One of the things I get to do on a regular-ish basis is meet up with Ian Mobsby who kindly agreed to be my mentor a few years back after my placement with Moot. Meeting with Ian is always a specal time as he is one of those people that can see the issues that are hovering and is not afraid to speak out, to challenge, to encourage or to kick up the backside of needed. At times. like most people, I need a combination of these.

Ian has great expertese and I consider myself really lucky to be able to spend a couple of hours every few months talking about what I am doing, where I think I might be going and what I need to be thinking about doing. The wealth of wisdom from this man is fantastic.

Today I have been encouraged and blessed as we looked at the values we as a community have been looking at, and how this has a danger of pulling us into head knowledge type orthodoxy when our gathering, if I am reading things correctly, is far more interested in orthopraxis, aspiring to live out our faith with integrity. The community, or gathering, have agreed some values, such as inclusivity, the importance of journey, mission and a few others. While I was thinking that we needed to be looking at what these mean, in other words ‘unpack them’,  it became clear after speaking with Ian that, actually, we need to be looking more at how we live these out in our world.

So … as a community we need to be asking, ‘how can we aspire to live in an inclusive way?’ rather than ‘what does it mean to be inclusive?’ and so on. This may seem only a slight shift in emphasis but it is a shift that will encourage us how to live rather than talking about how to be it – and I think that is where we want to be. I think we want to be a group of people that live out our faith authentically rather than have head knowledge about what we are doing.

As we consider this as a community I think we will be travelling into some pretty exciting times.