When life and faith go off script.
Follow the conversation,
join the discussion,
make yourself at home.
Life is dynamic. It moves and flows and very rarely stays still. But we’re a curious bunch of people, spending our energy trying to set everything in concrete. The problem is that the concrete systems we’ve set up inevitably fail to make room for our real life experience, and this can make us pretty anxious. In this place we either “double-down” on the system we’ve set up, or we have to allow ourselves to enter into the movement, into the transition, in the shift.
My hope is that this space provides room for conversations and stories that help us to understand what life looks like when it moves. These movements relate to systems of faith, spirituality and communities of belonging, and to personal and social identities that are complex and always changing. We need some way of having honest conversations without descending into “us” and “them”; without the polarisation that so often characterises (post) modern life.
‘In the Shift’ is about the stories, theologies and conversations that centre around:
EMBODIED SPIRITUALITY: Faith and spirituality do not need to generate systems that alienate us from one another and ourselves. Instead, they can help us enter into life-giving conversations and experiences that foster human flourishing.
SELF AND OTHER-UNDERSTANDING: If we are going to embrace life, we have to learn what it is to understand our own stories and the stories of those who we intersect with in personal, social, and global spaces.
NEW IMAGINATION: To move forward we are going to need a new imagination that invites us to see the world differently now, and to envision possibilities for the future that subvert the dominant forces of power and control.
Now I – and this may surprise you – was not lithe and athletic. If they were like gazelles I was more like an enthusiastic loris. And to make matters worse I was a loris wearing a bright yellow t-shirt and so as they disappeared into the dark night, I remember just looking down at the ground and saying out loud “ahhhhh crap”. I would have said something cruder, but, you know, it was church camp. And so I started sprinting as fast as I could, but my sprint was more of a lumbering stampede, but without the stampede. I was waiting for the “flight” response to kick in to give me some kind of superhuman speed and agility, but alas it did not arrive.