How my desk (and study) is changing for the better

I know it might seem like I've become an evangelist for GTD, but I assure that's not the case. It's just that I'm actually quite amazed, and a little thrilled, about the difference getting more control into my study is making to me overall. I just happen to have alighted on GTD and I'm experimenting with it.

What I like is the simplicity of the approach: Collect-Process-Do. Actually trying to implement this strategy has given me the reason to tidy up my study, but it's not the whole reason.

The story begins with a number of realisations. First, I needed to be organised. My study was a mess and that meant my mind was a mess too. A mess in the sense of no order and no system to track and monitor what I was doing. Second, I came to the realisation that one thing that needs to change for us as a church is accountability. And if I'm not holding myself accountable for getting things done, then how can I hold other people accountable for what the should be getting done? Third, I want to be more effective in what I do. I have so many things with which I have some level of involvement that it's impossible to keep it all my head. Well now I'm learning how not to store it there but elsewhere.

These then were some of the reasons that I took the plunge, not only to tidy up, but also to try and instill some discipline into my workflow. Look at the results. The first picture is my desk as it typically was. The second is my desk as it is now. The thing is I haven't tidied it up for the picture, it's actually like this most of the time! At the end of most days, I put stuff away, I process it in order to leave my desk empty for the following day just like I now leave my email inbox empty. I know I'll have days when it gets a little messy. But at least now there are no piles of loose papers piling up on the corner.

And my filing cabinet top is the same. It used to have an 18" high pile of papers with three full trays behind it. Next to my printer was another tall stack and there was another unruly bunch of stuff on the floor. All this has gone and order is emerging.

And you know what, it feels good to finally be breaking the pattern of years of marginal, fly by the seat of your pants, disorganisation.

Have I missed anything in the last 2 weeks since I began this process? Yes. I meant to email a document to someone but didn't because... it never made it to my list of actions. On the other hand I think I've actually delivered in some ways that were not the case before.

I'ts a strange experience, but one I hope to get used to. So please forgive me if I sound like a compulsive organiser, I'm not, I'm just enjoying the freedom that comes with a bit of structure.

At hand files

Many thanks have to go to my friend Mark for supplying me with ideas and products to help me in my quest to get organised.

Whenever I've tried to reorganise my stuff in a more orderly fashion in the past, I've always come up against what to do with the things I need close at hand. The things I'm working on right now, or the things that I can't deal with in the moment and need to check back on in a few hours or days. In the past this has been my desk-side pile, which inevitably got out of hand, became two piles, then tree, then just a heap of stuff mixed together. Well, thanks to tabbed folders, those days are over!

I currently have two tabbed folders sitting in my "Really Useful Box" that I got from the stationers. I have one folder for church related things and one for non-church. I'm hoping that these won't grow too much into amorphous storage systems, but only regular reviewing (the cornerstone it seems of making any organisational system work) should prevent that happening.

As an example, my church folder has tabs for:

Things I need to give to other people

Preaching plans

Pastoral care

Core BPV's (beliefs, practices and virtues: This is something I'm working on derived from The Connecting Church)

Church magazine

Church display stuff

David and Kylie's wedding

David and Tina's wedding

The two weddings are fairly short term projects, one this weekend and one in September. Once the wedding is over anything useful can be filed and anything not useful can be binned. The church magazine can accumulate ideas for the next issue, is a place for the draft of the current issue, you get the picture.

The great advantage of these files is that they are right there where I can reach them, so I can review them, process them and work on their contents very easily. I like this a lot.

The other great thing Mark introduced me to was post-it note tape. Just like post-it notes it sticks and peels off, but it's on a roll. That means you can put a strip down the front of the tabbed folder and write on it. When you've finished you can remove the tape, put another strip on and reuse the folder. Marvellous! I write in pencil too, so I can erase an index when I've processed the contents of a tab and no longer need it.

Organising my inbox

I made some recent comments about handling email and mentioned that some of the folders I use may need to change. Well, after a week of the new system it works fine but there are some rough edges. Here's what I've done.

I now have a folder structure that includes the following sub-folders under my inbox:

@Attend to: for emails that I need to do something about but can't do just at the moment (if you are a GTD-er they fall into the "more than 2 minute" category of actions).

@Follow up: For emails that are threads of conversations that I will need to follow up at some point or that I need to track in a non-urgent way.

@Read/review: For emails that (as it says on the can) I want to read and review because they contain something of potential interest that I can't look at right now but don't want to lose sight of.

@Replies no follow up: I have some emails to which I've replied but that don't need following up. I could just put them into the archive folder or delete them, but I've decided that this choice should be part of a review process. So this folder is just a place to store those replies during the week. Then, at the end of the week, I can review them and process them.

@Waiting for: This is for emails I've sent and am waiting for a response from some else.

The "@" symbol means that these folders appear alphabetically directly below my inbox. This is very useful in terms of seeing the folders among the list of folders.

The change has been to add the "read/review" and the "replies no follow up" folders. I found I was looking at emails and wondering where they fitted in my system. I have my main archive, which I review from time to time (hopefully a little more often now I'm getting organised!) and I have different folders for different archives (things like online orders and receipts for example). These new folders give a place to put new emails before they disappear into the vault of my archive. More than that, they allow me to review the status of all current and recent emails on a daily basis without having to wade through too many messages.

The end result is that my inbox is rarely going about 10 messages, and is usually empty once I've processed incoming mail.

Exploring GTD-Paper notes

As you know I'm exploring GTD as a mechanism for organising my workflow more systematically (and thereby less chaotically). To that end I'm reading the book and experimenting with Thinking Rock.

In a recent leaders meeting I even found myself asking out loud, "What's the next action we need to take on this?" And I found myself doodling in my notebook trying to arrange my notes to take account of this new-found determination to know what we were going to do and who was going to do it. What I needed was a notebook, or a notepad, that had all the relevant boxes on it to help me focus on getting things like "next actions" down on paper. The problem is that I can't find one.

The only thing like it that I've come across is Action pads and notebooks. Although available to international customers, the shipping rate is too high to make it worth my while ordering some to try. So, I decided I'd have a go at setting out my own note sheet. I've called it "Thinking Paper" simply because I've tried to tie it in to Thinking Rock and I needed a name for the file. It looks like this:

It's a first draft and I'll try using it over the coming weeks and refine it as I go. Or maybe not if it works.

It has space for the project or meeting, the vision or purpose and organising/who. Date and topic are on the right. There's a large box for notes and at the bottom a box for Sub-project if there's a project within this project that needs to be developed.

Bottom right is a box for Maybe/someday. The Next Action boxes have a space for the action and for a context and waiting for. I've also included a "Do ASAP" check box and a space for a date if this is a scheduled task. Below that is space for a name if the action is delegated.

I thought I might turn it into a notebook by printing it double-sided and then using a comb binder to make the notebook. I seem to remember when I was at college you could pre-punched sheets through which you threaded a spiral binder thingy.

If you'd like a pdf version of it, leave a comment and an email contact and I'll send you one, or just email me direct if you know my email address!

You may want to visit D*I*Y Planner to look at their range of pages for all sorts of organisers.

Reaching the end of the path

So here we are, the intrepid explorers at the end of the Greensand Ridge.

After 40 miles of varied walking, Jeremy and I finally reached our destination in Gamlingay.

We've walked by canals, through meadows, alongside woodlands and up and over a few small hills. We discovered an area of Special Scientific interest that I don't know was there, and view Bedfordshire from a great number of different places.

The path was generally easy walking, although around Millbrook and Ampthill and then Maulden, there were one or two climbs that needed negotiating, but nothing difficult. For me the hardest thing was crossing the A1 trunk road on the footbridge. Not my favourite thing, heights, but it had to be done and I'm quite proud of myself for making it across. Here are a couple of views which made the walk worthwhile.

And finally, a big thank you to our transport officer, Anne (my wife) who drove around the countryside dropping us off and picking us up.

Stepford cars?

In a conversation with my daughter Ally after watching Stepford wives I was reminded about the story of Bill Gates comparing the computer industry with the car industry.

I managed to track down a version of the story on the net. Here it is:

If cars were like computers

At a recent computer exposition, Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: "If General Motors had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, GM issued a press release stating: "If General Motors had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason, you would simply accept this.
Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive -- but would run on only five percent of the roads.
The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single "General Protection Fault" warning light.
The airbag system would ask "Are you sure?" before deploying.
Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
Every time GM introduced a new car, car buyers would have to learn to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
You'd have to press the "Start" button to turn the engine off.

Handling email

In my newly organised world (!) I'm trying to find better ways of handling my inboxes and emails are one of those inboxes that can easily get out of hand. To combat this I'm trying a new strategy which aims to empty my inbox every day. I used to wait until my inbox had about 100 messages before I would go through them and weed out the stuff that didn't need to stay there. I do have a folder structure for archiving emails, but it was a bit hit and miss. So I'm trying a new approach.

If you're a PC user, and I still am, you may use either Outlook or Outlook Express to handle email. I used to use Outlook Express to do emails, keeping them separate from my diary and notes etc in Outlook. At the moment I'm trying Outlook. All I'd say is that the two programs are different. Outlook has some functions that I never knew existed, and probably a few I haven't found yet, Outlook Express seems to do things Outlook won't, or can't do. For example, I haven't found the button yet in Outlook that will auto-complete email addresses in the way Outlook Express does so. Perhaps my old 2000 version of Outlook doesn't do such things!

Anyway hopefully my new approach can be modified for either and adapted to other email handling programs.

The first thing I've done in Outlook is create some new folders, one for emails which are waiting for a response, one for emails which need my attention, and one for emails that I need to follow up in some way at a later date. It's early days and these categories may need to change. In Outlook, if you start the name of these folders with "@" they will appear directly below your inbox. You can do the same in Outlook Express, just highlight the inbox and click .

When I check my email, I put incoming mail into either the "attend to" or "follow up" folders. Anything left in my inbox that's not assigned to one of these folders is either filed in an archive folder (church, school, invoices etc.) or left to be moved to the delete folder at the end of the day.

The folder for emails that are waiting for a response from someone else is quite useful. In Outlook you can populate this folder using a simple rule. I picked up this tip from David Allen's website at davidco.com. Having created the folder, you then set up a rule which puts a copy of any outgoing mail with "wf" in the body of the text into the "@waiting for" folder. I then just have to remember to type "wf" after my name (some of you may have seen this beginning to appear in my emails) and Outlook takes of it. Sadly, Outlook Express does'nt have the same ability in it's rules, at least not that I could see.

All this got me looking for software that might help me organise my email and I came across something called ClearContext. I haven't downloaded it (there's a free personal edition) because I want to try my new system to see how that works and because I'm using Thinking Rock to organise tasks and the like and using Outlook to do the same would add confusion and complexity to my embryonic workflow system.

ClearContext allows you to create tasks from emails and categorise them and do a whole lot more. It looks quite interesting and if you're at a different organisational place you might want to give it a look.

Overall I have to say that's it's quite satisfying to open up my inbox at the start of the day and see it empty. It's also nice to know that I can click on a folder and see all the messages that are waiting for a response from someone or that I need to do something about in the next hour or day or whenever.

Thinking Rock

What I like about Thinking Rock so far is the way I can list all my projects (Things I'm thinking about, or working on right now) and then list my actions (what I need to do) and give them a context in which to do them. My contexts include things like "preparation", "research", "with leaders", "at church" etc.

So, on Monday I had a church leaders meeting and I pulled all my "with leaders" actions. It was great! Now, if I use the system properly, I can enter actions onto my list and forget about them until they come due.

I guess the baseline simplicity of this is that I now have a place to capture all the thoughts I have over the course of a day or a week or a month about a meeting or event, or anything. I no longer have to try and retain all that data in my head, which was my fundamental problem with organising myself.

I know this isn't rocket science, and I don't expect to suddenly become the best organised person in the world, but I'm actually excited about having some structure, and for those who know me, that's a really strange thing for me to say!

The other side effect so far is that my study is now almost completely clear of stray piles of paper that don't have a home.

For quite some time I've tried to work with one notebook in which I capture ideas, 'phone calls, meeting notes etc, ready to transfer to more appropriate storage (appropriate to the data that is), and TR will help give a place to the "to do" list stuff that never really made to a list because I could never manage to write down everything on one list using paper.

If you've got any helpful suggestions about how you corral paperwork, let me know. I'm starting on my filing system which has to said is more a place to hide stuff than find it!

getting organised

Okay, confession time. I'm not wired for great organisation but I know that I need to get better at it if I'm going to minister effectively. So I keep reading and looking for things that might help me in my search for the Holy Grail of a well organised life.

Recently, by an odd route, I found myself watching a demonstration video about a product called Omnifocus. It caught my imagination and I followed the trail to David Allen and the GTD (Get things done) approach. So impressed I've bought the book to read!



Now, I'd never heard about GTD until my friend Mark threw it into a conversation this week. So my curiosity was piqued and I began to read and search the Internet for something like Omnifocus that was available now. This is how I found Thinking Rock.

Thinking Rock is a GTD based idea munching, project organising, action taking bit of free software that runs on Mac or PC (a good thing considering I'm looking to try out Mac-dom in the autumn).

Last year I had a stab at Open Workbench, but I didn't really find it very intuitive and it left me more exasperated than organised. I think that's because I've never used project management software before and I was lost from the very start.

Enter Thinking Rock.

I've been using it for just a few hours and it's fun. Not everything makes sense to me yet, but I can see some really helpful things arising from this kind of system. It's less demanding than MS Project style software and I've already begun to organise some of my tasks and thoughts into projects.

So if you're like me and you're looking for something that might help you plan projects without mangling your brain, you might like to try Thinking Rock. I know there are other applications out there, and I have to say I'm really looking forward to Omnifocus reaching the market at some point, but TR looks like a good solution for the in-between time.

The walk (2)

Yesterday, Saturday, we did the second section of the Greensand Ridge.

Setting off from Eversholt we made our through woods, along tracks and over a few ups and downs to Clophill. We covered just short of 12 miles and have now complete 22 miles of the 40 mile route. Interestingly, from Eversholt to Clophil we dropped about 200ft overall. On the other hand we had many a climb and descent along the way. If I took my time I could work out how much climbing and descending we did. I'll have to look at my digital OS mapping, but I think we climbed up and down at least 4 times. My feet certainly knew I'd been out for a walk.

Along the way we passed through an area of special scientific interest that would, and probably does, go unnoticed by almost everyone who passes by. The walk detours from the ridge to take the area in, otherwise we wouldn't have known it was there. It sits just alongside the A6, half a mile or so north of Clophill.

Our lunch stop was by the golf course at Milbrook.

In the photograph you can just see a small section of the test track tot he left of the buildings. Just left of centre, on the mid-horizon are the airship sheds at Cardington. They're about 6 miles away at a guess and the far horizon might be 12 miles or more, but I'm not sure. Visibility was good yesterday!

We're hoping to do a short section next weekend and then maybe finish the walk the weekend after that. I'll keep you posted

A little bit of maths fun!

While we were coming home in the car the other day Ally, my daughter, asked me a maths question. She'd been looking at all the small change that sits in the cup holder of my car and wondered aloud how many coins you needed for it to be probable that two came from the same year. Now for those non-UK readers, we went decimal in 1970 (?), I don't remember exactly but I know I was at secondary school. That means the earliest date for any coin was going to be 1970 and the latest 2007, which gives a nice beginning and end for this problem.

Now I can't remember exactly how to do the probability maths (it's 30 years since I did any!) so someone may need to help and that's where the fun comes in if you're mathematically inclined. As I remember it the way we'd work this out is to calculate the probability of two, then three etc, coins coming from different years and then subtracting that from 1 to get the probability that they'd be the same. did we use something called a Laplace transform to do this? Once this number dropped below 0.5 then the probability that they were the same year was greater than the probability that they were from different years. Or something like that. Anyway, if I'm right then I think the answer is 15. But I'm not at all convinced that I'm anywhere near right!

I do seem to remember than we were asked to do the same thing to calculate the probability of two people sharing a birthday the answer was 23. In other words, if you have a group of 23 people or more, then it's more probable that two of them share a birthday than that they all have different birthdays. If that's true then 15 seems a little high for the coin question given that there are 365 days to choose from for the birthday thing!

If there's a mathematician out there who can do the maths properly and knows they've done it properly, I'd love to know the answer. I'd be even more thrilled to discover that I'd got it right in the first place!

Programmes and cultures

In a conversation with some other church leaders over lunch the other day someone used a phrase along the lines of: ".. we've seen things like servant evangelism, a.n.other form of evangelism [I can't remember the other types of evangelism that got mentioned] come and go."

I guess it was hearing SE mentioned that made the phrase stick in my mind. Couple that with our decision this week to adopt a strategy document I, along with other leaders at church, have been working on this year and it got me thinking about programmes and cultures.

The biggest challenge we face is changing the culture of church more so than changing the programme. When you treat something, anything, as a programme, you can keep changing the programme, you can keep blaming the programme. But that is not the root of the problem. The problem seems to lie in the culture. I suspect that at some level you can make any programme work if you get the culture right in the first place.

I remember Clive Calver back in the 80's (at least I think it was), posing the question, "Have we become universalists?" because it looked that way when you considered the priority we gave to mission at that time.

Now we are certainly not universalist, but the reason we are doing so poorly in mission (and a recent survey of evangelicals in the UK shows that we are in decline albeit at a lesser rate than non-evangelicals) is not a programme problem but a cultural one. We invest most of our time and money and effort in maintaining the happiness of the churched community. But isn't the church here primarily for those who don't belong to it yet? I'm of the opinion that since I know Jesus Christ as leader and forgiver I'm destined to spend eternity with him and have, therefore, an eternity to work out some of my unresolved issues and problems. My friends and family members who are not part of God's great family don't have that opportunity.

At Cotton End we're looking to shift the balance significantly and I'm excited about that. I'd have to say that I think we've come a long way anyway and what we've decided to move towards is another step along a road that God has been leading us for some time. But unless we shift the culture too, unless we all take responsibility for and engage in reconnecting our friends and neighbours with the God who misses them and loves them, nothing much will change and worse still nothing much will have been achieved.

We're in a good place. We've got loads of potential and bags of passion, but we are not unaware of the challenge ahead.

The Character of Community

I didn't get a lot of reading done on holiday. That's no bad thing, since I was supposed to be on holiday! But I did read a little more of The Connecting Church by Randy Frazee. In his chapter on Finding a common place he list five characteristics of community built around a common place. Here they are:

Spontaneity: This is about unplanned contact. In our modern-day, high paced, highly mobile society, we've lost the space and time simply to bump into people as we walk to the shop or the the school. There are very few unplanned moments in our lives and most, if the surveys are true, are taken up with with watching TV. We don't "drop by" anymore.

Availability: To make spontaneity work you need availability. I'm as conscious as the next person about how often I have to consult my diary to see if I'm free. When we organise a meal with friends or a visit with our families, it usually has to be booked a month in advance. This cannot be good for us.

Frequency: If Acts 2 is a defining paradigm for the church, then we can no longer afford to say we don't have time for community. Okay, so things are different, but how often is often enough when it comes to building true, biblical community?

Common meals: I wonder if half the attraction of Alpha is the meal. Common meals are important to community. We have a monthly fellowship meal at church after our Sunday morning celebration. I'm always saddened by the number of people who choose not to be there. Common meals provide a place for some of the spontaneity and availability and frequency issues that affect our communities.

Geography: Frazee argues that: The simple fact is that in all places of effective community people live in close proximity to each other-and the closer the better!

What's in your rucksack?

Having just posted something about walking, and because it's summer, and because blogging should be broader than just book reviews and church, I thought I'd take a look in my rucksack and, for a bit of fun, list what I take with me when I walk! I wonder what it says about me?

In my bag I have:

1. Lightweight waterproofs (you never know when you need them in Great Britain)
2. A lightweight fleece top (again, you never know and it can be cold on top of a hill)
3. Maps.
4. A mat to sit on (it's about 400mm x 200mm)
5. a plastic "ziploc" bag for small electrical items like my 'phone and electronic car key to keep them dry if it rains really hard.
6. A small first aid kit (the only time I've ever used this as far as I remember was to do a running repair on someone boots!, but I still wouldn't walk with out it.)
7. Painkillers (in the first aid kit. I'm a migraine man and so I always carry something just in case, and I also have a painful knee joint that a little ibuprofen soothes)
8. A small pocket knife.
9. A whistle
10. A compass (most useful for the scale if you want to pinpoint your location. You don't have to be a great map reader and compass user to enjoy walking)
11. A small GPS (I use my GPS to find my position and to check distances. More functions just complicate the issue, so I have a Garmin Geko 101. It tells me everything I need to know.
12. A handheld weather station . I love gadgets and this is just fun. It measure barometric pressure and shows the up/down/ steady trend.

Other important items are:

1. My hat. I never walk without it, if only to embarrass my fellow walkers!
2. My walking poles. If you think there for wimps, think again. The extra stability going up and down hills is great and they take a lot of pressure of your knees. I tried using two on Saturday and it was great once I got used to it.

So that's my list. The only thing I can think of that's missing is probably a survival blanket, so maybe I'll pop into the Pound Shop and get one (you be surprised what you can pick up in the mos unexpected places!)

The long way round

I love walking. I'm not a massively experienced walker, but I like getting out on footpaths etc and exploring. One day I hope to walk the coast to coast path from St Bees to Wallsend, although I will probably miss out the mainly metropolitan area at the easterly end. This path follows the ancient wall built by Hadrian.

Anyway, on Saturday I began, with my friend Jeremy, to walk a local path called the Greensand Ridge. It begins in Leighton Buzzard and wanders for 40 miles through Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire to Gamlingay.

We did the first 10-11 miles from LB to Eversholt, a small village just outside Woburn.

What is interesting is that by walking from place to place rather than doing a circular walk, you get see such variation in landscape. There are some quite spectacular views to look at and maybe next time I'll take my camera along. The problem is that we don't stop that often to do a photoshoot.

The first part of the walk took us alongside the Grand Union canal. At one point we should have crossed a meadow but it was under water, so we followed the canal a little further and rejoined the footpath on higher ground. The meadow had boardwalks which looked more like jetties that day. After that we climbed up through woodlands and eventually reached a small hilltop that looked down to Woburn house. From there it was a short walk to Eversholt where we finished for the day.

For the most part of our journey we didn't meet another walker at all. A few folk were walking along the canal-side, and a few more exercising dogs in various wooded areas, but for most of the time we had the path to ourselves.

If you're the kind of person who sees walking as what you do between the car park and the shops, let me encourage you to go and explore. I'd bet that wherever you are there are some old trails that are worth the effort of finding.

And, as you can see, whilst most of my time is consumed with church and theology, there are other things that occupy some of my days.

Personality test!

Jeff Noble blogged about this personality test. I've had fun doing several of these as a result of Jeff pointing them out. So here's the result for me from the latest one:

Leaving school

Today I acted in my capacity of chair of governors at the local school. I had to give out the presentation gifts to the children who are leaving us this year to go on to their next school. I was also asked to do a little talk.

My talk was very simple, and short, and based around two quotes which I think are helpful reminders to me about who I am and what I do. The first was this:

God does not make junk. (Ethel Waters)

Rick Warren quotes this in The Purpose Driven Life. What I like about this thought is that it reminds me how special and precious and individual I am in God's sight. When I'm tempted to think the very least of myself, I remember this quote and remind myself that whilst I'm far from perfect I'm not junk.

The second quote comes from Jim Wallis.

Find out what you do best, and do it in a way that makes a difference.

Ah, I hear you say, if only I knew what I did best!

I know the feeling, but the more I share thoughts and ideas with other people, the more I interact with them, the more I'm beginning to understand what I do best. It's quite a long process and it takes courage, I think, to stick with it and learn all you can about how God has shaped and prepared you for what you do best.

So if you're struggling a bit at the moment, remember that you are not junk, that you were made with a purpose in mind and there is something you do that only you do and it makes a difference because you do it.

Back to the blog

I'm not sure how much I have to say at the moment. Been processing a lot of thoughts about church recently and also been on holiday to the wonderful Greek island of Rhodes. So very peaceful and so very hot! I actually swam in the sea (some of you may remember that I only learnt to swim last year). I say swam, is was more like waving my arms around and going nowhere in particular as the waves lifted me up and down. I probably chose the day with the least benign conditions, but at least I got in the water and had a go. My efforts in our pool were more significant!

Anyway, got home to find two parcels, always exciting, one containing two books I'd ordered form Amazon sometime ago. One was Bill Bryson's The life and times of the the Thunderbolt Kid. The other a more serious book altogether called The Big Idea by Dave Ferguson, Jon Ferguson and Eric Bramlett. The subtitle of the book is focus the message-multiply the impact and in the introduction they talk about the increasing amount of information that is available to us through the media that we have around us. Of this exponential increase in information they say:

... more information is not bad... But more information that leads to less action is a big, big problem, particularly when the action we desire is to accomplish Jesus' mission.

The challenge becomes therefore, to focus less on information and more on action!

The chapter heading that caught my attention was this:

Communities of transformation, not information.

This is going to be a good read, at least I hope it is. You see I've been around church for a while now and one of the refrains I hear from church after church is: "We need more teaching." As if the only thing stopping the church breaking through into effective mission and ministry is more information. It seems the priority has become leaning as much as possible about what we believe without ever having to turn that understanding into action. For a long time now I've thought that what the church actually needs is more opportunities to serve not more teaching about stuff we should already know.

So I'm looking forward to at least one chapter in the book and I'll try to remember to blog some thougths as I go. On the other hand do you really need any new information, especially if sitting reading it is keeping you from actively engaging in God's ministry and mission to a lost world he made, sustains, loves and died to save?

Building a great church

After hearing Jim Collins talking about principles of greatness at the 2006 Global Leadership Summit, I've been turning over in mind the idea of great church. I've preached about it, thought about, even blogged about it! Just recently I revisited it as I thought about where we are at this point in time with respect to our vision and purpose.

Once again I found myself wondering aloud about the church as I prayed and reflected. Once again I found myself using the language of greatness. I even wrote the following definition which some of you will recognise if you've read Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life.

A great church is built upon a great commitment to the great commandment and the great commission.

It seems to me that whatever style of church you are and whatever core values, mission statement and purpose you have, if you're going to become a great church the statement above must be true or becoming true for you.

What, by the grace of God, we're trying to build at Cotton End is a relationally based, Biblically taught, contemporary styled, relevantly involved community of faith. We want to be effective, influential, growing, disciple-making and caring.

The tough part is that when you cut through all the nice phrases and words, you need a strategy that is clear enough so that everyone can see where you are going, and flexible enough to change and adapt as you discern more clearly the precise call of God at any given time.

Perhaps these too (discernment and adaptability) are hallmarks of a great church.

I'll keep thinking and reflecting and exploring, hope you are doing so too.

Great quote

Came across this great quote from Wayne Cordeiro of New Hope Christian Fellowship:

You can teach what you know, but ultimately, you are going to reproduce what you are.

Found the quote on the churchrelevance blog.