Jon Rogers

I’ve been blogging about Valve, their leaderless structure and how that might work out in church over the last week or two, first with an overview, then looking at what I perceive to be strengths of this kind of holy anarchy. As with any idea, there are minuses as well as pluses to what I’ve suggested. If this post is a bit disjointed, it’s because they don’t flow into each other that naturally, but go with it, we’ll get to some kind of a conclusion eventually!

One big difference between Valve and any church I would be prepared to be a part of is the ‘hiring’ process (as was pointed out in the comments last week). Only exceptionally good people are able to get hired at Valve – ‘T-shaped people’, (‘broad ranged generalists with deep expertise in one area’). Each employee is a stakeholder, responsible for the direction the company will take, so it’s essential that every single new Valve employee raises the average of the company.

A church must be the exact opposite, though, no policy of only hiring people smarter than yourself. But it does raise questions about what it means to be a part of the church. Perhaps it’s too easy to walk in and be a part of our churches – the early church made it easy to hear and believe the good news but a long process to be baptised and join the church. But doing that seems to over-value commitment and certainty in a way that seems at odds with the way I value space for doubt and questions.

Occupy’s answer to this, in London and other cities, is to welcome anyone to their camps. This is one of the things that has been turned on them as a criticism – that most of the people there are homeless drug addicts. It’s caused problems in the camps as they do not always share the same priorities as other occupiers. In a hierarchy, ‘the least of these’ can be dismissed in order to follow the vision of the leaders, but in a flat church everyone is a leader as well as a stakeholder.

Conflict resolution would have to be deliberately planned; with no authority to appeal to, each group or committee (or ‘cabal’ in Valve-speak) would have to decide how they would go about making decisions between different ideas. Is consensus realistic? Is it even desirable – is it a certain route to mediocrity and mundaneness? Is a majority decision enough, or do we look for 60/40, 70/30?

It’s in the most mundane of issues that problems occur, whether in churches, companies or families – with money being the foremost. I have no idea how Valve control purchasing and equipment, though the handbook talks extensively about hiring. I do know that Occupy set up committees to handle the money and make them responsible to the General Assembly and that being on that committee is strictly voluntary and based on willingness and ability. Would that work in a church context? Total transparency on finance, anyone can attend scheduled finance meetings. A commitment to consensus decisions would reduce the likelihood of loose cannons derailing things. But can it work in a context where only a small number of people get paid for what they do as part of the church?

One thing is for sure, finance would still happen in a totally flat, non-hierarchical church, but whether the other things we are used to in a church would is debatable. There are always people interested in money, but any activity without people willing to get involved would not happen. Valve works hard to make sure its employees don’t work to hard or take too much on – would a church be able to do that? Would a flat church be able to make sure that no one was over committing – enforce sabbath? Cutting programs at churches can easily lead to guilt, though in a new church this may be less of an issue. It’s fascinating to imagine what might survive and what might be cut, some kind of holy battle royale!

There are certainly many problems with the concept of a radically flat church, both conceptually and practically. We run the risk of over-valuing the individual at the expense of the community. We have to recognise that this is the bias of contemporary society, the exact opposite to the bias found in scripture. Jesus himself taught that the only way to be a Jesus-like leader was to be a servant – not just notionally with a humble job title on your gilt-edged business card, but in reality, by taking the job that really needed to be done that no one wanted to do. Would anarchy encourage that kind of service or would it lead to selfishness?

What do you think about the weaknesses I’ve described? What have I missed, what have I over-stated? Do they out-weigh the strengths from before? I’ll try to pull this all together in one more post…

Last week I blogged about the Valve handbook and how it brought up the idea of a completely flat, anarchic, leaderless organisation. It’s not just a concept, this is a highly successful company. So the question for me is what can we learn from Valve in the church? Could there be a church with the same organisational non-structure? And what would the strengths and drawbacks of this kind of arrangement be?

Before I go any further, I want to be clear that I understand the hierarchy in our churches does not function like the Army or a company. The congregation don’t have line-managers and no-one goes to services because they have been instructed to by their boss. Religious authority works in different, perhaps more insidious ways. The key for me is the way a structure without authority gives freedom to those who would otherwise not have a voice.

This resonates strongly with an idea that as a Brethren boy I often heard about – ‘the priesthood of all believers’. This is the idea that none of us need someone other than Jesus between us and God. It’s radically egalitarian; no one is superior to anyone, irrespective of gender, age or ethnicity. Any ‘minister’ must be there to serve rather than lead. Leadership is less about power and more about allowing and empowering people to do the things they believe the Spirit is calling them to. Lay vs clergy becomes a non-discussion because there is no distinction.

It means that the members of the church are not hostage to a vision imposed on them by a leader or leaders. They set the agenda by deciding what they want to be involved in. This should empower them in the way Valve employees are empowered – if they understand the way the church works, they will know that nothing will happen unless they want it to. No more passive congregants, each one takes part in the way(s) that they feel they should.

Of course, here are many parts of church life that work on a voluntary basis – probably because they are staffed by volunteers! This means that they have chosen what teams to be a part of, but it is still different to being non-hierarchical. In a voluntary system, it seems that there is a small number of people who set the agenda and then find other people to help them do the work (or do it for them!) However, in a non-hierarchical church there would not need to be an agenda, just people joining in with the tasks they thing are important.

At Valve it’s very different to church – every employee is paid to be there, paid for doing something productive and successful, no-one has the choice of free-wheeling. A flat church would have the challenge of inspiring people to be a part of what the church is doing without telling them what they must do. Making sure members know what they can join in with requires a lot of deliberate effort be put into internal advertising of active and potential groups – is that well spent effort? I suppose that depends on whether it encourages more action and self-ownership or leads to empire-building.

We’re sailing perilously close to the drawbacks and potential problems of a really flat church now, which I want to leave to another post. I’d love to have your input, though. Are the strengths that I’ve written about realistic, would they happen in practice – and are they things we should really be desiring for the church? Are there other things that you can see coming from an entirely flat structure that would be benefits to the church?

The employee handbook from games company Valve was released on the internet this week and I found it via a blog post from Seth Godin. He says it describes the ‘post-industrial method of management’ – a way of organising a company that is radically non-hierarchical.

Almost every organisation in the world operates with managers and managers of managers, a hierarchy – just like the military, where (according to a Valve employee) it is ‘perfectly suited to getting 1,000 men to march over a hill to get shot at’. It also works well in the world of manufacturing inaugurated by the industrial revolution, keeping employees under control and enforcing uniformity. But in our post-industrial context, we value creativity, individuality and freedom much more highly, so Valve (and a very few other companies) are experimenting with ways to run a company that do not depend on structured leadership.

If someone at Valve has an idea that they want to work on, they can – all they need to do is persuade other people to work with them. No one tells them what project to join or what tasks to do, they must choose what they can add most value to, what is most important. Anyone in the company can attach themselves to any team – they all have desks with wheels which they can move anywhere and plug in where they are now going to work.

Anyone can be a part of meetings and have a say in decisions, which are reached by consensus, though not necessarily without a lot of heated discussion. In this sense, Valve is a functioning anarchy – in its technical meaning of ‘without a ruler’ or leader, rather than its more popular sense of disarray and lack of direction. Each employee is empowered to take the company in the direction they want to see it go, and the only leaders are colleagues that people organise themselves around.

The idea of a functioning anarchy makes me think about the Occupy movement – again, officially leaderless, though there are people who lead and draw others around them. If people want to occupy a location they find others who will do it with them, take their tents and set up camp. If they want a demonstration, they use social media to find others who will come with them, if they want placards, posters or art installations, they collaborate or it will never happen.

I’m interested in what I can learn from these models that will inform church leadership – specifically the context of independent free churches that is my world. I don’t suggest that the Catholic or Anglican churches are going to implement non-hierarchy any more than Valve want the US military or Microsoft to change. Being outside of denomination structure has drawbacks as well as strengths and perhaps a radically non-hierarchical structure would amplify both.

That’s something for another blog post, though, or this one will drag on far too long. But I’m fascinated to hear from you – do you know some examples of flat church in practice, really non-hierarchical churches that deliberately reject any kind of leadership, even or especially elders and pastors. Can you point me in the right direction to find practical details of how those churches work? What do you think their strengths and drawbacks are/would be?

Dear Christian World,

Deconstruction. ‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk

What it doesn’t mean

It seems that Christians often use the word ‘deconstruction’ to describe an experience when assumptions and beliefs seem to come to pieces, where questioning and doubt become more natural than certainty, where grief or pain make simplistic suppositions seem naive. Using a word like deconstruction lends some hope and possibility that it might not be an altogether dark experience, that some positives can be found in the process. Perhaps it reminds us of a vaguely remembered line from Ecclesiastes

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: … a time to break down, and a time to build up…
Ecclesiastes 3:1,3 (ESV)

It’s often put in some sort of opposition to whatever came before and to ‘rebuilding’, it’s seen as an intermediary process, a necessary but painful one that will lead those who endure it to a better place.

I read this kind of understanding most recently on Kathy Escobar’s blog, where she describes deconstruction as

where much of what we believe shifts.
where things we once held dear unravel.
where the number of questions begin to overtake all of our past certainties.
where we find ourselves saying “uh oh, our faith might be in big trouble.”
where we lose the safety of familiar communities because we’ve changed.

I have no problem with describing this kind of experience or wanting our lives to be built up after it seems they have been broken down. I think it’s essential that the doubts are taken seriously and that we have safe places to work through them and even past them.

But that’s not deconstruction.

What it does mean

Deconstruction sounds ‘cool’ because it’s part of the whole postmodern thing. It must be a good thing because it’s so ‘up to date’ (ignoring the fact that it came out of thinking from the 70s and 80s…) It must be real because it’s contemporary and slightly dangerous.

I think deconstruction is an essential tool for the church to take if we’re to take the issues of our contemporary world seriously, but on its own terms, not as a word applied to something we want it to.

One source of confusions over what deconstruction is comes from the fact that with the hyper-individualism of postmodern thought comes the conclusion that nothing is completely fixed, own-able or definable. So in some senses, deconstruction means whatever we think it means. But if we’re to have serious conversation with postmodern thinkers outside of our Christian bubble, we need to agree on shared language.

Deconstruction is a pulling apart, but it certainly isn’t destructive, and nor is it an intermediate state. It’s a thoughtful, analytic process of exploring an idea from every angle, looking at its limits – how far can we stretch this before it becomes something else – looking at its origins, looking at the directions it could possibly go in, exploring inversions and challenges to it. It’s critical rather than criticising in the sense that it’s trying to understand and evaluate rather than express purely negative emotions – forensic rather than destructive. Deconstruction brings us to a more profound and positive understanding of a term than we started with, not a tabula rasa to begin again.

Deconstruction is the rebuilding process.

An end in itself

When we see what deconstruction really is, we see it as an end in itself, not a disaster to be recovered from. It’s a way of life, not an interruption of all that is good.

Deconstruction is something that we all (as individuals and communities) need to actively and deliberately participate in if we are to take a postmodern approach to faith. It takes nothing for granted and does not presuppose the outcome, so it’s dangerous. It’s highly subjective – personal and contextual rather than private – but  this makes it unrepeatable and unpredictable as each different individual involved will alter the trajectory. Deconstruction is an ongoing process, not something that’s ever concluded and moved on from. We keep deconstructing and exploring, looking for new ways of understanding and living.

Maybe we would start with church. We’d look at the blurry differentiation between building and congregation(s), the biblical origins of the word and the historical evolution. We’d look at what it meant to be excluded from church – heresies and splits – as well as what it meant to be inside – creeds and conferences of bishops. We’d look at contemporary churches – what you can not do and still be a church, what you can do in addition and still be a church. We’d look at other surrounding words – temple, chapel, mega-church, cathedral, shrine, congregation, community, coven, synagogue - and try to understand the differences, the lines of definition. We’d look at inversions – what it means to be an un-church, an anti-church. We’d look at differences in churches and try to understand what works in our situation and why – liturgies, leadership structures, worship bands, teaching styles. We’d look at contemporary and historical cultural differences, bringing in insights from Coptic, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Pentecostal – from the global north and south, from developed, emerging and developing nations. We’d look at relationships with the state – both collusion and opposition. We’d find the unique expression of church that works and resonates with us right now – and keep looking and keep changing as we change and learn more.

Maybe we’d look at Scripture in that way, maybe we’d look at individual facets of Christian faith – worship, prayer, evangelism. Maybe we’d discover that deconstruction is a way of life, an attitude towards the world. Maybe we’d discover elements of it in Jesus’ teaching – his refusal to take the status quo as a given or as a fixed point, challenging and inverting assumptions about God and about faith. Maybe we’d discover the prophetic voice of deconstruction, calling us to an examined life that is not accidental but deliberate in how it relates to both past, future and the present moment.

Meltdown and de-contamination

I think we need to choose better language or different metaphors to describe the real and painful process that Kathy Escobar and so many others are talking about. I think it’s right and good that she and others are charting it, looking to recovery from pain and brokenness. But it does a disservice to deconstruction to call the dark period by that name, and makes any engagement with postmodern thought much more difficult when a fundamental word like deconstruction has been wrongly appropriated.

Maybe we could use nuclear language instead. That dreadful time is like a reactor meltdown, uncontrollable and dangerous, a complete break from normal reality. But reality will and does return, through the slow and arduous process of de-contamination. Look to Fukushima for how this works, look at the forests that surround Chernobyl now. Life goes on, there is a way through the dark times.

As I discussed in my last post, Marks Gospel ends in a strange way, with the women fleeing the empty tomb in bewilderment and fear. What happens next? It’s the ultimate cliff-hanger ending.

Mark 16:8 is the last verse of the in the oldest manuscripts. Our Bibles have some follow up verses, but they’re very different in tone to the rest of the book. While there’s nothing ‘wrong’ about those verses, I have no problem in suggesting they are not original.

So how did Mark intend it to end?

It’s been suggested that there’s a ‘page’ missing – that a scroll was cut short, that the last few paragraphs were lost. Those of us who have a high view of scripture might have a problem with that – thinking that some Spirit-filled sentences were written but never available to us raises some questions about divine sovereignty. Imagining that there were lost words that we were never supposed to have is troublesome in terms of how human/divine authorship works. I think I prefer to think that this was exactly how Mark intended his Gospel to end and that the extra add-on is a bonus.

So why does it end in such a strange way? Unlike Luke, Mark has no sequel to ‘sell’. If he intended it to end in this way, he meant us to finish reading with a bunch of questions. There’s no follow-on book to explain what the apostles did after, or even what the resurrected Jesus said, did or looked like.

Yet there’s more that we can be sure of. Jesus really was alive. The women who fled in fear and the disciples who had deserted Jesus in Gethsemane when he was arrested, even Peter who denied Jesus during his trial came to understand what had happened. The story spread, the community of Jesus grew – all the way to you, reading the story where ever you are right now.

By ending the Gospel in such an impossible way, Mark shows us that the story isn’t over, that there is more to come. That resurrection is an ongoing thing. It isn’t done on that Sunday morning by the garden tomb. The story of Jesus isn’t contained to the pages of scripture, it keeps leaping out and coming to life in those who tell it.

N.T. Wright often talks about a ‘five act drama’ – a play that has four written acts but a fifth that must be finished by the actors who perform it. Like an unfinished symphony, those who intimately understand the earlier parts and have worked through studying and performing them must write and act out their own take on what comes next.

I think this is how we must read Mark’s Gospel – it’s a story that is deliberately left incomplete so we have something to work out, something to play our part in. The full details of resurrection are not spelled out because we must see them in action in our own lives, in the life of our communities, in the life of the church that has lived two thousand years in the reality of that resurrection.

The resurrection accounts in the gospels may not perfectly match each other in every detail, but a very human detail rings true from each: no one expected that it wasn’t all over.

What we call Holy Saturday was the Sabbath of Passover, was the day that the women waited, unable to do anything, unable to finish the job that they started in such a hurry once Joseph of Arimathea had got the body and put it in his tomb. No time to properly wrap the body and put all the spices that custom expected with it, they had to wait until the Sunday morning, when Mark tells us they were worried that they would be unable to move the stone that covered the entrance to the place where they expected Jesus’ corpse to be.

But the stone had been moved, and an angel was there to greet them. Understandably, they were ‘alarmed’ – scared rigid, more like! He told them not to be afraid, that Jesus had risen, that they should tell the disciples that he would be meeting them. But Mark, in what seems to be the rawest account, the one that is usually considered to be the oldest Gospel, ends in a strange way, at least in the oldest manuscripts.

Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.
(Mark 16:8 NIV)

That resurrection goes against all that humanity expects and the pattern we are used to is unsurprising. That’s kind of the point, it is a breaking of the expected pattern that dead is dead. So it seems natural that those who see it would respond with astonishment, amazement, awe. But fear?

It isn’t just Mark who records this confused response – in John’s gospel, Jesus is not recognised by those who were his closest friends and followers. They just can’t imagine that it can be him, alive, present with them. Whether it’s angels or Jesus himself, the good news of resurrection life has to be prefaced with ‘Don’t be afraid!’ It’s good news, but it’s not easy – it means everything you ever knew is wrong, and that’s terrifying!

I think that there’s sometimes a tendency in parts of Christianity to minimise the visceral shock and human carnage of Good Friday and Holy Saturday. The cross can be seen as an almost theoretical step in the legal argument for justification rather than an event that was more than real. Holy Saturday can be overlooked and Resurrection is an apologetic argument to hit people over the head with. It’s a ‘proof’ that God wins, but it’s too easy.

Resurrection requires something that has died. Something good, something beautiful, something Godly, something we loved, something that should never have died. Resurrection requires the separation, the pain, the doubt, the burial. And when resurrection comes, not only will it surprise us, it will terrify us. We won’t expect it, we won’t know what to do with it. We won’t know which box it fits in, we won’t be able to explain it or even take the message to our friends. But the message will get out eventually, somehow, despite us.

Yes, ‘Love Wins’, the new life of resurrection can happen in the lives of each of us, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. If it seems easy it might not even be the same story.

Today is Good Friday when as Christians we reflect on the day when Jesus was killed. At Canley Community Church, we are reflecting on this day by following the story of that day through scripture readings, images and other media.

For Jews of Jesus time (and today), a day starts in the evening and ends the next evening, rather than starting in the morning as we would count it. We begin our reflection in the garden of Gethsemane, after the last supper and the first communion meal, as Jesus prays, knowing what is about to happen. We will follow through the night, into the afternoon as Jesus is crucified and buried. This is the the path set out in the ‘Scriptural Way of the Cross’, as celebrated by the previous Pope and this one, using fourteen readings to guide us through the day. Finishing in garden of burial, we await the resurrection of Jesus on Easter day, celebrating communion together in the darkness and loss of that day.

Please use the images and suggestions for music and physical items in the prezi below to help you reflect on Good Friday.

I don’t normally post sermons up on my blog, but having read Tony Jones’ ‘A Better Atonement‘ ebook and seen his request for anyone who’s writing or preaching about atonement on his blog, I thought I’d put something up. This isn’t a transcript (though you can hear the audio on the church website), it’s a draft version of what I planned to say. Preaching is not a written art, it’s all about the spoken word and so planning on the screen only goes so far. Right at the bottom I’ve embedded the slideshow I used alongside my talk.

I’d also like to say an enormous thank you to the family and friends who were at the service on Sunday to support us in the blessing of our little boy, Nathaniel. It meant a great deal to us, so thanks!

If we want to understand why the Goodness of Jesus matters, we have to start at the beginning. Twice.

First of all, the creation story in Genesis 1. Let me start by saying that I believe that believing that God is the creator is essential for Christian faith. Whether you believe that it happened in precisely six twenty-four hour periods or not is not such a big issue to me, though I’ll happily talk to you about why I believe what I believe, but it matters that God did in fact create everything that is around us in this fantastic universe.

[This paragraph goes with a sequence of images on the screen] Light, dark, sky, ocean, land, flowers , trees and even apples. Sun, moon, stars and planets, fish, whales and coral, cute birds and kind-of scary ones. Insects, tigers, creepy-crawlies and Sunday lunches. And when God had made each one, we’re told that he looked and saw that it was GOOD.

Last of all, we’re told, came human beings, men and women. In the idyllic situation of the creation story, before any kind of sin, death, sadness or pain is mentioned, God sees the whole of creation, with the addition of humanity and says that it is ‘very good’.

Now many of you will have heard what comes in chapter three of Genesis. The man and woman are told not to eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, yet they do. It seems that they want to be in control of their own destiny, to be better than the ‘very good’ that God saw. Through this sin, we’re told, Death comes into the story.

Second of all – there’s another beginning to the scriptures. The beginning of Exodus is the beginning of the nation of Israel, the Jewish people. It’s a story of freedom from slavery – while they are doing forced labour in Egypt, Moses turns up with a message from God – who says that he’s going to take them away from slavery to a good land – one with lots of produce and security. Yet time and time again, despite this promise, they disobey God, wanting their own way, not wanting God’s way and the ‘good land’ seemed to be just as full of problems as any other country.

Throughout the history of Israel, their rulers turned out to be bad more often than good (maybe not just in Israel, either) There were times that seemed to be hopeless, and times that seemed to be OK, but where did the promise of a good land, of rest and peace disappear to?

There seemed to be two options – give it up as a utopian dream that could never really exist, or start to talk about God as the only real good in the world. The Psalms were the hymn-book and prayerbook of the Jews and over and over they say “Give thanks to the LORD, for he is GOOD, his love endures forever.”

But this isn’t a sermon about creation or the old testament – it’s about Jesus and his goodness. For Christians, all the hope for goodness both in the Old Testament, the world around us and in our own lives is focussed on the person of Jesus.

In a letter to the Corinthian church, Paul writes about Jesus as the ‘second Adam’ or the ‘last Adam’ – a fulfilment of all humanity could have been and a new start for a new humanity. To me this makes a lot of sense of the life and death of Jesus, making it all tie together around this theme of goodness.

You see in Jesus, all the promise and potential that’s in God’s “very good” are fulfilled. As he walked around Palestine two thousand years ago, everything he did brought back the “good” that was always supposed to be. He taught and explained how the way people were excluding others from God was wrong, how everyone was welcomed unconditionally. He brought physical healing as well, demonstrating how even the most damaged could be made good.

There are many complimentary ways of understanding Jesus, both his life and death and resurrection. We think of Jesus solidarity with us in our suffering, sharing our pain. We think of Jesus taking our place, dying instead of us. We think of Jesus the example of commitment, as Peter writes about in the passage we read earlier. We can think of Jesus triumphing over the powers of evil.

But when we’re thinking of the goodness of Jesus, connecting his death with all he did through his life, we see that it must be part of how Jesus was bringing the Kingdom of God, bringing the goodness that was always meant to be. Tom Wright puts it like this: “Jesus’ crucifixion was not a messy accident at the end of a glittering career, but was in fact the proper, though shocking, climax to it.” Jesus died because it was part of the plan to bring back the good that seemed to have been missing for so long. In dying with us, dying like the first Adam, but without ever disobeying God, Jesus shows that death is destroyed by rising from the dead. Even what looks like a complete victory for evil is in fact the triumph of good.

But it’s not something that happened in the past and gives us some vague hope for the future. Let’s go back to the passage we read earlier from 1 Peter.

As an aside, let me acknowledge that it’s tough to read a passage written to slaves and ignore that context – one that’s very foreign to us today – barbaric, even. Peter’s suggestion that they should imitate Jesus is very subversive – and I’d be glad to talk to you about it afterwards if it’s something that you find difficult.

Peter writes first of all about Jesus doing nothing sinful, nothing wrong at all. But his goodness goes beyond that – Peter says that he ‘entrusted himself’ to God. This isn’t just some vague belief in a higher power that’s out there somewhere, it’s a deep immersion in every aspect of life, depending fully on his father, committed to doing anything that will bring his Kingdom. That plays out in the teaching he did, in the miracles he did but supremely in his death and resurrection.

In his life and death, Jesus shows God’s solidarity with us in the pain and dirt of this, but his resurrection shows that there is new life, something beyond what we currently experience. Peter starts to refer to a famous passage in the old testament about the suffering servant. It goes further than we have already, saying that in the wounds and suffering of Jesus there is healing. better than that even, Peter says to the Christians he’s writing to that they’ve already been healed.

He also uses the image from Isaiah of God – of Jesus – as our shepherd. It’s one of the most beloved images from both the old testament (the Lord’s my shepherd) and the new (Jesus said “I am the good shepherd). In this context, Peter is saying that the brokenness and pain we experience comes from wandering away from God and his goodness. He’s saying that Jesus doesn’t just heal us and leave us, but leads us as we join with him in bringing the Kingdom of God to earth, in bringing back the good that was always meant to be.

We all feel the brokenness of the world and ourselves – for me it’s on a daily basis. As we go into holy week, remembering Jesus’ last days before his death and as we look forward to celebrating resurrection (and chocolate) next week, let’s hear the invitation of Jesus.

Perhaps you need the ‘very good’ of Jesus to break into your life – the healing that comes from his wounds.
Perhaps you need to realise that you can’t fix all the brokenness in the world on your own or with anyone else but Jesus.
Perhaps you need to join in and follow him as he shepherds you and guides you, encourages you to join in his healing mission.

Whatever it is you need, may you experience the goodness of Jesus this Holy Week. May you feel the healing that his wounds have brought us, may you return to the shepherd and overseer of our souls.

This is a geeky one – in case you forgot that I’m like that! It’s World Backup Day – an annual reminder that computers are not infallible and that if you don’t back up your precious documents, photos and other files, you will one day lose them. I know it sounds doom and gloom, but it’s true – hard drives crash, burglaries happen, laptops and phones get snatched and apparently there are viruses that attack some computers (not that I would need to worry much about that…)

If you’re anything like me, your computer contains documents from the past decade at least – work from University, perhaps, applications and CVs, ideas you’ve worked on in years past. Far more precious than that are the thousands of photos and videos – holidays, dates, birthdays, family celebrations. Countless memories of the first year of our little boy’s life are saved on the hard disk of my desktop and I’m not going to run the risk of losing a single one of them. My phone is scarcely less precious – since it’s the camera I always have with me, I use it a lot to capture little moments that the DSLR just isn’t there for – out shopping, in the park, having coffee, just playing on the living room floor. I want to keep every photo and video I’ve ever taken, safely and without a chance of any getting lost if my phone is taken or broken.

So this is how I do it.

Computers

I have a desktop that my wife also uses for work. I also have a laptop and a net book that has been re-purposed as a file server. Each of them runs Crashplan - by far the best backup software I’ve used, and it’s completely cross platform. It uses Java, so it’s even possible to get it running on some NAS servers. There are several ways to use the software – both free and paid-for. My desktop has a paid-for subscription to back up to Crashplan’s servers in the cloud – currently using over 250GB. The netbook has Crashplan installed only to receive backups – a smaller set from the desktop and also the laptop as well. So for most of my files, photos and music included, I have ‘on-site’ and ‘off-site’ backup. It updates daily if the computers are on and tells me weekly by email what has been backed up, so I never need to wonder if it’s running properly. There’s also an android app if I ever need to access a backed up file from the desktop while I’m out and there’s no other way of getting it.

However, one point of failure is too few to bet on, so there’s more. All my important documents need to be shared with both the desktop and the laptop and I use a combination of Dropbox and Ubuntu One to synchronise them. This has the obvious advantage of putting all those files in the cloud again, available on android apps and from the Dropbox website. As it stands now, Dropbox is the superior service – I have more available storage and as it syncs over the LAN it’s much faster.

Phone

My Android phone (Samsung Galaxy S 2) is rarely out of sight, I use it a lot, especially for photos and videos of our little one. I’ve detailed before how I sync photos daily, automatically and with no hassle. They’re also uploaded automatically by the Dropbox app on my phone (partly because it’s been snagging me more storage space!) Again, I have no need to worry about losing anything as they’re in multiple locations which are themselves backed up.

Conclusion

Backing up is not expensive or time consuming, but it’s often something people don’t think about until it’s too late. For half an hour of downloading and setting up a couple of programs you could get years of peace of mind and even make your files easier to access when you need them and you’re out.

If you’re not backing up, go and do it now!

If you back up with some other software, why not tell me how in the comments!