H2H Pre-Conf 1 - Tribes and leadership

The first session of this year's House2House Pre-Conference was interesting and raised a lot of questions. It was led by Tony Dale and he began by demonstrating with a show of hands that perhaps 10 or 15 percent of those in the room were from megachurch or medium size church organisations, with one or two in mission work and the remainder house church people.

We watched Seth Godin's video from the TED Conference, you can view it yourself below.



The pre-reading for the House2House network leaders meeting was Seth Godin's book 'Tribes' in which he goes into much more detail.

With this to set the scene, Tony led us through a series of thoughts based on Seth's analysis of what a leader does. He referred to Romans 15:18-21, Paul felt what Seth describes as 'I can't stand the status quo'.

Here are one or two of the key thoughts.

We need to be heretics. Jesus was a heretic. He had a lot of trouble with the establishment of his day. We change things by telling a new story, people are waiting for something new, we need to connect people who share the same vision. Jesus did all these things.

Here are some quotes from Seth's book.

• Heretics are the new leaders, they get out in front of their tribes.
• It's more fun to make the rules than to follow them!
• It's profitable, powerful, and productive to make change.
• Managers make widgets, leaders make change.
• Great leaders embrace deviants by catching them doing something right.
• Growth doesn't come from persuading the most loyal members of other tribes.
• Tearing others down is never as helpful to your movement as building your members up.

We then did a number of exercises in small groups, testing some ideas out and commenting on them. Why wouldn't we do things the way Jesus did them? Should we focus on the masses or on the ones who stick out as different?

Pita chips in bulk

Ho hum, I'm in the USA. Food comes in larger quantities than I'm used to!

Last night I felt peckish, not hungry enough for a full meal, I just wanted a light snack. The hotel offers these in an area with comfortable seating and low tables around the TV between the dining room and the lobby. I ordered pita chips with houmous and olive paste - just a light snack.

I was served a very nicely presented dish containing enough pita chips for four people (I kid you not!) and as much houmous as you'd expect to put on the table back home for six. It was delicious but it was not a snack, not in my terms at least! Nor was it healthy eating, too much salt in the chip coating and too much deep-fry oil - but very tasty. I didn't finish my 'snack' although I made a pretty good attempt.

I'm still not hungry this morning.

Grand to be in Dallas, though. I'll take a stroll in the morning semi-cool and spend the day relaxing and getting organised for this evening's pre-conference session. I didn't take a photo of the pita chips, so I've included one of the Dallas sunrise instead.

Israel's New Disciples

This is the title of Julia Fisher's latest book, the subtitle is 'Why are so many Jews turning to Jesus?'.

It's a very good question! Julia provides some intriguing answers in the book by publishing edited interviews with a number of key people living and working in Israel.

Although I haven't yet finished the book I want to draw attention to a couple of brief mentions that struck me as particularly significant.

First, as someone interested and involved in networking small groups of believers in Eastern England, I was fascinated to read about the same sorts of things happening in Israel too. On page 56 Julia quotes one of her interviewees,

I see, alongside the traditional congregational structure, a growing number of smaller groups of believers with a greater focus on community living.

And secondly, on page 79 she refers to Islamic Indonesian followers of Isa actually praying for Israel and a real need for believers in the West to get more involved in prayer and interaction with Messianic Jews.

These two factors mesh amazingly well with things I've been watching elsewhere. Namely the growing trend in the West to meet at home informally and become more involved in practical ways of real community living, and the trend reported by Wolfgang Simson of rapid growth of small, close-knit groups of new believers in Asia.

We live in very exciting days!

By the way, I strongly recommend anyone interested in events in Israel to read Julia Fisher's other books, 'Israel - the Mystery of Peace' and 'A Future for Israel?'.

NEWS - Changing times

This blog is changing its direction slightly.

In the past it concentrated on notes and reports of meetings at homes in and around western Cambridgeshire, north-east Bedfordshire, and southern Northants. When there was just one meeting that worked well, but now there are three and a network is developing with a number of other groups too. So in the future this blog will not attempt to cover everything, but just my thoughts about getting together as church - wherever that may be.

You may have noticed that the site hasn't been updated with meeting notes recently. This is not because there were no meetings (they've been thriving) but because it's been hard to keep up.

At the same time, I've been involved in more activities that don't always fit the meeting concept. I'd like to cover those too.

From now on I'll be reporting on meetings I'm involved in, other events, and every part of my life that involves focusing on the King. All the existing notes will remain here, nothing will be lost, and the Great Doddington folk may take a copy of this blog and continue to publish notes of their own journey - if so I'll provide a link to that new blog. (This has now happened so you can visit the Great Doddington blog.)

In the next few days I plan to head out to the USA to join the House2House annual Conference in Dallas. I'll try to post a few notes here from time to time while I'm away.

I hope you'll check the blog to keep in touch, sign up for email updates, or use the RSS feed to follow progress. More here soon!

The electric car - but better?

Shai Agassi through his company, Better Place, has developed a system for building and operating electric vehicles - and it might just work. He claims that the car would cost less to buy and be more convenient to use than a normal petrol powered car. And the cost per mile would be similar to current fuel costs.

Shai has thought this through in great detail and has persuaded companies (Renault and Nissan) and governments (Israel, Denmark, Australia for example) to make a start on building the necessary infrastructure and the new vehicles. He is a visionary but he also has business acumen, drive, enthusiasm, and good persuasive speaking ability.

Very, very interesting, and well worth watching the video (no longer available). You will have to watch the sponsor video first (amusingly enough it's for an oil company) but then you can choose individual segments for yourself.

Note added in 2024 - Better Place was a great idea that failed. It had potential though, and you can read about it in the WIkipedia article.

Co incidents

Prayeramedic just posted an item to his blog about a 'coincidence'. Everyone will draw their own conclusions of course, but whatever that conclusion may be - it's an amusing story.

Here's another one to go with it.

Back in 1984, the Archbishop of York made the controversial appointment of David Jenkins as the new Bishop of Durham. Three days later York Minster (the seat of the Archbishop) caught fire and was seriously damaged.

David Jenkin's notoriety was based on his widely reported views, particularly denial of both the virgin birth and the resurrection.

What do I think? I think that both these events are much more than mere coincidence. But the question is, 'What do you think?'.

Here are some photos of the fire and the repair work.