threshold reflective – decisions to be made

some of our discussion touched on practical decisions which need to be made, rather than philosophical questions which may never be answered. the main issues like this were:

• dropping our official social. people felt that it was artificial to have a fixed social, and it was an unneccesary drain on capacity (someone having to turn up in case a new person came even if everyone else was away etc). opinion seemed to be mixed about what we should do instead: just have one meeting a month/ have a book group/ have an unofficial/unfixed social time at least once a month.
• making the group more parent friendly. this is becoming an increasing issue and is also likely to be an issue for newcomers.

could these two issues be resolved by having our reflective once a month on a sunday afternoon for three hours (instead of meeting twice for 2 hour sessions)? we should pick somewhere central and child friendly (whilst also taking into account our many other preferences such as real ale, nice wine, proper gingerbeer and some food).

if we go with this idea, should we also resolve to meet up as friends inbetween? or should we have some type of philosophy/book group which could feed ideas into our reflectives?

greenbelt offering – spaces inbetween?

the other pressing decision is about greenbelt. the garden have very kindly invited us to do something in their venue (a meditative ambient art installation / performance space). they need to let greenbelt know what’s going on in their venue by the end of the month.

in our discussion last week we decided (?) that since lindsey and i were going to be there, time would be much better spent preparing for a 1 hr slot in the programme rather than creating games to be used (or not used) throughout the whole weekend. we seemed to agree that our theme should be thresholds.

there was justifiably some concern about being an authentic expression of threshold at greenbelt, and whether this was possible… we don’t want to betray our values by stressing to produce a performance. i’ve been thinking about this in the past week and i think we could achieve this by setting some quite strict boundaries on resources (such as only paper, pens, crisps and ale) so that we don’t get carried away by our ideas. the strength should be in the exploration of the ideas themselves, and to some extent we’ve done this work already. in fact i wondered whether the structure of the gb hour could be around our group’s journey exploring the concept of threshold (a great excuse to use activities from previous reflectives!)?

imagining this in gb wording the description of this concept would be something like:

“threshold

threshold is a post-something community from bristol exploring spirituality without Religion. their only concept of heresy is defining heresy. [is this us?!]

spaces in-between

experience the journey of standing still on the threshold. enjoy the place related to other place, with no place of its own. non-dogmatic uncertainty has never felt so fulfilling.”

i’m imagining activities to do with: entry/exit; changing state (threshold as melting point); sitting on the fence; being neither/nor and beyond (building on negative theology in terms of a/theism and other aspects of personal identity such as gender and sexuality); janus; twilight spirituality.

please comment as this is a starting point rather than a finishing point! what did you have in mind?

threshold reflective – up in the air

as well as agreeing some points there were other issues which needed further thought and discussion. there may never be a clear answer to these dilemnas:

• is threshold post-christian or post-secular? how does this question effect the content of our reflectives? is there a value in always assuming that someone from a different religious culture will be present? how do we react emotionally to references to scripture? is it best to assume diversity even if we seem similar? we would like to include people from any religion (or none), but so far we have all been post/christian, is it more realistic to ask guest speakers from other perspectives?
• initially we conceptualised threshold as a point of exit or entry in terms of organised religion, but we all seem to be standing on the threshold for a long time! we now feel that there is much to explore in this state of being.
• threshold meets in public, but the nature of english pub culture means that people will never join in with what we’re doing (unless our reflective was officially recognised by the venue). we talked about the difference between meeting in public and meeting for the public. at some point we would like to do something which engages more people, but this also seemed to raise some anxiety in terms of capacity issues. we also talked about trying to become a recognised event in a venue’s publicity (e.g. like start the bus or cafe kino).

threshold reflective – consensus reached?

we talked about a lot of different topics in our may 2009 reflective and so i’m going to use a few posts to summarise the discussion so far and to enable further online discussion.

this post is to cover points on which we seemed to have consensus:

• we like the imperfect creativeness of our reflectives and wouldn’t want to lose this aspect of threshold.
• we all like the outlook of a group which doesn’t require commitment and we want to keep this, even though we are actually committed to the group.
• we agreed that there was a difference between the emotive use of the word ‘commitment’ and a more pragmatic understanding of our capacity to do things. all of us are committed to the group but our capacity to contribute may be limited by various things (childcare, geography, work pressures, health issues etc).
• we thought that there are two ways to respond to limited capacity: attract new people to increase capacity or do less so we are functioning within our capacity (which leads to discussion about our meetings, for a separate post, as well as:)
• revisiting the dilemna of non-evangelism vs sign-posting. it seemed to be agreed that we needed to do more effective sign-posting and that we weren’t in danger of becoming evangelical about threshold! we decided to try to improve the website, update our description on spirited exchanges and explore opportunities for targetted advertising (such as facebook advertising vouchers). we gave each other permission to use our initiative in terms of promoting the group as long as we clearly wrote from our own perspective or using standard text. we discussed designing a new poster/flier that could be understood outside of a greenbelt context.
• we agreed to keep the decision making structure of consensus and no leadership, but this didn’t mean that we couldn’t take leadership in an initiative sense (suggesting new ideas, doing some publicity for the group).

reflection on threshold

I’ve been wondering about what it means to be part of a fluid, non-institutionalised group or community. When we started thinking about threshold roughly a year and a half ago we had lots of ideas about what being part of such a group might be, and lots of aspirations. We had lots of good ideas such as no commitment, no leaders, consensus, and numbers should not be a measure of success. However at that point I don’t think any of us had been in such a fragmented or de-centred group before, but now we have.

So I’d like to use my reflective as a reflection on Threshold itself. For example, I’ve been wondering if maybe always being under threat of collapse is inherently part of the nature of a non-institutionalised group? Are our difficulties also our strengths, or can we eliminate difficulties without losing our positive points?

It would be great if you could bring your questions and thoughts on Monday. If you can’t make it, add your comments here:

Lindsey