Cultivate

I had planned to be at Cultivate but a combination of work and more work kept me home.  Pernell Goodyear has a good post here.  Jared Siebert (who I have started to allow him to do my thinking for me) has some posts here.  Mike Todd has his thoughts here.  Jared posted all of the photos in Resonate's Flickr photo pool so check them out.

Technorati Tags : Cultivate, emerging+church, Frwy.ca, Canada, Resonate

Small is beautiful

Kester Brewin pushes back on Andrew Jones'  ideas for getting money from foundations.

Vaux was a very small project. I remember going to see the Bishop of London at the House of Lords and him sitting down saying 'So what do you want to see me for? Do you need some money?' His jaw almost hit the floor when we said we didn't. We accepted gifts, sure. But we never went out fundraising. Why? Because it seemed right to live within our means.

I love Schumacher's principle of Small is Beautiful and sometimes wonder if much of the industrial mission machine has moved away from this. The subtitle of his work is 'A Study of Economics As If People Mattered', and it is of course the relational that is central to all we do. How much funding should we need for that?

If these donors want to 'get in' on the global emerging culture, why not just give freely? Oh - because they want to make sure their money is being used wisely. How can they do that? As Andrew hints, they need to get relational. But much more so than they might already be doing. Forget the funding forms and spin culture.

I recently went to speak at a large, modern, beautiful church and was speaking to one of the congregation about the building. 'It's horrendous!' they moaned. 'It's costing us so much to keep up'. So sell it. Live within your means. Accept gifts. And if that means scaling back some big projects, fine. The Church™ will survive.

Technorati Tags : funding, emerging+church, consumption, mission, Affluenza, Vaux

The new Emergent Village

The new Emergent Village website is now online.  It looks good and has moved from a bunch of pieces into one integrated site.  The bad news is inevitable and that is some broken RSS feeds that need to be changed but that isn't much of a problem (although I have heard that you always permenantly lose people when you switch).  In case you missed it, there are a couple of pretty good interviews that Tony Jones did with Karen Ward and also Tim Keel.

 

Technorati Tags : Emergent, Karen+Ward, Tim+Keel, podcast, website, emerging+church