This blog is continuing at this new address as lightmoments

Learning Church

Can the Church be anything other than a "Learning Organisation"? It would seem so as the metaphor of the "learning Church" is one that has become something of a buzz word - presumably because the Church was something other than a "learning church" - like a "teaching church", or an organisation that had stopped learning.

Membership of the Church is called "discipleship" which has learning at its heart. We are disciples of Jesus - called to learn his way(s). Disco is the Latin for "I learn".

It was Peter Senge who promoted the idea of "learning organisations" in the 90's. He wrote of organisation "where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to learn together.” (Senge, 1990, p.3). Senge was writing as a generation was coming to terms with the accelerating pace of change which would leave the unlearning organisation extinct and the unlearning person behind.

George Lovell writes: “To be effective and to experience vocational fulfilment in this changing context, clergy ... must reflect critically, imaginatively and systematically, on their own and with others, on the work, ministry and mission in which they are engaged or contemplating.”

In a really stimulating training session yesterday at Woodchurch High School, Andy referred to our age as the “exponential age” in which the pace of change virtually goes off the scale. We’ve seen nothing yet! He showed us the way technology is shaping change (shifthappens uk) and referred to some of the implications of the new technologies highlighted by Mark Pemsky.

Pemsky refers to students as “digital natives” who think and process information so fundamentally differently from ourselves. The way they relate to one another is fundamentally different and would have been seen as science fiction even 10 years ago. The way these digital natives think, and the way their brains have developed is likely to be different from us – born to a different age – and from virtually a different planet. We can enter their world but we enter as “digital immigrants”.

What has all this got to say about Church and about belonging? Digital natives do belong together – but not as we know it. They have a culture - but a culture that as cultural immigrants we find it hard to penetrate. What does it say about mission and how we might begin to bridge that generation gap? It brought to mind the beautiful work of Vincent Donovan who with tremendous love, humility and respect shared the gospel with the Masai thinking that the principles he adopted may have something to teach us about how we relate to this new age from which so many have become alienated. Interestingly Donovan, way back in 1972 – an age ago – wrote this:

“Never be afraid to ask questions about the work we have inherited or the work we are doing. There is no question that should not be asked or that is outlawed. The day we are completely satisfied with what we have been doing, the day we have found the perfect unchangeable system of work, the perfect answer, never in need of being corrected again, on that day we will know that we are wrong, that we have made the biggest mistake of all.” (p197)

The Winton Train

Wow. The Winton Train arrives at Liverpool Street Station today – with passengers rescued from Prague 70 years ago - the train will be met by the person who masterminded the rescue – Nicholas Winton (pictured). Nicholas Winton is 100 years old.


Altogether he managed to rescue 669 children transporting them by train from Prague to Lon don. Most of them were Jewish children who otherwise would have become victims of the holocaust. They have become known as the Winton Children – and that family of 669 has now become a family of 5000. This was part of the Kindertransport rescue mission which began a few days after Kristallnacht (1938) when some British Jewish leaders petitioned the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to accept unaccompanied Jewish children from Europe to protect them from Nazism. Six million Jews were killed in the holocaust. A quarter of them were children.

Dagmar Simova is one of the Winton Children on the train. Her response to the question of what it felt like to be once again being on a train from Prague is on the Winton Train Project’s blog: “My mother, father and grandfather came to the station with me. We all wept. This time my husband and daughter came to see me off. When we waved, suddenly it struck me. I was looking at them, but again I saw those three.”

Nicholas Winton never mentioned anything about this. It only became known 50 years later when his wife, Elizabeth, came across some papers when she was cleaning out their attic.

People like Nicholas Winton are honoured in a memorial park in Prague called the Orchard of Saviours. It celebrates all who helped Jewish children at great cost to themselves. Four types of apple trees have been planted and the refurbished fountain has been named after Sir Nicholas Winton.

The Winton Train Project hopes to despatch another Winton Train be dispatched with young people and their artworks inspired by goodness bound for other European cities, and that it become a tradition to commemorate the resilient determination of people to believe in goodness and actively take part in a common future.

St Augustine's Day

Paul Ballard and John Pritchard talk the work of the practical theologian in their book "Practical Theology in Action". "The work of the practical theologian is to participate in and be a catalyst for the common life of the whole Christian community".

They quote St Augustine:

When I am frightened by what I am to you then I am consoled by what I am with you. To you I am bishop, with you I am a Christian. The first is an office, the second a grace; the first a danger, the second salvation.

Ballard and Pritchard also write about the practical theologian:

The practical theologian strives to be a bridge across a divide; a catalyst sstimulating change and renewal; an enabler, who allows others to take up responsibilities; an educator who opens up the world to students within the community of shared learning. Of course there are set occasions and structured means to facilitate this process of theological reflection but it is essentially an ongoing process of shared living. It is always a vulnerable and exposed position appearing to have no status or substance other than the wisdom and the skills that are learned in the doing. (p37)