O dear - having logged on not being ready for Advent, things have gone from bad to worse in terms of having time for all those things I was going to do! Of course, this is also the story of my life, so to blame Advent, or Christmas, would be naive in the extreme. What it has done, however, is raise even more questions in my mind about how Churches and Christian organisations get things done (or of course, don"t). Since re-entering the real world after my sabbatical I've had some interesting meetings with a one or two Churches around this theme. Basically, with permission, I offer a very basic overview of the extent to which a Church to align its practice with whatever they believe to be their reason for being. It is, perhaps not surprisingly, rather scary. Now, of course, when something is as challenging as feeling everything must change, our default position is to retreat like a tortoise - we're OK underneath this shell from everything 'out there' which threatens us!

So, I'll be interested to look at this e-book offered free by Seth Godin with thoughts from 70 thinkers on what matters now - sethgodin.typepad.com

Also, don't know if anyone else saw an article about the Met being a dysfunctional organisation in various newspapers? Well, this was apparently what Sir Paul Stephenson, the current Met chief, (does the knoghthood come with the job these days?) said was true about certain parts of it before he took over little over a year ago. Now, of course, we must always take care with our responses to such news, but it made me think if the Met, with all the organisational expertise at their fingertips, are dysfunctional, perhaps we're not so bad after all. Incidentally, I can hear many a new Minister saying the same thing about their Church, referring to the previous Minister. What was also intriguing, to me at least, was the reason given - 'in-fighting between senior officers'. Now, when I conducted my research into why people leave Christian Ministry some years ago now, conflict within the key leadership team was high on the list of significant factors.