Stanmore Baptist Blog

baptist-times-roy-searle 

IT IS always worth talking to people who inhabit a space larger than that normally ascribed to Baptists. The Revd Roy Searle is such a person. He has walked in the front stage of ministry as a congregational leader and as former President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain (BUGB) but is equally at home back-stage in silence and contemplation.
Where he has moved outside a narrow range of movement in ministry is as Leader and co-founder of the Northumbria Community with its emphasis on Celtic spirituality and contemplation, and his wandering work in relational leadership within secular and corporate settings, as well as the peace process in Northern Ireland.
 I have this sense of him having a harbour within the Northumbria Community and his family, but setting out on his coracle to wherever the Spirit blows him. A map of his travels tracing all the lines of influence of his life would make a fascinating document.
In a denomination that has often been a place that has put up walls, he is committed to creating a space where community can live without walls.  I asked him about this paradoxical and apparently contradictory path he has walked for over twenty years.
‘For a denomination of activists contemplation is a clarion call to stop and examine ourselves and what we do. We can run ourselves into the ground with frenetic activity, which poisons the soul, in fact it doesn’t even reach the soul, it just dries up the soul’.
Roy’s own journey into the silent places began before he became a Christian when he was training to be an outward bound instructor as a young man.
‘The solitude of the open space, the mountains and the sea were important to me. I had time to reflect and face myself as well becoming aware of God.’
This rootedness in being rather than doing has enabled him to avoid the fate of many ministers, who can end up as project managers of little corporations.
Roy’s ministry would be much more about soul-caring, helping people find ‘the right seat, the fitting task, and a willing heart’. It has taken him outside the church into a wider circle of influence, which some might call apostolic. Roy himself uses this word with caution as he talks to me.
 ‘Out of this quiet place for me has come the forming of a building, envisaging, imagining a different future, transforming type-of-ministry.  It is more apostolic rather than evangelistic although I am wary of apostolic as a word because of contemporary connotations about the way the word is used.’
I get a sense that it is about bringing words of healing, where communities, people, even organisations that have been broken, can be re-made. Sitting with him in a small café in the middle of London I am reminded of a hawk at point, hovering in the air waiting for the Master to send him flying off, content to hover, but desiring to fly over the ancient paths.
At Bible College in Northumberland where he first trained an emphasis on nurturing and mentoring has stayed with him. It was there he was introduced to the writings of Richard Foster who has since become a close friend and mentor. Roy has worked hard to mentor and nurture younger leaders in turn.
A thread of pioneering runs through his whole story. His first church in Portrack, Stockton, on a large council housing estate was an opportunity to pioneer. But even in an urban setting he was drawn to make space for being.
In his own experience he has found that congregations don’t always understand that what they see as a day ‘faffing around’ is actually a day seeking God.
Roy found time for me to talk to him within a week of having lost his father, not in a driven way but an available and vulnerable way. These deep family roots are very important to him.
 

‘I learnt from my mother hospitality and generosity, and from my father the importance of finding time for self, not in a selfish way, but to allow God’s right moments to break in.’
It was such a moment, seeking God on the rocks at Bamburgh, looking back towards the Farne Islands that Roy experienced a sense of God’s call, to follow a movement of God’s love.

‘It was a Scripture that just so resonated with me, ‘You are Peter and this rock I will build my church’. And I was on the rocks. The image was of reaching out to people out in the sea and pulling them onto the rock.’
It wasn’t until eight years later driving up the A1 in Northumbria to visit his parents with Bamburgh Castle on his right and the Cheviot Hills on his left, wrestling with a sense of his calling, that he realised that epiphanal moment on the rocks was not just about what he was to do but where he was to do it.

‘As I drove by the lit up castle I just started to weep. I realised, thick Geordie as I am, this was the place of my calling. That moment 8 years later rooted me in Northumbria.’
And then began the real exploration of Northumbrian spirituality and walking in ancient paths. 

‘I found in Celtic spirituality this twin thing that mirrored my own life calling - the cell and the coracle,
The monastery and the wandering for the love of Christ, the aloneness with God but the building of community.’
Roy’s openness to other Christian streams of spirituality has been recognized by the wider Christian church with ecumenical appointments, such as an Honorary Canon at Down Cathedral, the burial place of St Patrick. His own hope is that as a denomination Baptists will journey into a greater openness.

‘I fear we are not as open as we should be, and  I fear that in some ways  our strength, our mission emphasis, sometimes blinds us to the strength  of other traditions. There is an element of separation within Baptist spirituality which I really struggle with. Having travelled to Ireland for years if I loathe anything in life it is sectarianism.’

Roy believes that as Baptists we have great things to bring to the ecumenical table, including our mission emphasis and a flexibility, but that we need to recognize, humbly, that we are not the only guests at the table.
Twenty five years ago when Roy was involved in the founding of the Northumbria Community, his prophetic sense was that the church was in exile rather than moving towards revival. This forced him to repent, in the sense of asking questions that brought about an even more open, vulnerable and available attitude in his own life. What the Community in its rule might call ‘the heretical imperative’, asking awkward questions that upset the status quo.

This openness to being available and vulnerable has affirmed for Roy that actually God is for him.

‘Love is stronger than evil, light is stronger than darkness. Therefore you don’t fear receiving from others.’

This principle of receiving from others extends into the community life of the Northumbria Community, which is made of many diverse backgrounds, from Catholic to unchurched. 

 Roy would also see his spirituality being about common-sense and love not power.

 ‘Bede would see signs and wonders, for example, but then they would be back digging potatoes. In that working-class housing estate I worked folk would say to me, “Give your head a shake, Roy”.’

Within the Community the leaders would stress that ‘it’s the power of love rather than the love of power’ that is important. When they appoint new leaders a further adage would be, ‘unless someone has the humility they will not be given the responsibility.’

The Community has a Rule, a way for living which came out of the experience of living together for 8 years.

‘It gives us a framework for our lives,’ adds Roy, ‘that tries to take seriously the Sermon on the Mount. We want to live in the kingdom and the only way to do that is wrestle with these central words of Jesus’.

For Roy it is values that need to be at the centre of community, congregational and associational life.

Roy’s deep concern is to bring what is life-giving to people. As a Spiritual Director and leader of a community he is very aware that so many people are dying spiritually. The great life-giving commandment to love God and to love our neighbour is at the heart of Roy’s spirituality. He sees the Sermon on the Mount as Jesus’ outworking of this great vision of love.
He believes living the life of love and creating space for God will make all the ripples that are required to make a difference in the world. In the words of a poet, he sees ‘the windows opening in the trees’ and wanders through them.

ODILON REDON’S painting The Mystical Boat is a picture of hope, wholeness and integration. The colours and the two people in the stern of the boat speak of reconciliation and unity. It has real power to  evoke meaning for us because of the buried feelings it draws out of us – the longing and yearning for such a picture to represent our own life course.
 The symbolic paintings within us that speak of our own sail boat journey of life are then brought into focus.
Redon (1840-1916) is one of the outstanding figures of French Symbolism. During the 1890s after a religious crisis and serious illness he turned to painting and a dormant talent as a colorist emerged.
I saw The Mystical Boat recently for the first time and it spoke to my deep self, that part of me made in the image of God. It resonated with great power because over the last few months I have started drawing sail boats with me in them.

Since Noah’s ark boats have been a powerful sacred symbol. When they emerge in our consciousness it is worth looking at the reasons. There is a strangled Argonaut in each one of us, and a golden fleece we need to seek.
Except we have to journey on our own. One of the highways of the sea that lead us to God is the awareness that for much of the journey we are alone and responsible alone.
 

Often the golden fleece is only found in darkness. We usually flee from that darkness rather than seeking it out. Which is why the bright yellow of the sail, symbolic of God’s presence is so comforting, for we need to take His light with us into the dark places of our soul.
 

I started drawing small sail boats with me in them after reading Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea this summer.  Written in the 1960s for children it is a book that can lead anyone to their deeper self. The hero, Ged, who is everyman or everywoman, lets loose a shadow in the world that hunts him and from which he flees.
 

The turning point of the book is when Ged receives a word of life from a wise old man, that he must turn around and hunt the shadow, ‘the hunted must become the hunter’.
 

He makes a small boat with a sail and sets out on the sea and the shadow flees from him, as it begins to take on his likeness.

 We all have a shadow side that we deny, but needs to be reintegrated. The Mystical Boat is the journey after that hardest work has been done. When Jesus stands on the beach of John 21 and says to Peter, ‘Simon son of John, do you truly love me more than these?’ Simon Peter is forced to face the shadow of his betrayal, and his words of love to Jesus in response now include the painfully acknowledged dark thread of betrayal as well as the deep blue of faithfulness to follow.
 

In religious life we are all prone to creating a shadow, the parts of ourselves we have repressed for fear of rejection or being judged. Another way of looking at it is to say Christians often have a front-stage that conforms to the perceived morality of their community, and a back-stage where the hidden life is. Hidden addictions like alcohol, drugs or pornography is shadow work which has not been done.

This summer I realised I needed to launch a boat and sail in it to track down my shadow, with the fear of rejection lurking at the heart of it.  Only then can we begin to move on from Paul’s cry, and all of our cries, ‘For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.’ (Romans 7:15). Only then does the cry, ‘I do not understand what I do’, become a cry of understanding and metamorphosis.
 

We can use the language of sin and old self but our task is to find new words to say those things, words that resonate with people in our culture without watering down the meaning God intends. The water must still be salty sea water that stings and heals us.
 

And not all of our shadow is about sin. I have repressed creative aspects of myself like writing poetry or painting pictures to express what I feel because I have been told these things are not ‘real’. How many of us have these parts of our self waiting to be released?

 In the last few weeks on retreat at Worth Abbey I felt I had to paint a second picture of me in a sail boat, but this time in an embrace of reconciliation. The embrace was inspired by a sculpture at Coventry Cathedral, a duplicate of which is in the Peace Garden in Hiroshima, Japan.
This picture too is one of hope, a picture of now or a picture of the future. The embrace could be with my shadow, someone I love, or God, or all of them.

It was after I had painted my two paintings, hunting my shadow, and the embrace of reconciliation that I came across The Mystical Boat. I was suddenly filled with tremendous hope that wholeness, reintegration, reconciliation was possible and could be the next painting representing my journey towards God. I suddenly had insight into what my paintings might mean for me.

In The Mystical Boat the person sitting next to you could be your shadow, someone you love, or God.  The sail is the golden fleece of God’s presence. It is only by His light that we overcome the darkness and our wounds are healed.
 

Redon himself wanted to ‘place the visible at the service of the invisible’ and in this painting he has done that.

18 January 2010

Published in ‘Baptist Times’

MUCH OF today’s worship and prayer seems to be a closed system which does not allow for the validity of silence and solitude. I have been in that place myself where people told me silence and solitude was important, I tried it, but it did not seem to work.

But the work of silence and solitude may be the most important thing we do as disciples of the Still One.

It is interesting but if you look at things in the world slightly differently you can see how silence and stillness is built into the fabric of existence around us.

At the beginning of everything God spoke into the silence. From the beginning of our lives we have the connected silence and solitude of the womb, where the first sounds a baby will hear are her mother’s heartbeat and the sound of her blood pumping at around 16 weeks, two months before the ears are fully formed.

The mysterious process of quiet sleep is a place of silence and solitude making up a third of our life. The silence and stillness of a spider, or crouching tiger are God-given signs in the world that we just don’t see. Silence is more important to our well-being than we realise.

The attentiveness we develop in art or poetry which makes the world more fully present is another sign God has placed in the world to draw our attention to the importance of stillness.

Not being able to find a place of silence, as for tinnitus sufferers, can feel like a madness. We live in a kingdom of noise where there is almost nowhere to go to find silence. We are drowning in noise but we do not know it, we think we are waving.

A small amount of silence can be wonderful, but stretch it out a bit and suddenly it becomes a fearful place. A number of times in prayer meetings I have said ‘let’s wait on God in silence’, and within twenty seconds someone prays out loud.

The Desert Fathers whose work was silence tell us that a prolonged period of silence and solitude means we will have to ‘wrestle with our inner demons’. In fact when Abbot Moses was asked for a word of life he replied, ‘Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.’ In other words the silence and solitude of the cell will teach you everything.
 Silence and solitude especially within monastic settings has often been criticized as a withdrawal from life. But it is in silence and solitude we become aware of our connectedness to all things. It is in the kingdom of noise that we feel isolated and disconnected.

When Jesus healed the paralytic in Luke chapter five he was able to read the hearts of the Pharisees and teachers of the law. This is often attributed rightly to a prophetic gifting through the Holy Spirit, but  just before this passage we read, ‘ Jesus often withdraw to lonely places and prayed.’ It is that work of silence and solitude that also enabled him to read hearts.

I have only begun to put the tiny crescent of a fingernail into the doorway of silence and solitude which is how we develop a contemplative self. It is a tiny splinter of sunlight in my heart that refuses to leave.

The goal of developing our contemplative self is to become awake and aware and compassionate like Jesus.  The fourth century Syrian Ephrem said that in baptism we ‘put on the Wakeful One’. Noise puts us to sleep, silence and solitude awakens us to be like the ‘Wakeful One’ we have put on.

Perhaps the most important thing is that silence and solitude is our umbilical cord to God. Just like babies we can hear without having to hear through our ears. Without that guiding thread we lose our way in the competitive maze that is western culture.

We are so preoccupied in our minds with our own selfish chatter we have forgotten how to listen to God with our hearts, we do not know how to hear the words he tries to form in our inner being.

Another way of saying that we wrestle with our inner demons in silence and solitude is to say that the illusions about who we are are stripped away.
 If the voices who say that silence and solitude are the turning point in Christian transformation are right then we need to find a way to get all Christians to embrace the vision.

In that silence and solitude we are ‘blessed’ with the greatest blessing of all, the gaze of a loving God and his loving presence when we ‘take to heart’ the word of God that has been revealed to us (Revelation 1:3).

The greatest challenge facing the church today is to get all Christians to take to heart this landscape of interior solitude, planting within it the transforming Word of God.

Baptist times article, interview with Jim Graham by Shaun Lambert

JIM GRAHAM  recently celebrated forty years of ministry at Gold Hill Baptist Church and 52 years in ministry altogether.

He has been called one of the fathers of the modern charismatic renewal movement which began in mainstream churches in this country in the 1960s. The seeds of personal renewal for him were sown in the early 1960s when he met key individuals involved with the East African Revival.

Jim Graham has never wavered in his commitment to the person and work of the Holy Spirit. He looks back at those pioneering days and his long journey of wrestling with God for a vision of a New Testament church with real clarity.

 ‘I was baptised in the Holy Spirit in 1968, whilst I was still in Scotland. And the reason that happened to me was I’d almost given up on the ministry. I felt there was something more. To put it another way I felt there had to be something more.’

 Jim didn’t just want to have a ministry keeping the church doors open with a domesticated God and inward-looking congregation.

 ‘I’d learnt how to do church. At the time I pastured the fourth largest Baptist church in Scotland. But there was an internal dissatisfaction, a longing, a yearning for something more.’

 His initial encounters with people claiming to have been baptised in the Spirit alarmed him. Today many of the battles around the validity and work of the Holy Spirit have been won, but these were heady, risky, dangerous waters to paddle in back in the 1960s.

 The key encounter came when he met up with a friend of his who was a Church of Scotland Minister who had a dramatic infilling of the Holy Spirit.

 ‘He was in a mining village and mining families began to be saved and healed. He stirred longings in my heart, there must be something there.’

 Jim had struggled with the issue for a couple of years prior to a breakthrough. People were warning him that if he got caught up in charismatic renewal it would spoil his ministry.

 ‘In my arrogance I didn’t want my ministry to be spoilt. But there was the compelling internal struggle to try and interpret truth as it is revealed in scripture. I came to a view that this was real and this was right.’

 During a mid-week prayer time in the church hall in July 1968 Jim had an experience which he can only describe as ‘Jesus coming in and touching my life in a new way’.

 ‘I had a sense of gratitude, I had a sense of wonder, I had a sense of warmth, I had a sense of longing, I had a sense of light, I’m talking rubbish to you now, words can’t fully express what was going on that night…I almost cried.’

 This experience happened at the end of the prayer meeting and he went to his vestry and kneeling in front of his desk the encounter with God continued.

 ‘I poured out my heart in my first experience of what I can only call pure worship. I was ignorant. I didn’t know what to do. If someone was there to affirm me or encourage me I might have spoken in tongues, but I didn’t.’

 After a couple of hours Jim slowly walked home through the public park.

 ‘I don’t know if you know Robinson’s hymn, ‘Heaven above is softer blue, earth around is sweeter green?’ That’s how I felt. I felt a oneness with God’s creation.’

 God was at work at a deeper level than Jim knew at the time. Unable to share this experience with his wife Anne because of guests at home, he was disappointed, but Anne received her own encounter with God the next morning.

Jim also found out later that mid-week evening in July 1968 was also the time Gold Hill decided to call him to Chalfont-St-Peter.

 He was left with a dilemma about how to take this forward.

 ‘I knew it was real, but because of my temperament I’ve always wanted to be sure about being sure. As a Christian leader I knew this was controversial and could invite persecution. But it would have been hypocrisy to hide it.’

 It was at Gold Hill that his opportunity came to test the waters. He began by sharing his personal testimony at a church weekend away.

 ‘I suppose I expected a reaction, but there was nothing. Not - ‘that was interesting’, or ‘that was deeply disturbing’…nothing. So I raised it with the elders and they began to encourage me to teach about it.’

 The congregation over a long period of time moved from having the gifts of the Spirit forbidden to accepted, from accepted to encouraged, and from encouraged to affirmed.

 One of the other initiatives that helped enormously was to have times of open forum every Sunday evening after the service on this possibly very divisive issue.

 It was not all plain sailing, and Jim acknowledges that the first ten years in the church were very difficult. For any minister starting out, or experiencing difficult times, Jim’s ministry is a testimony of perseverance and grace in leadership, as well as being prepared to put one’s ministry and reputation on the line.

 He felt very supported by some of the other early pioneers of charismatic renewal.

 ‘My support was from Anglicans, especially Michael Harper from the Fountain Trust. People like David Watson, Graham Pulkingham who founded The Community of Celebration and the worship band The Fisher Folk were an enormous help. I found sanity, a demand for biblical integrity from them. Liturgy came alive in their hands.’

 One the things that speeded up the transition he was looking for in terms of style of church came through inviting these innovative leaders to come and speak at Gold Hill.

 Jim was keen to pass on the blessing and helped Gold Hill become a resource church for other local churches.

 ‘What drove me in those days was to find out what the beating heart of New Testament Christianity was. One of the ways I tried to do that was to expose the congregation to what God was doing elsewhere.’

 This included an understanding of the wider theology in which the person and work of the Holy Spirit was rooted.

 ‘I became convinced, and I now am rooted in this, that we must come to Pentecost by way of Calvary, by way of the Cross. And this leads to an understanding of the Kingdom, of which charismatic renewal is a prerequisite.’

 At the heart of what has sustained Jim over the last 40 years is his love for and rootedness in God’s Word.

 ‘There have been many who have encouraged me. But there are those who have despised me. Doors have been closed to me. My commitment to Jesus’, Jesus’ people  and the Word of God has kept me going – not success, because there has been success and failure along the way.’

 The story of growth at Gold Hill’s over his 27 years as the Senior Pastor has been documented in some of his books. When he arrived the church had about 120 members. When he moved into a full-time wider ministry 13 years ago there were between 650 and 700 members. Over 2000 leaders had come on conferences at Gold Hill.

Nearly 30 members had gone out into local church ministry during that time, and at one point during that period 52 missionaries were supported by the church.

 Jim acknowledges he couldn’t have thrived in 52 years of ministry without his wife, Anne’s, support.

There are many gems of distilled wisdom that he dispenses naturally as we talk. A surrendered life is another secret of his durability.

 ‘I get my sense of significance and self-worth from surrender to Him, to Jesus. I can truly say I have never felt more spiritually alive than now’.

 For the last 13 years he has tried to develop a more contemplative prayer life, which began with a visit to Brother Ramon, the former Baptist minister who became a Franciscan hermit at Glasshampton monastery.

 He believes that many churches today have the theology of renewal but not the experience. For him theology without experience is dead, and experience without theology is dangerous.

 If he had the opportunity to start over he would still try to forcefully advance the kingdom of God, but he would give more time for change to occur, he would give more opportunity for feedback, he would encourage more leaders to lead, and on a personal note he would spend more time in contemplative prayer.

 Although not a revolutionary or a radical by nature, he has been that throughout his ministry – the  consistent revolutionary who lasted the course.

 

 

 

 

Article for Baptist Times, by Shaun Lambert, interview with Simon Walker

 SIMON WALKER is an Anglican minister who has succeeded in becoming a credible voice in the market place through his company Human Ecology, through his heading up of The Leadership Community (www.theleadershipcommunity.org) , a growing international group of social leaders, and by acting as a consultant with Ethertalk, an international group of trend leaders and thinkers. He also teaches leadership in a number of theological colleges, as well as teaching on the coaching course at Oxford Brookes University.

 In one of his roles as a social analyst he has been predicting a financial derailment in the UK for the last four years.

 ‘The way the current crisis is unfolding is like watching a train crash in slow motion as carriage after carriage derails, and we still haven’t seen the end of it,’ he says.

 He believes the financial crisis is part of a much wider seismic shift in society.

 ‘I’m fully convinced that the next fifty years are going to be ones of violent and aggressive change. It’s going to involve territorial competition, at an unimaginable scale.’

   Part of his mission has been to find the dominant metaphor for our time which enables the church to fulfil it’s task of allowing Jesus to enter fully present onto the public stage.

 ‘It is quite clear that the dominant metaphor for our age is going to be ecology, which is really how we occupy space as a society.’

 His argument is that the industrial question in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was how we occupied time, and about compressing time so that we could do things faster and quicker.

 ‘The task now is about how we share a planet in which there are too many people, and in which ten percent consume too much of the resources.’

 He has found a vocabulary in the whole metaphor of ecology which seems to resonate with the task of the day.

 In his book Leading out of who you are: Discovering the secret of Undefended Leadership he talks about his own experience of depression and breakdown as a younger leader, which gave him an empathy and desire to address an increasingly dysfunctional society.

 ‘I wanted to ask the question what does it mean to wash the feet of a broken society? We need to find the ways in which society is broken and battered and serve it.’

 It is clear to Simon that we are living in a society in which moral and intellectual  foundations have been eroded.

 ‘This financial black hole into which we are falling is merely a symptom of a deeper black hole we are falling into.’

 Part of the mission of the church he argues, is to go up-stream to find the systemic, intellectual, economic and financial sources of this crisis.

 His advice to ordinary people caught up in this frightening upheaval is, ‘don’t panic – it all makes sense!’

 He can say this because he has developed a model of social ecology which helps explain how societies change. Applying that model to the UK has enabled him to make some challenging assertions.

 ‘The controlling voice in our society over the last 30 years has been the financial markets – they have exerted an unprecedented influence over the shape of our society.’

 His model shows that we may be at the end of an economic and social cycle which began with the Renaissance in the fifteenth century.

 He is not convinced that the government can merely prop up what is a collapsing edifice through short term measures like nationalizing large parts of the banking system. He argues this is a premature solution which will only defer the larger problem.

 ‘The real crisis is much more than a consumer recession it is about a full scale addiction to debt which has propped up the global economy for the past twenty years.’

 He feels very strongly that the social change that is required will only come about by experiencing the pain of this collapse.

 ‘We are so terrified of pain and loss, we are so addicted to soothing ourselves, and because we have no resilience either individually or societally to deal with this mess,  we are trying to avoid it.’

 He believes that the government has colluded with the financial markets because they have relied on the corporation tax revenues the lending institutions have provided.

 ‘We need courageous politicians who will help us negotiate a time of loss and wean us from our addiction to over-consumption.’

 He has been working on a fuller and very timely analysis of the shifts in social and political leadership in the West over the past 30 years which is to be published early next year in a book entitled ‘Leading with Everything to Give: Lessons from the success and failure of Western Capitalism.

 By testing the ideas he has developed in the whole area of personal, human and social ecology against market forces and with leaders of commerce he is becoming an increasingly influential voice in the whole debate about how to reshape our society.

 In a culture that has lost its map, social ecology offers us a new and more hopeful route ahead.

 ‘Part of this is a new debate about what it means to be fully human. That we are not just what we consume. We need to have a debate about our dysfunctional society which values   life and health purely in terms of financial wealth and we need to help people find new more holistic measurements.’

 He believes only some sort of cross-party partnership within the existing electoral system will be able to address these longer-term problems.

 Central to his work is the awareness that the language of ecology has enabled society to rediscover a moral conscience. This opens up the way for Christians to enter credibly into the public debate.

 ‘This language of ecology does a lot of work for us as Christians. It is only a small step to talk not just about our carbon footprint, but to talk about our human footprint, our social and emotional footprint.’

 One of the great insights of social and all ecology is our connectedness. As Simon Walker concludes, ‘where I’ve just trodden has left a footprint on somebody else. People are beginning to grasp this.’

 (Leading out of Who You Are: Discovering the Secret of Undefended Leadership, Piquant Editions ISBN: 978-1-903689-43-1

Leading with Nothing to Lose: Training in the Exercise of Power

Piquant Editions ISBN: 978-1-903689-45-5

Leading with Everything to Give: Disarming the Powers and Authorities

to be published by Piquant Editions January 2009 ISBN: 978-1-903689-44-8)

The Leadership Community and Simon Walker are hosting an open evening in London on Wednesday December 3^rd at Thomas’s Kensington School W8 5RJ, contact david.wheatley@theleadershipcommunity.org.