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?

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

is threshold accessible?

we’ve recently been chatting about how to make threshold meetings more accessible to different types of people. we’d particularly like to hear your views if you’re interested in threshold but haven’t been able to come to our meetings for various reasons. what changes would mean that you could realistically attend?

making the group ‘parent friendly’ is something that has been particularly up for discussion. we don’t feel that we have the resources to cater for children yet, but there maybe things we can do to help parents attend more regulalry. do you have any suggestions?

one of the main things that was valued when threshold started was that we would meet publicly so that anyone could come along. there are also lots of benefits from meeting in a pub (including alcohol!). however, we don’t want to stay the same for the sake of it, so any ideas welcome…

leaflets/fliers

18th july

this is the most recent low-res draft of the flier (ignore venue info details). this should obviously be at the bottom of this discussion, but you can’t post images as comments:

what do you think?

15th June:

a while ago we had talked about the compexities of getting leaflets printed – and it was surprising how many issues there were. leafleting was seen as a good way of letting people who might be looking for us find us, especially those not on-line, but there as a fine line between sign posting and ‘evangelising’. if we decided to do something at greenbelt we would need leaflets too. but how would we fund them? we have tried to run at no real cost to memebers and don’t want to gpo down the route of bank accounts or threshold ‘owning’ anything.

i have an idea for a leaflet, and I’m sure others do, and I’ve had an idea about paying for them. i thought we could have a ‘buy a pint’ box at meetings. then individuals who wished to could ‘buy a pint’ for the leaflets by contributing the price in the box when they were buying drinks. how many pint you wished to buy, if any, would be entirely up to the individual. over several meeting we might get enough money to pay for the printing, and any extra could be used to buy a round at the next threshold meeting. i think this would give everyone the chance to contribute, but to their own means and preference, in an easygoing, non-coercive way.

my idea for the leaflet is a medley of photographs and text boxes. the photos would be of different ‘thresholds’, and each text box contain one of our core principles. i’m imagining a green filter over top, the colour of the international fire exit signs, so the photos are ‘green and white’ (akin to black and white) and the texts are in a white font on a green background. on the back of the leaflet we could have the description of the group from the website/spirited exchanges profile: threshold is a bristolian community….  and contact and website details. I think we could add labels to this basic design for different purposes, e.g. we could print labels about times and date for greenbelt beer tent reflective and stick them onto the leaflet.

i know everypone will have lots of different ideas, and as a creative group we’ll end up with loads of options (both how to pay and designs). I just wanted to get the ball rolling on a discussion, and seeing as this is a ‘agenda’ it didn’t feel right to bring it up in the social, and it’s not reflective, although a session on designing the leaflet does have potential to be. so i thought this was the best place to have this discusion.

lindsey kh