Indaba or quits

My conference clock is normally set to “two days, big sevice, back home to the kids.” I did that and... woke up to find myself at the beginning a two week conference! This is a marathon not a sprint.

First indaba group today on the basis of a bible study group which has been wonderfully affirming, with a group who have become firm friends. It was pretty inevitably a basic acquantance with each other and the process. There is a basic level of information about our contexts without which we cannot meaningfully interact about big ecclesiological questions, far less make big decisions. Skating over this thin ice in 1998, they fell in, and some were vulnerable to being hijacked by lobby groups. For example, someone this morning in another group was baffled as to why the Bishop of London hasn’t simply fired Martin Dudley. He was just reading the way such a matter would be handled back home into a context of which he knew nothing. Without taking time to elucidate basic information about everyone all round, it would be sheer craziness to try and enact decisions affecting each other. Conclusions matter, but without clarity about the basic realities facing everyone, what you have assumed wrongly about others you know not will get you every time.

We all come with our own preconceptions about how to make decisions, and we really do have to learn how to lay them aside. Even the English. We all need to discipline ourselves to engage fully with the process as set up. Some siblings are managing this better than others.