Northumbria Community Leadership Schools

My friends in the Northumbria Community asked me to let people know about some forthcoming events.  I reckon you can guarantee, good speakers, good hospitality and a good time.

Northumbria Community Leadership Schools, Nether Springs

Following on from the highly successful Leadership Schools that were launched last year, you are invited to join Roy Searle and others for this year's Schools.

Our mother house, Nether Springs, has recently relocated to its new home at Acton Home Farm, south of Alnwick in the Coquet Valley near to the Northumbrian coast. Our new monastic missional centre has ten en suite, twin or double bedrooms, a library, sitting room, dining room, offices and entrance built around a cloistered courtyard, set on a private estate, just off the A1 near Felton.

Each day will follow the pattern of a monastic rhythm, with times for prayer, reflection, rest, study, teaching input and sharing together.  There will also be opportunities to walk and visit some of the famous places that are associated with the Celtic Saints.
To book a place or for further information and details please contact office@northumbriacommunity.org or telephone 01670 787 645

Missional Leadership School
Monday 6th to Saturday, 11th June, 2011
The challenges and opportunities of missional living and leading require new ways of being and exercising leadership.  Join George Lings and Roy Searle as they explore some of the key issues facing leaders in a changing church and culture.  Based around the rhythm of the monastic day, time will be spent alone and together exploring these issues with other leaders in a supportive environment.
Cost, including full board accommodation, £285.  To book a place or for further information and details please contact office@northumbriacommunity.org or telephone 01670 787645.

Prophetic Voices
Monday 5th to Friday, 9th September, 2011
Join Roy Searle and Stuart Murray Williams of the Anabaptist Network looking at what the new monastic, Celtic and Anabaptist Traditions have to say to leaders in the midst of a changing church and culture.  Based around the rhythm of the monastic day, time will be spent alone and together exploring these issues with other leaders in a supportive environment.  Cost, including full board accommodation, £230.
To book a place or for further information and details please contact office@northumbriacommunity.org or telephone 01670 787645.


Change and Transition Retreat
Monday 7th to Saturday, 12th November, 2011
This retreat, led by Roy Searle and Pete Askew, opens up ideas of how to lead through the challenges and opportunities of change by strengthening relationships, facilitating creativity, fostering innovation, promoting growth and development, whilst still facing issues of conflict and building community.
Cost, including full board accommodation, £285.
To book a place or for further information and details please contact office@northumbriacommunity.org or telephone 01670 787645.


Please see some of the feedback from the last Leadership School held last year:-

It was really excellent. I enjoyed the people and the environment. There was a good balance between teaching, praying and relaxing.

The Leadership School provided a valuable time to pause together as church leaders and focus on our relationships with God, self and others. Thanks to the Northumbria Community for facilitating this for us.

Refreshing, inspiring, liberating!

Review of Morna Hooker and Frances Young's "Holiness and Mission"

A renowned New Testament scholar and an eminent theologian deliver a series of lectures on Mission and Holiness, looking for lessons for today’s church from the remarkable growth of Christianity in the urban centres of the Roman empire.   Intriguing.

Morna Hooker, offers an account of mission in the scriptures from Israel through Jesus to the New Testament church.  She detects a common thread originating in the call to God’s people to be Holy as God is holy.   This Holiness is social holiness, a particular people living an ethically distinct life in the midst of other peoples, thus pointing to the reality of God and offering an embodied invitation to come, know and worship.  Words alone, whether proclamation or personal testimony, aren’t enough.  Witness is dependent on corporate godliness, ecclesial bodying forth of Christ the God-revealer.

According to Hooker, living the holy life in a city offers particular challenges.  The Bible is ambivalent about urban living.  From Babel through Babylon to Rome the city is a place of alienation, corruption and hubristic rejection of God.  Both Jesus and his followers meet the challenge of urban godlessness and in so doing offer a challenge to the cities that sought their death.  Yet in the vision of Zion restored and Babylon/Rome become the heavenly Jerusalem, scripture offers us assurance that God isn’t done with the metropolis.  So, the church today is called to meet the challenge of the city and to offer a challenge to the city by living otherwise, thus pointing to the promise of the city, God’s promise.

In her treatment of early church growth Frances Young also emphasises the significance of holiness, the quiet, distinctive, engaged presence of the first Christian communities.  She recognises that early Christian mission took many forms including demonstrations of power through exorcism and healing, remarkable confidence in the face of death and verbal announcement of gospel.  But it is the presence of Christian networks both like and unlike Roman institutions, quietly overlapping the structures of society and offering a place to belong, a sense of identity, practical care and a distinctive philosophy that gets most of the credit.  The church grew because it was an articulate, attractive anomaly.

Young then ventures beyond Constantine when the booster rocket of state of approval carried church growth into stratospheric dimensions.  She offers us a welcome, nuanced rendition of an oft told story – church moving from household to basilica, from lifestyle to religion, from radical alternative to the mainstream, from simplicity to flamboyant dazzle.  Mission becomes enculturation and growth through conquest; organic, grass-roots life becomes top-down establishment and as society is Christianised, the church is de-Christianised.

And the implications for today?  What is called for is an integration of verbal witness and embodied witness, rooted in social holiness.  We could do worse than allow Marshall McLuhan to provide commentary on Leviticus:  be holy as I am holy – the medium is the message.

All in all then not a bad little book.  Not bad, but not great.  I can find nothing with which to take exception in Hooker and Young’s exposition and I approve their central message but I’d hoped for more.  A book by these two commended heartily by James Dunne and David Ford is one that I was eager to read but one that taught me very little.  All too familiar.  I was much more impressed by the Kreiders’ Worship and Mission after Christendom which tells a similar story and offers a similar vision.  Still, I’ll probably use Hooker and Young as a set text for my first year course on mission.  It’s short, clearly written, reliable and makes some important points; ideal for those beginning to study missiology.  If that’s how you see yourself, go ahead but if you want more than an introduction I’d look elsewhere.

This review was originally written for Regent's Reviews and is reproduced here with permission of the editor.  Check out the web site to get a free pdf of a whole bunch of reviews.