Teach a man to fish and he might teach others

The book I read yesterday, I gave away today and told another person about it tonight. That’s the way I am with new knowledge, I’m not satisfied with having it until I have passed it on to someone else.
Now I’m not sure why I do this… it could just be that I am a generous person, but I am not sure that is not what it is. It could be that I am doing it to put others down, you know: “look at me, I’m clever I read books and everything!” I don’t think that I am clever enough to play games like that.
No, I think in my head that passing something on is the end of the learning process. If I learn something new, I don’t feel I have really learnt it until I pass it on to someone else.
Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime and with any luck he will probably teach somebody else, and before you know what a community is fed.
It would be good if those involved in regeneration really followed through this idea by allowing those who have learnt how to do it to share their knowledge with others.

What if unfair is fairer?

Tuesday is my day off which is usually occupied with stuff that has crept into it from other parts of my life. So with a genuine day off I suddenly felt a bit low. They used to say about ships that when they come into port the stuff they have thrown overboard follows them in. Anyhow into port today and then the rubbish flowed in behind and in the darkness the shining of a great book to lighten my day. Also the fact that the sun shone and I was able to sit in the garden to read it, cover to cover as it happens.
The book was called the Social Entrepeneur by Andrew Mawson. It's a great book the kind of thing you want to buy lots of to give to people. It's a story of a minister coming to Bromley - le - Bow in the East End and discovering h0w to form partnerships and to get invovled in fostering entrepeneurship. It is an impressive story with some startling ideas.
Most startling is his idea that fairness means that stuff can't happen because fairness dictates that if you have ten groups in a community you have to give everyone the same amount, so ten million means a million each despite the fact that if one of the groups has a proven track record of changing their communities giving them ten million would be a better prospect.
His strongest analogy was that of the scientist who is given money to distribute to research cancer. They wouldn't give it to every scientist they would look for the ones most likely to find a result.
In regeneration he argues we should give money to only some in the community, not everybody, which although it's unfair could result in the revival of that community.
I need to think about it a bit more.

Beam me up Scottie, or should we take the car?

It's about time somebody invented one of those transporter devices that are used on Star Trek. I love going to Durham to visit my daughter but the A1 is such a boring motorway/dual carriageway type thing. If only you could be turned into energy and beamed down the phone lines to home.
Mind you cars are an interesting place for sorting things out. Catherine and I often have some of our most in depth conversations in the car and the children trapped and bored will often talk about the stuff that really bothers them, or interests them, or makes them laugh.
Today we were trying to get to the bottom of where and exactly why I was going on my Fraser Teal sabbatical. It's not very straight forward because as well as the bomb that went off in Yemen this week, the other person I know who knows the middle east, not the one I am going with, reckons it's a dangerous place to go for a westerner. We didn't solve the problems in the car but we did air the issues.
I remember when I was a University Chaplain my car was almost a mobile confession with students asking for a lift home and then taking the time to tell me their deepest darkest secret. Maybe it’s because we don’t have to look at one another that makes a car the perfect place to talk about difficult things.
So perhaps having a transporter thing like on Star Trek might not be such a good idea, but just another excuse for not talking.
“Don’t beam me up Scottie, we need to talk!”

Durham Night Life

To Durham, again tonight to see my daughter, and after a fine pizza, to her church. This is by the market place infact as worship went on we, the hundred plus mostly young congregation, were treated to a passing display of the flotsam and jetsam of the streets of Sunday night Durham. Two girls with short skirts and long hair sheltering from the rain until they spotted the many worshippers singing in their direction. Another reaction to the discovery came from two young men who treated the unshocked worshippers to a great view of their unmasked buttocks.
It was a busy night in Durham, outside the church people partied whilst inside the people worshipped and recommitted themselves to changing the world... beginning with themselves.
And people wonder why I think faith communities are vital to regeneration.

Motto Sunday

Tomorrow is motto Sunday, not a national or even international festival… come to think of it, it’s not even a local festival it’s one I made up. Every year on this Sunday, since I started, I present a verse from the bible for us to carry through the year.
Tempting though it is I have not chosen “Everybody hates us, we don’t care…” but instead I have been lead to “Pressing on to take hold of that for which Christ took hold of us.” This verse from Philippians is about keeping going.
I think what this message of pressing on is encouraging us to do is to just keep going.
Often we want a new direction, a new project, a new “master plan” but what we need to do is to press on, to keep striving towards the initial project.
So in all our projects this year I will have that phrase “Pressing on…” stuck in my head.
It might help, who knows.
If you want to borrow our motto….
Pressing on...

Get your own!

Sometimes there is smoke without fire

“I understand that you are selling the church.”
It was one of those out of the blue statements that rock you back on your heals.
For a while now we have been trying to redevelop the hall at Cragg, with a failed lottery bid and no prospect of raising the £500000 that is needed to make it DDA compliant. Three years ago one of our older members called us all together to say what many of others of us were already thinking, “It’s time to sell the hall.” So here we are a few years later poised to sell the hall to provide the money to turn the church into a multipurpose community building, fit for the twenty first century.
“I understand that you are selling the church.” This sensible person had heard a rumour, and assumed that there is no smoke without fire. Despite our reassurances, despite one hundred and seventy years of faithful service to our communities… why let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Rumour is a funny thing, it gives a smoke screen and it’s difficult for anyone to see the truth when the rumour smoke is swirling.
The problem is that sometimes there is smoke without fire.

investors in people

Today I had my action set facillitators training with Tom Herbert, which was a surprisingly sad affair. I think we ha d all suddenly become aware of how much we had learnt from Tom and each other. The sessions had begun with a fairly hefty four week stint of weekly input sessions outlining some of the skills of facillitation. Where things became much more valuable when we started the action learning sets which were a kind of peer review group.
We all talked today about what we had learnt from one another, helped by the fact that all of us in different ways were involved in regeneration. However what I had got most from was that each of us had grown through the investment put into us, simply adding value to our self worth.
If only all education could be viewed in this light.