally receive the ball through the hands and already running when they do. Good training mixes these things up but also focuses them so that players can build their skills.

But this book is about tennis not rugby, so I'll stop digressing and make one last observation form the book that caught my eye. In the footwork chapter there's a great picture of Jennifer Capriati setting up for a backhand. It's a great picture because you can clearly see how the weight transfers and takes her forward into the shot. Oh to be able to do that consistently!

And the best quote from the book so far? Well that has to be the description of what to do when the ball is coming straight at you. Are there complicated movements to make, or detailed descriptions of when to take the racket back? No. The answer is simple. When the ball comes straight at you: Get out of the way!

The book remembered!

I've done a bit of digging and found the title and author of the book on guidance to which I made reference in my last post. The book is called: Decision Making and the Will of God, by Gary Friesen. It is still available, albeit with a new cover by the looks of things.

It's been such a long time since I read it, almost 30 years I think, that I certainly couldn't do it any justice in terms of a review. However, I still think it's a book you might want to read if your interested in thinking through how you understand and apply the principles guidance in your life.

I know some might suggest that the book dispenses with the idea that God has a plan for your life, but I don't remember thinking that at all. In fact my memory of reading the book was a sense of liberation from the debilitating need to have everything confirmed by some sort of sign. As with all things, there is a need to keep a sense of balance and to understand the interrelationship between obedience, choosing freely and applying what you already know about God's general will. Too often Christians can become paralysed, unable to make a decision because they are unsure about what God wants them to do. I wonder if that is in some way because we have a showed view of God's will, not grasping the differences between his revealed will, his sovereign will and possibly something more specific to particular events or decisions we have to make. I wonder too if there are not times when we want God to be specific because we don't want to do the "wrong thing".

Complicated stuff, guidance.

Where's the connection?

I've just started reading Steve Peter's The Chimp Paradox. For those who don't know, he's the guy who's been working with British Cycling and other high performance athletes and sports people.  I've only just started the book, so I can't give you an overview of the whole thing, but I did start to think about the theological implications of the way he describes the brain.

Using a very simplified model of the brain, he divides into three parts: the human, the chimp and the computer. The computer is the storage centre and the other two the active controlling brains. Put simply, the human brain is who we want to be and the chimp brain essentially interferes with our fulfilling of our potential.

What struck me as interesting is that theologically we talk about the will and talk about how sin affects our ability to do what honours God. I hear the echo of Paul's words when he speaks of doing what he knows he shouldn't do and not being able to do what he knows he ought to do (Rom. 7).

Now, I'm not trying to find a theological correlation or interpretation of Steve Peter's work in order to make it somehow Christian, rather like the quest for finding parallels between the Star Wars saga and the gospel. All I'm saying is that i'm intrigued by the the concept of a part of me that interferes, that gets in the way of me becoming that which I have the potential to be. That concept seems to have resonance with the way I understand the gospel, redemption and the whole of the Biblical narrative.

When we declare that we can't help it, the simple truth is that we can. Just because we're tempted we don;t have to fall for it. We always have a choice. When I first came to faith one of the first verses of the New Testament I committed to memory was 1Cor.10:13 "No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it."

I've always thought that is possible for us not to sin, but probable that we will sin. This is the battle we face, the battle of choosing. This makes reading The Chimp Paradox an interesting prospect!

Having finished "Bounce: The Myth of Talent and the Power of Practice"

So I've finished reading Bounce. The last section of the book seemed to take a long time to make its point about genetics and relative success, but the conclusion is in keeping with the premise of the book that it's practice that makes the difference. Whist your genetic make up may predispose you towards a particular sport and/or sporting success, there's no substitute for good and focussed practice.

Actually, when you put it like that it doesn't seem that new a concept. The only "new" thing is the demythologising of talent as an overriding factor. However, the jury is still out on the role of talent in many ways. For example, is hand eye coordination built in or developed? The answer is probably a combination of the two. I could always catch as far as I remember. I don't ever remember having to learn how to do that. I do remember learning how to refine the technique of catching in order to improve my skill and I do remember practicing throwing a ball and catching it for endless hours. I even remember the infamous cradle at school we used for catching practice.

As to the premise of the book, that it takes 10,000 hours of focussed and appropriate practice to achieve excellence is anything, well that statistic is somewhat undone when you dig a little deeper. The research on which this principle rests shows a much more significant variation that you'd want to see if you're going to establish a precise principle in terms of hours spent developing technical skills. I also suspect that it is quite difficult to control all the contributing factors. Put simply, not everyone practises the same way with the same coach and the same equipment. Not everyone develops at the same rate physically, mentally or technically. So variation is to be expected and trying to draw a universal conclusion is always going to be difficult.

Maybe the key concept form the book is grounded ion the basic principle that practice matters because practice makes a difference. If you want to get better at anything you have to practice and you have to practice in ways that help you improve and not in ways that ingrain bad habits.

Bounce is certainly a book worth reading if you are tempted to think that you will never be any good at anything because you simply lack the talent to do it. Just remember that you have to pick the right thing. If you can't hold a tune, I doubt whether 10,000 hours of practice will ever give you the pitch required to star in your musical!

Another new skill!

Over the last couple of years I've been thinking about learning how to string a tennis racket. Why? Well because it's interesting, at least it is to me! Perhaps I have an inquisitive nature or just some deep need to try new things.

Anyway, I bought myself a stringing machine around Christmas time and I finally got around to setting it up and having a go. The delay was mainly due to working out how to calibrate the tensioning system. There instructions are clear and I bought a tension checker when I got the machine. The only problem was that I wasn't sure the checker was accurate. The scales didn't seem to match (Pounds and Kilos) and I didn't know which one was wrong. Anyway, I got some fishing scales and compared the two, but this still didn't satisfy my scientific need for accuracy. I needed up weighing a large bag of cat litter using both devices and decided which scale I could trust.

With the machine set up, I took and old racket and set about stringing it. I've done three now and worked out a few useful tips. The most important one being to keep my fingers out of the way of the brake lever when tensioning the string! It locks out with quite a snap and if your finger is in the way it's both painful and messy when it hits the soft bit just below the nail (ouch!)

I haven't yet strung one of my playing rackets, but I will take the plunge at some point and do one now I'm okay with the process. The difficult bit is making sure you've got notes of where the main and cross strings start and finish. Quite how you do that when you buy an unstrung frame I don't know, maybe they come with instructions.

So why am I doing this? Is it just because it's interesting? Well yes and and no. Strings can have an impact on the way you play. The more tension they have the more control you have and the lower the tension the more power there is. Different strings have different playing characteristics, and it might be fun to explore different combinations to see what effect they have. And it's a nice thought that when a string breaks you can bring the racket home and restring it yourself. They say that you should restring your rackets as often in a year as you play in a week. At the moment that would mean restringing my rackets every 2-3 months! Three rackets at £12 a racket works out at £144 to £216 a year! Not that I do that, but if I did and if I did it myself I think it would work out at between £2 and £5 a racket. So quite a saving.

In reality, you get your racket restrung when you break a string, probably once every 6-8 months in my case. So I'm not saving a fortune, just learning a new skill and keeping the grey matter working. 

Speaking of which, I'm currently reading a book on biomechanics alongside finishing off "Bounce". I find the whole biomechanics thing really interesting, and when I've finished that book I have one on myofascial structures to read. I feel a trip to a coffee shop coming on!

Cracking on through "Bounce"

To people who have never reached a national or international level of competition, it may appear that excellence is simply the result of practicing daily for years or even decades. However, living in a cave does not make you a geologist. 

I came across this quote in a paper by K. Anders Ericsson, Michael J. Prietula, and Edward T. Cokely called: The Making of an Expert. I read the article because I'd also read a piece on the BBC website around the topic of practice and excellence because I'm working my way steadily through Matthew Syed's book, and very interesting it is too. While it would be a rather reductionist simplification of the book, the basic premise is rather simple: Practice not talent makes for excellence.

From what else I've read, the 10,000 hours principle of purposeful practice is both a generalised average, some achieved excellence with fewer hours and some with considerably more, and really only the beginning of understanding the path to doing something well. Other evidence does appear to suggest that there are factors other than practice that contribute to one's overall ability to achieve your goals. For example, some research suggests that visual acuity is better is better performing athletes where their sport involves what we might call hand-eye coordination.
It is however quite clear that too often we buy into the talent myth, and limit our own potential on the basis of our perceived lack of talent. Most of us don't like practicing things we find difficult to do, and, when we do try something harder, we are quicker to declare that we can't do it than we are to encourage ourselves to persevere.

Perhaps the truth lies somewhere along a continuum of complex abilities married to purposeful, deliberate practice. Practice that stretches and challenges our abilities from a position of what we can do towards what we can learn to do better.

The truth is that if you reduce either Ericsson's research or Syed's book to a simple algorithm, then you miss the point. If I want to improve the percentage of forehand's I make in a game, then I have to measure both my success rate and the repeatability of those successes. In other words, when I practice I have to have a goal in mind and I need some form metric to apply. That metic not only needs to take into account how many shots I make but how "good" my technique is when I make the shot.

Reading Matthew Syed's book carefully, thoughtfully and critically will draw you to those conclusions. Read it superficially and you'll probably be disappointed in ten years time when you've practiced for all the required hours and still not achieved greatness!

Holiday reading

We've just come home from a week away in Portugal. Wall-to-wall sunshine, lazy days walking around, sliding into the pool, playing tennis and reading.

I took my trusty pedometer with me and recorded my steps each day. I managed a creditable 124, 200 steps over the week (that's 17, 742 a day, or the equivalent of 8.9 miles a day!) It's staggering how far you will walk when there's no rush to get anywhere! Although we had a car, we didn't use it, except to go to and from the airport and one shopping trip.

I took my Kindle with me. I think it's possibly one of the greatest bits of tech kit I own. It does one job and does it really well. I can carry a wide range of books and reading material without getting my bags checked at the airport (it has happened to me once when I had a lot of books with me) or adding extra weight to my luggage.

I read "Zoo Station" by David Downing. It's set in pre-war Germany in 1939. The story begins on New Year's Eve '38 and centres around John Russell, a freelance journalist who sees the regime for what it is and how he drifts into spying and uses his connections to help get a Jewish family out of Berlin. It's the first in a series and I've got the second book to read now we're back home.

I also read "How to like Paul Again" by Conrad Gempf. I haven't quite finished this, but I've thoroughly enjoyed what I have read. Conrad was one of my tutors at college many years ago (over 25 years now I think about it). It's a really helpful book for those who have issues with some of the things Paul has to say and how best to handle them. There's great encouragement to get stuck into the task of understanding the nature of the text and the context too, before ploughing into interpreting.

Perhaps what Conrad does best is to make hermeneutics and exegesis something that lives and breathes rather than just some dusty academic exercise. He humanises the text, reminds us that these are "other people's mail" and that Paul was doing his best to address real situations among real people and not writing some abstract theologise treatise on your favourite topic!

Beyond those two, I dipped into a short monograph about exercise and health and I read the free e-book short from Jim Wallis about politics, Conservatives, Liberals, and the Fight for America's Future. It's abstracted from a longer work, but popped us a free offering just before I went away. It's well worth a read even if you're not interested in America or politics. The call for a more civil society, one in which we can honour each other even when we disagree is a call we all need to hear. As TV programmes seem more and more to be predicated on the principle of how insulting we can be about each other, and while live audiences boo judges with whom they disagree, a little civility wouldn't go amiss. Maybe our own political leaders would do well to read it while it's free!

Currently Reading

I decided I'd like to read Michael Mosley's book about intermittent fasting. We were away during the Olympics, so we missed the BBC Horizon programme about it, although I did see his "The truth about exercise programme", which I found very interesting. 

Anyway I bought myself a copy of The Fast Diet: The secret of intermittent fasting - lose weight, stay healthy, live longer, which he co-wrote with Mimi Spencer, and set about reading it. I'm about a quarter of the way through the book, but reading it on Kindle means I have no idea if I'm near the end of the theory/practice bit before we hit the recipe section, or if there's more scientific revelation to come!

I guess that with our societal issues with obesity and preoccupation with diets as the solution, putting "diet" in the title was a no-brainer from a marketing point of view. But this is not really a diet book, although there are plans (recipes) and patterns to help you get started. 

If you already know about things like GI and GL, you'll probably skip over those bits, and to be honest, you can skim through much of the early pages as long as you don't miss some of the really interesting things that are being explored and discovered through current research. The thing is, this is not just about weight control, it goes to the heart of a healthy life. If the book is right, then our bodies need the routine of fasting (more accurately low-calorie days, around 600 for men, 500 for women) to get down to the business of repair. Giving our liver and pancreas a couple of days off might just reduce our risk of a number of diseases like diabetes and dementia.

Ever one to experiment, I think I'll explore the ideas. Being able to combine an age-old spiritual discipline with a 21st century exploration of healthy living sounds like a good plan! After all, I suspect one of the major reasons any of us puts on weight is a lack of discipline in the first place.

What I'm about to read

Alongside reading books on nutrition, i'm still reading as widely as I can about church, particularly missional church. I have a number of unstarted books that I ought to get stuck into in the next month or so. Two that I want to read are: The faith of leap by Hirsch and Frost and The missional church in perspective by Gelder and Zscheile. Alongside these two, I've jus bought Barefoot church by Hatmaker to read on my Kindle.

That should keep me pretty busy for the rest of January.

The nutrition thing is quite interesting. I'm now on module 5 of 18, trying to do one a week. I guess this will get a bit more demanding when I start my other course. Self-discipline will be of the utmost importance. It will almost be like college all over again! At least I'm free of major examinations this time around. I remember vowing that I'd never sit another exam after I finished my first degree and then I went and did two more! And then after that I still did two more exams for my accreditation as a batiste minister and a diploma in counselling. Must be a genetically disposed student.

Maybe it says something about being willing to embrace something new and different. At least that might be an argument I could use for it. If, at school. someone had said to me that I'd have a degree in chemistry, two in theology an two or three diplomas in unrelated subjects I think I'd have thought them quite mad. Back in the 70's it was still very much the case that you settled on a career and followed that through. Now it seems that there's almost a portfolio approach the career development. Maybe not for everyone, but for some.

Anyway, whatever it all means it certainly means this: life will be different. So I'd better get on with writing up my next assignment and ding some research for a friend who needs some nutritional advice. Does this count as my first real client I wonder? Hope I can help!

Ongoing thoughts about discipleship

A couple of interesting things from a book I'm currently reading called Growing the church in the power of the Holy Spirit.

People need to be incorporated into the kingdom of God by being born again. The fruit of the Spirit needs to be cultivated so that people are transformed into increasingly Christlike character. Unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God must be nurtured, growing people in their understanding and in their personal relationship with Jesus. And men, women, and children need to be baptized with the Holy Spirit so that they can be empowered to do everything that Christ commands, each playing their unique roles as members of the body of Christ. 

This sums up the early chapters of the book rather well, and the foundational argument of the book as a whole. But it's also an important summary of the fundamentals of church.

Later there is a compass point illustration which is rather helpful:

N: New life (incorporation)
S: Sanctification (transformation)
E: Empowerment
W: We (fellowship)

As I continue to think about discipleship, these things are proving helpful along the way. I was listening to an interview with Bill Hybels the other day and he said something very interesting. The Reveal Study has been on the receiving end of some harsh, and unwarranted criticism, over the years since Willow first shared its findings. But I've often wondered if that is because it revels exactly what we've actually known deep down inside.

People don't tend to grow through a programme, they tend to grow through active personal involvement and engagement. Not that might be over simplifying things, but I've watched and participated in a lot of personal evangelism training and I don't see any great improvement in my ability to share the gospel or in the church's engagement with mission. I've prepared a lot of Bible study notes, but I'm not sure that I've seen much actual spiritual transformation taking place as a result. I've preached a lot of sermons, but I cold count of the fingers of one hand the number of times anyone has accurately reflected the content of a sermon back to me.

Anyway, the thing Bill H said was how he would remind the congregation that they were responsible for their own growth. "We can't read your bible for you, we can't say your prayer for you," is a paraphrase of what he said. That isn't to say that the church as an organisation doesn't have a role to play, but spiritual growth depends on the desire of the individual to grow not on the range of courses offered.

Everyday Church

As I think about what to do next in terms of Sunday mornings, I began to think about a series based in Peter's letters. To be honest, I've often shied away from them so that I don't have to try to explain about spirits in prison and the place of the ark in salvation history!

But those things aside, Peter's first letter has alway struck me as an important reflection on life as a Christian in a non-Christian world, and that's just the kind of world in which we generally live in the Western world. We may have some modernistic view that the world around us was once Christian and that the church ought to have a preeminent place in society, but such a world, if it ever truly existed, is long consigned to the past.

Anyway, thinking about Peter's letters, I came across Everyday Church along with one or two other resources and set about reading them through. I haven't got too far into this book, but I do find it refreshing and interesting and thoughtful and helpful as I prepare to outline my ideas.

The book is not a commentary but rather a reflection from a missional perspective on the implications of life for the Christian community in a hostile environment. Seven chapters cover the ideas of life and hope on the margins, what "everyday church" looks like in this context ad some thoughts about the next steps to take. Community, pastoral care, mission and evangelism are all explored.

A few things have caught my eye in the early pages. firstly the idea of storying. Storying is the process of understanding the culture of the people you are trying to reach and then creating a set of Bible stories that cover the key turning points in the story of salvation, along with bible stories that address the barriers and bridges to belief in that culture. I want to find out more about this, o I will need to do a bit of research but it sounds interesting.

The second thing that has caught my eye is a series of questions we need to ask ourselves. Boiled down, they become:

• Where are the places and activities in which you can met people ('the missional spaces')?
• What are the patterns and timescales of your neighbourhood ('the missional rhythms')?
• What 'gospel' stories are told in the neighbourhood (stories about why we are here, what has gone wrong, what are the solutions and what are the hopes)?

There are of course many more questions, but these questions draw us into a deeper engagement with the world around us. It forces us to ask "What does the gospel lok like and sound like for the people of my neighbourhood. It forces me to stop asking why they don't conform to my story and to ask how I can influence their story with God's great story.

I shall continue reading!

Conduct Gospel-Centred Funerals

This book is part of a helpful series of practical guides to ministry. If you've never done a funeral and you are just starting out in ministry, then this book could be a really useful resource.

Written for an American market, it still has lots of hints and tips that apply in a UK context. However, you will need to find someone who can help you put it into a UK context if you are untrained in conducting funerals.

Of course the best advice and old hand can give to a novice is to trust the funeral director to help you be in the right place at the right time. I've always found them really helpful, and they have much more experience that I do!

There are a few concerns about the book. The section on choosing music seems to place the responsibility with the minister to vet all possibilities and although one is encourage to accommodate the family's wishes, the emphasis is upon music that promotes the gospel as far as possible. I take a rather different position. I see the funeral as a reflection of the personality of the one who has died and a time for the family to remember them and choose music that fits with those memories. I've yet to have felt the impulse to veto an choices made by the family.

Doing funerals is one of the privileges of ministry, and the responsibility is not to taken lightly. Weaving the story of God's grace and the good news of Jesus into the service can be a challenge. This short book will help you think these thing through as well as help you consider the practical side of this important ministry.

Heart, treasure, focus and fixation

The issue is not about the church model or even the building but rather whether or not the life of Christ is getting out of the box [the church] and into the culture.

Most Christians perceive the church service as "the main event" and thus the central locus for Christian life and activity. And they look to the pastor and staff members as being primarily responsible for organising and conducting outreach and evangelism. As a result, the mission of the church is professionalised, and outsourced to the "clergy" thus leaving the majority of Christians out of the missional equation... In short, our actions say that what we do inside the building is more important than what we do outside the building.

Right here, right now p217-217

Jesus said that our hearts will follow what we treasure most. If church treasures the gathering above everything else, where does that leave the missing who don't fit our culture of church?

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A Challenging Call

When Jesus stood strong, He was crucified. When the apostles spoke the truth, they were martyred. When the early church modelled the message, they were persecuted. But they turned the world upside down. Many were rescued from emptiness and despair by their message of the cross! Is our calling any different?

Church Awakening, 270

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New Books

Two new books dropped through the letterbox today. Simply Church by Tony and Felicity Dale explores dynamic trends in society and church that are pushing Believers into simpler ways of doing church. I've blogged and thought out loud about church a lot. Sometimes I wonder if the institution of church hasn't become way too complicated and way too demanding. This should be an interesting read.

The second book to drop through the box is Right here, right now: Everyday mission for everyday people by Alan Hirsch and Lance Ford. According to Reggie McNeil it is a powerful new resource. It is both inspirational and instructional for serious Jesus-followers who understand church as a verb.

I'll get going on these just as soon as I finish Church Awakening.

In between times I'm dipping into Hit the ground kneeling by Stephen Cotterell and I want to have a look at All-Age Worship by Lucy Moore, bought on the basis of a review I read the other week.

So, as usual, a lot of reading to get through!

Church Awakening

I'm only part way through reading The Church Awakening but I have to say it is full of gems and encouragements and challenges. Often reading a book like this can leave you feeling somewhat inadequate-wondering if you fall into the category of leader who would be judged as falling short of pressing biblically or failing to pursue grace. But you have to cut through those insecurities and let the book both refresh your sense of call and commitment to seeking to lead according to God's heart and to challenge you to invest more fully in building those things into your ministry.

Throughout the book there are sets of principles and patterns that set out the core of being a biblical community. There's nothing controversial, just a plain and simple call to profound realignment of the church with biblical models. A call to face up to the reality that we need to pay attention to those things that work to erode the fundamentals of being the church that Jesus wants to build.

The danger with such a book is that it makes a straw man of the emerging church or the ideas behind missional communities. I think Swindoll avoids this. His concern is not with a return to some bygone age where all in the church garden was rosy. No, his concern is to address the slow, subtle and silent erosion of core values that happens over time as we drift gently on the tide of popular thought and away from our biblical moorings.

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The Church Awakening

I'm reading The Church Awakening by Charles Swindoll. We're doing a study in Acts at church and this struck me as a useful book into which I could dip along the way. In the first chapter he talks about course correction in order to address issues of erosion in church life. He sets out three simple truths about erosion: it is always slow, always silent, and always subtle. The implication of this is that unless we measure it, we simply will not spot it before it's too late.

Learning from the early church, Swindoll identifies three principles and three imperatives:

• Clear, biblical thinking must override secular planning and a corporate mentality. (Principle)
• Think spiritually (Imperative)

• Studied, accurate decisions must originate from God’s Word, not human opinions.
• Stay biblical.

• Wise, essential changes must occur to counteract any sign of erosion.
• Be flexible.

As he goes on to say: “you can have more than these, but you can’t have church with less than these.