"Safe Metamorphosis!!"

This book is the first full poetry collection from Otis Mensah, himself Sheffield's esteemed Poet Laureate and an incomparable jazz-rapper.* His words (which I'll get to) are bolstered with an enigmatic series of illustrations by George William Stewart, Luke Featherstone, and Miroslav Kiss.

   Okay - the title, what's that about? Imagine there's a spacestation, and everyone on it has never left it but knows they need to - how terrifying! So, once the moments inevitably come for people to be shuttled onto their capsules and shot out into the inky void, a few cheery veterans of this process, who know the pains and processes of going from embryo to Full Moth or Whatever - shout sarcastically as these pods fly past "[title]!" Which is a weird image but a comforting one when you know who's shouting it and why, and Mensah's book fulfils that role perfectly.

   The poems in here are profound meditations on identity, change, anxiety, technology, trust, creativity, race, class, loss, love, and so much more. A few of them genuinely have prompted more genuine philosophical questing in myself than many full books of "Actual Philosophy", and do so with a readableness and perspicuity that gave me pang after pang of poet envy** for the skill with which he spins vivid metaphors off their own axes again and again in truly an alchemical application of uncluttered language. Just rereading that sentence I am not in the slightest shocked that I envied this skill [that of uncluttrdness] LOL.

   Poems to be read aloud - for sure, as each quivers to their brims with audible zigzags wordplay and little resonances that bring even more life from the verses penned. Though if you want to hear them in full fat you'd do no better than to see this brilliant artist*** live. His book, like mine and Raluca's, was initially a self-publication, so unless we're in a fortunate future where this has been picked up for mass-distribution, you may struggle to get you hands on a copy, in which case I can only apologize for now for getting you all excited about how bloody good this collection is.

* Check out his hiphop on soundcloud - he's a bona-fide lyrical genius, and his backdrop beats are sick to boot. Also to make a completely unnecessary claim-to-fame I feature very briefly in one of his music videos, and do somewhat regret the mustard cardigan as it may have been too loud for the surrounding colour scheme. Liam, if you're reading this, sorry for over-yellowing the aesthetic.

** Difficult to pick an overall fave - but 'Speak Light into the Dark', the untitled one [signed no name], and 'No-one Here Hears Me' are just unfetteredly incredible & spoke to me with so much poignancy that I got paranoid I was misreading certain lines because it seemed too close to certain trains of thought I'd been trying not to own.

*** And an absolutely lovely man, I'm not name-dropping I genuinely know him through Sheffield poet life stuff

Adulthood is a conversation about what we used to do as kids

This book* by Raluca de Soleil** is an absolute treasure. Some quivering with righteous and articulate rage, some fluttering like reflective sage moths between the light cast by the drives to expressively unify oneself and the shadows cast of traumas we should rightly be wary of how we talk about, more still dancing wholesome pirouettes of singular pure poetic "well, and that's like how that is, right?"***

* Because she self-published I wasn't sure where the best place to direct that link was. If you're interested in trying to get your hands on a copy probably best to ask her via message on her artist facebook page.

** A true poet-peer of mine on the Sheffield spoken word scene. In fact we both had our first ever open-mic experience at the same event, a Mental Health Matters night called Speak Your Mind; we were both very nervous, until we smashed it and weren't anymore, and I'm delighted to still belong to that wonderful community; "not with entitlement, but safety and uncharted possibility" [quote from one of her's].

*** Of course right.

the Lotus and the Cross

This book is an imagined conversation, by Ravi Zacharias, between Jesus of Nazareth and the Buddha - without wanting to deride its author too much, I think anyone will easily be able to instantly recognize that to faithfully and authentic-seemingly construct such a conversation would be an immensely delicate task of anyone's imagination, even without "taking a side" - which Zacharias does, for the Christian camp. That said it is not a dogma-heavy dismantling of Buddhism - or at least not as much as it might well have been if, say, certain other evangelical thought-leaders had written it - and while I think Zacharias's ultimate finished work in this book is a relatively generous, nuanced and thoughtful one, I do not believe he truly grasps the nature of Enlightenment as Buddha taught it, as to my own hunching there would be substantively more fruitful overlap between the thinking and praxis of the two were they to actually have met and talked; it concludes not with an intellectually-humble Kingdom-seeking consideration of possible both-ands, but Zacharias putting the nails into the "Buddha wrong, Jesus right" signpost - which is fair enough given its authorial purpose, but all things considered I think is a very ideologically blinkered way of dealing with both camps - insofar as one wishes them to actually come to respectfully and honestly understand one another, which is presumably sort of the point of writing a book like this.

Another thing, that has virtually nothing to do with this book but which I'm going to talk about on here because I need to process my thoughts on it and this blog has always sufficed as a place to process similar thoughts and this post seems to be a poetically apt place for the discourse I need to shart.
   I've left my church.
   This was an incredibly difficult decision, as I've been going there since the age of eight - in 2002, when the church itself was also young; I was baptised there, and pretty much all of my significant discipling relationships up until my joining Church Army's Research Team have been through it. My reasons for choosing to leave are many, complex, and deeply difficult to talk about - but I've been dithering over whether to go, and then when to go, and then how to tell my elders that I was going - for probably several years by now. But as you'll know if you read the recap post for 2018; my spiritual development has been accelerating a great deal and is rather unpredictable as of late - part of this has been through the nature of my work itself, part through ongoing exposure to a greater diversity of Christian expressions - as I've said in previous posts I've joined the Anglican Mission Community of which my work is a part - and even found myself visiting quiet corners of Christendom that I two years ago never would've dreamed myself to be seen in; and underneath or alongside all of this, is another aspect of my changing identity that has felt all-but-impossible to raise in TCH - even though if I'm being honest with myself looking back I should have heard the warning klaxons in my own heart years ago. So yeh, and yep I'm writing this in summer 2020, as this whole mess was probably the main bulk of reasons why I developed such an awful blog backlog, because my mind-heart was just not in a place where I could easily reflect on anything relevant to the posts I needed to write because it was all too fresh, too harsh, too painful and sad: but - I can't actually remember exactly when it went down, but some time during May or June of 2019, already having had a thoroughly unhelpful conversation with my elders about the fact that I'd joined the Church Army Mission Community and so I couldn't in good conscience 'sign up' to the formal TCH membership, as this denies anyone who does so from being part of any other Church communities - I came out as the gender non-binary problem-child that I am to my head elder and told him up front that I knew, Acts 29's position on gender-stuff being as it was, that to remain even a non-member but attender in the church I'd grown up in would entail the constant expectation from them as my pastors that I would someday repent of my personal identity - and this was not a situation I felt was healthy, or thus acceptable, so I'm leaving, sorry, please... thank you.
   I'm not writing this to make any kind of victorious or vindictive point. I'm fucking heartbroken.
   I just need some place to put this whole story down, as none of my brothers and sisters from TCH are likely to want to hear it, and few if any of my closest friends outside of church life would be able to grasp the emotional point of it, and the only other people I could talk to about it would have been in the office from which I've just been fired, or else my parents, who left the same church several years ago, but for very different reasons, and I'm not 'out' to them yet and I have no idea what they'd think. Anyway, it's all so close to the bone, that even now [as time of writing being summer 2020 I've had some time to process all this but it's still raw as heck], when I am 'out' to my parents, they just don't seem to give much of a shit and I'm not really sure what they think of what I told them of my actual triggering reason for leaving the same church. But - what's in the past is in the past. Jesus is good, and God's great grace is sufficient for all. Even genderqueer Quaker shitshows like me.

the Universal Christ

This book by ecumenical thought-leader Richard Rohr is an astounding treasure. It dives into the wholesale glorious mysteries of the biblical gospel, reminding us of the meaning of 'Christ', the freedom of forgiveness, the reality that Creation was God's testimony to us of heavenly truth long before scripture was written, the nature of spirit and incarnation, the sheer uncontainable universality of grace and peace and love...

   I don't have anything particuarly clever to say in reflection on this book. It simply pulled off the boots of my own Christian faith, shook them upside-down to dislodge a few large lumpy pebbles of English-evangelical intellectual cowardice and tribal complacency, then gently eased them back onto my feet as a liberating send-off back to the Jesus I had always known but now saw afresh. It is written accessibly enough for non-theologians, even non-Christians, and has a moral sensibility and wholesome common-good heartiness that I defy you to not find beautiful, challenging, and totally eternally counter-cultural: this is not Rohr's ideas unfolding themself but the very basics in implication of the gospel of Christ crucified and risen. A dazzling pragmatic inclusive truth, that has so long since been contained and constrained by overthinking underliving Christian commentary, the stultification of which Rohr here does a supremely excellent work in decolonizing Christ-consciousness from, yet never descending into partisan critique.

   I am giving this book to my mother and buying another copy to lend out.

Plum

This book, a collection of poetry written both recently & way-back-in-her-youth by Hollie McNish, is as lively and entertaining as I was worried it wouldn't be. I saw Hollie live last year and her delivery of spoken word is just so full and engaging that for some reason I'd developed an apprehension that reading it written wouldn't be as good. To be fair it's not, but that's not the point cos they're still good poems. Aside from all that fluff I do actually really like her audacious choice to include stuff she wrote when much younger - there are recurring themes of growth, failure, learning and changing across the wide variety of topics reflected upon, and seeing the stark gear-shifts on certain matters with age really helps a lot of the gaps in between her poems hit home harder than they otherwise would. Thoroughly enjoyable.

transforming

This book by Austen Hartke was a breath of wonderful fresh air after reading a totally different book on the same theme. Discerning readers may well write this off as basic confirmation bias, where I read a book about a thing and it argued for a conclusion that I wasn't entirely comfortable with so I discounted it and read another one which argued for something that I was more comfortable with, so I took this one to be better - and you may well be right. I'm not infallible, gender is complicated as fuck, and I've been on the fence about coming out as non-binary for the best part of a year.

   But in all honesty, Hartke is a better authority on this issue than Vaughan Roberts, given that he has experienced first-hand the community and theology alienation from evangelical Christianity that Vaughan is all too keen to say 'yes well this is not ideal' but then makes the kind of theological points that keep transgender and non-binary people from actually feeling comfortable in church; he has also approached the issue with much more than a cursory intellectual rigour - and draws on perspectives from church leaders, churchgoers, trans and otherwise, as well as a rich variety of scientific and social theory, but all grounded very much in a contextual and generous reading of scripture,* considered through the lenses of everything from the ambiguity of the Creation narrative poetry to the person and ministry of Christ and its carrying by his apostles to the varying significant re-namings in the Bible to the gender-bending roles eunuchs played and how they were still very much included in the early church.**

   Ultimately this a highly affirming and challenging book about the sovereignty of God, the fluidity of Creation, and the necessity of unity in the Church - an absolute must-read for Christians who are personally experiencing transformational elements in your life and gender identity, and should also be compulsory reading for anyone with any speck of pastoral responsibility, as there are guidelines on how to be meaningfully inclusive given as an appendix which go far beyond most of what I'd seen before.

* Even given my own views and latent identity, the depth of the tendrils of evangelicalism I've grown up in made me feel somewhat uncomfortable at parts of his argument. Though I suppose this could be a good thing, as it has maintained and renewed my vigour to not just settle for 'an answer' but to keep reading and exploring. That said, the general points Hartke makes are probably the best Christian perspective on the issues around gender fluidity that I've read so far.

** Transphobic Christian readers will do well to note that Philip didn't even demand the Ethiopian to grow his cock-n-balls back before receiving salvation!***

*** It was only upon googling this passage that I noticed for the first time that another Ethiopian eunuch features in the Bible, and pulls Jeremiah out of a dunghole.

A Call for Revolution

This book is a short, impassioned and timely reflection from His Holiness the Dalai Lama - as the title suggests, calling for a global insurgency - albeit one of empathy, of deep love for all beings and our shared world, for compassion, forgiveness, listening, breaking down the walls of the mental prisons we have traumatized ourselves into inhabiting across our history and creating spaces for new, urgent possibilities. It is a call I very much endorse.

No-one is too small to make a difference

This book is a collection of speeches made over this past few months by Greta Thunberg - whom you've probably heard of by now, unless you've been living under Boomer Snowflake Rock - since pretty much all of these speeches are available online or were covered in the news media, the only real reason I can envision buying a copy of this book might be for someone a necessarily recommendable act is as a present for people living under that aforementioned rock. Not that they'd probably read it, because hey, who's going to listen to an autistic Swedish teenager if you're already not going to listen to a united consensus among our planet's most dedicated minds on questions of ecological action?

Letters to a Young Poet

This book, a collection of letters written from Rainer Maria Rilke in response to one Franz Kappus, who was studying* at the same military academy Rilke had, and wanting to become a poet, reached out to his school's most famous-thus alumni: you can guess who. It is not super easy reading - Rilke was a master wordsmith as well as a pretty mentally troubled and emotionally complicated man, and while the overall tone of his letters is of an immense generosity of spirit and optimistic view of man, nature, art etc; the tortuous route he makes it sound like to truly go into and get to know oneself in objective truth at all enough to make a halfway interesting poet - it is, he repeatedly states, a role one can only take up by committing oneself endlessly to purity of perspective, to unlearning and relearning and revising and revolting, to solitude so deep that one's own thoughts burst out of you and onto a page with such urgent strength that to suppress them would be suicide. These letters are a potential goldmine for those who want to devoutly follow the classic (and dumb) trope of the 'tortured artist'; who prioritises their inner struggle above all else as it feeds their work; but however much he could've benefited and probably lived longer with a bit of therapy the general views offered here by Rilke are not, I don't think, supportive in themselves of this view, but are provocative, spiritual even, in ways that are challenging & ambiguous - and as a poet should know, Results on Readers May Vary.

* There is appended another longer essay, which may Rilke wrote to one 'Mr V.', entitled Letter from a Young Worker - which delves into much more sociopolitical critiques of the hegemonic repressive Christian ethics and expectations, especially around sexuality and personal expression; he rails against the hypocrisy and cultural stagnation he sees as being symptomatic of this deeper religio-philosophical malaise.

milk and honey

This book by Rupi Kaur is among those gigantic few poetry books of the past decade that are responsible for helping mass-popularize poetry among new audiences - namely, people who search through self-affirmation/breakup/trauma hashtags on Instagram.* My thoughts on this book may come across as sounding priggish and judgmental but I'd like to try to assure the reader this is far from the case. Okay - so I really genuinely 100% do not think the poems in this book are that good. Most** read more like a youth's private derivative heartbroken scribbles than anything of any particularly noteworthy originality or heft. That's not to say they're bad - it just requires one to step back and ask what poetry is for - moreso, who it is for.

   I'd say it's for everyone. Does that include people who have never really cared for poetry*** but who share similar traumas to an artist willing enough to expressively carve out the niche of their own struggles and recovery to help others reflect on their fundamental similitude? Yes, absolutely. And those folks, speaking objectively from the sales statistics, wanted a book of poems that apparently didn't exist before this one - and how many people do you think were inspired to process their own traumas, plot out their own paths to wholesomeness, forgiveness, forgetting or wellbeing, through their own bespoke lenses of creative writing - by this very book? The figures here don't even bear estimating but by my very asking even if the answer were to be Just One you'd know it's a worthy attributation of priceless evidence that this book - whatever the haters in their ivory towers wanking off to T.S. Eliot's most obscure & esoteric academica might say - has DONE something good, and that is infinitely better than everything said by the critics**** who would be the arbiters of Is [x] Thing Good.

   This is my blog and I will arbite here: this is a very good book and would make a strong heartfelt present to anyone (even if they don't generally give a hoot about poems) who is going through a rough patch after surviving abuse or having a bad breakup. Kaur's poems will sit with readers through their grief and may genuinely help disentangle webs of self-doubt, fear or other negative emotions, and they won't even have to keep cross-checking Sparknotes to ensure they're following their feels-journeys properly.

* Don't @ me, it's a big fucking market

** I say most because there are quite a few that I properly enjoyed too, for their creative content and not just pathos-bombing.

*** And for many people rightly so, because maybe for they the sole initial means of encountering poetry has been through rigorous pointless academic study and never for enjoyment or personal growth or exploration. Do you think some of the people who read milk & honey who had never read a poetry book before went on to read more poetry and found that in fact they found poets who they decided were better than Rupi Kaur? Maybe! Does this make Kaur less of a fantastic poet for having created a book which both helps people & induces them onwards into the world of words?

**** Yes, I am fully aware that I do write a whole blog effectively critiquing every book I read - but I approach the entire endeavour rather laxly, and always try to consider context & intended audience & such with stuff, and don't usually rate the books rather preferring to recommend who might enjoy it and for what - so I'm not really a critic, more a sort of pan-biblioliterary speculative cartographer.

Single-Minded

This book by Kate Wharton is about singleness; a vital counterpoint to the mass of extant Christian literature about its alternative. Rooted in personal experience to demonstrate the veracity of her case, as well as very much in Scripture - the "ideal" individual disciple's experience of primary intimacy with God in Christ rather than any worldly relationships - throughout she makes powerful arguments and highly encouraging ones to anyone who, like me, may have felt somewhat left out of the all-too-often world-conforming Christian culture of "oh well we may as well get married to someone as soon as possible because isn't that just what all the nice Christian couples at church have done?"
   It's likely to be an uncomfortable read for many on that side of the divide just as much as it is an affirming one for single people: but Kate's right in saying that Jesus very much emulated the ideal of a single life, well kept and well lived, to and for God alone; it's a message so deeply counter-cultural both inside and outside of the Church & I can only applaud her for having put forward the view so poignantly as here given the fat enormity of this particular lacuna not only in Christian literature but most church communities too.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

This book is of course the children's classic by Lewis Carroll - & I'm not going to talk here about the literary impacts of nonsense writing, nor the many & myriad cultural spinoffs or references strewn across Western book/screenwriting like flecks of shit out of a hippo's arse aimed across the wasteland of post-Victorian Anglophone normativity, nor even the whole paedophilia question; because this YouTuber has already done a better job talking about these things than I could be bothered to do.

   One thing I will talk about instead is that recently, and I forget the context exactly of how or why or if this revelation was prompted, but smack-bang in the middle of my inner angstful dithering over whether & when to come out as non-binary, my dad told me that had I been born without my Y chromosome my name would've been Alice - and this was - a lot, as discerning empathic readers will probably long have realised that I've been well on my way down a variety of rabbit-holes anyway and my life is even to me somewhat topsy-turvy nonsensical at the best of times.

   I can't think of an appropriate segue for this but I'm mentioning it anyway - I've been fired.* Yes, from my dream job that I was really quite good at and had foreseen as being as close to a lifelong fruitful career as someone like me was likely to find - without moving to London, which is still very much fuck that. I don't know what the next chapter is apart from it definitely entails moving out of my flat that I can't afford anymore. I can't say however that I don't know why this happened. It happened because my mental health has been All Over the Damn Place recently and I've been too irregularly unreliably missing days at work given this, and have consistently failed to develop means of communicating with the rest of my team in mitigating any inconveniences this causes to our work. I got my first formal disciplinary warning less than a month ago, and my head being where it is at the moment, I think part of me just went "okay this is happening, fuck it" and I've got the second and third-final within an impressively neat time-frame.** It sucks. I will miss that job, that whole office, like anything, and I really hope that in time God will help me to work through my shit enough to even get a handle on why it all happened the way it did. But for now, I can only press onwards, through the mystical horrible wonderland that is my life, in the hope that things will get - if not easier or better - then at least clearer.

* I mean, not like right now, I'm on holiday with my family at the moment. But last week.

** As I don't want to run any sort of risk of people thinking I'm bitter or trying to slate the Church Army folks or their HR personnel here, let me state that they've handled things with incredible patience, generous kindness and proper formality.
   The first warning only came in after the problems kept manifesting when they'd already given me several sessions of counselling, which weren't much help, and repeatedly asking me what if anything they could do to help my situation, which I could only say I didn't know, as I don't. Tim, Faye, Mark, Des, Andy, Neil - you have my utmost apologies, thanks, and sincerest reassurance that I hold nothing against anyone and you made the right call. If I wasn't as mental as I obviously must be I'd have fired me too.

the Saint of Milk and Flames

This book, a collection of poetry by the fantastic Kate Garrett,* is among my favourites of recent reading. I read the whole thing in one sitting while on a family holiday, going back during that same long weekend to re-read certain poems over a third or seventh time.** Its themes are broad and deep, touching on faiths lost and wavering and refound, the human challenges of self-realization as mother or daughter, the isolations and solidarities found in disability and disappointment - ultimately there is a strong vein of hopeful healingness throughout and the subtleties herein should prompt most discerning readers to reexamine their lives through lenses of everyday myth, reverent grief and life-affirming love.

* To whom apparently I am 'grand-padawan', she having mentor-inspired my own primary mentor-inspiration in the spoken word world Kinsman.

** Including possibly my favourite of Kate's poems that I've read thus far - Everyone needs a friend when the world begins to end, which for my money sums up the beauty of poetic community in these strange dark times better than anything.

the Etymologicon

This book by Mark Forsyth is, as its subtitle concisely proclaims, something of a circular stroll through the hidden connections of the English language. It's been my go-to toilet book for the past six months or so, and honestly it's far more interesting than you'd maybe expect and certainly far more entertaining than I did. Everything from farts to frankfurts to Milton to nutshells to China to organs to testicles to cynicism to the fascinating story of the somewhat arguably insane self-made eunuch murderer who did an astonishing bulk of the legwork on proofing definitions for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary... having finished this book I don't think I'll ever look at my own language the same way again, to say nothing of the truly bizarre island culture that spawned it. A must-have for Werd Nerds, and if you're anything like me in terms of reading habits - it works brilliantly as a toilet book as the chunks are pretty much exactly poo sized. You know what I mean.

5Q

This book by Alan Hirsch is quite possibly the best work dealing with the nature and proper practice of Church that I've ever read. It literally [okay, figuratively, but very much] blew my mind.

   It's probably not the best of reasons for checking out a new thought-leader but my first encounter with Alan Hirsch was hearing him talk at a Fresh Expressions conference earlier this year which I was sent to for work purposes; it was an incredible weekend all round, at which I was also introduced for the first time to Ignatian reflexive prayer and the whole concept of orthopraxis - but I digress; he mentioned anecdotally how he met his wife, who now helps him run a range of missiological ecclesial initiatives, when tripping on LSD, and I thought that "this alone makes him a much more interesting figure to be hearing talk about the church and stuff than most other people at these kind of conferences." Though I may very well have misheard or misremembered this, so if Alan or anyone with any kind of quasi-legal responsibilities for him thereabouts wants to push me on this particular cited anecdote, I will happily remove it from the post.
   In any case, this book was about as psychedelic as theology gets, so buckle in.

   This book is effectively a gigantically thorough unpacking of Paul's model of the Church as the Body of Christ - as we're given in Ephesians 4: 1-16 - which is well worth a read before you dive into the rest of this post, as it'll help make sense of it.

   First then - what even does he mean by 5Q - it is Hirsch's coined term to describe a kind of fivefold quotient, much like the IQ or EQ of intellectual or emotional capacities; only it's describing five distinct elements which, he argues, though with deeply grounded and in my opinion thoroughly convincing roots in Scripture and orthodox Christian doctrine, are latent as psychosocial forces/powers within all of mankind - demonstrably synthesized to their fullest and most perfect extent in the single personal being of Jesus Christ, and thus distributed as empowering drives among his people. We did say all of mankind, as Hirsch does argue this too, but we'll come back to that and deal with the ecclesiology first. The five foldings of quotient herein are:

• Apostles: those who push the Body onto new ground & so aid its development
• Prophets: those who help the Body listen well to what the Head said/says
• Evangelists: those who share the Body's goodness with others around it
• Shepherds: those who maintain functional unity of the Body's members
• Teachers: those who remind the Body that & how the Head's cleverer than it

As clearly laid out in the Ephesians passage. Not controversial stuff, even though much of the pragmatic holistic reality of these quotients doesn't seem to be realized to too widespread an extent in many Christian cultures today... Anyway. Each of these five quotients is unpacked by Alan in great depth and detail, far more than I've given above; with many a helpful scriptural example as well as broad pointers for looking at sorts of roles within the life of Christian communities or wider society that map onto the particulars. There is far more granularity and intricately considered detail to this whole model in Hirsch's book than I could summarise here - plus buttloads of excellently illustrative diagrams.

   The basic point though is that this 5Q can be taken as a means of apprehending the real-life latent capacities present within the psychosocial collective intelligence of the Church as the Body of Christ - and this is why this book is such a mindbomb: Hirsch, in one deft book - has married metaphysical Christology to managerial ecclesiology in a holistic model that makes total theological sense and is easy to derive pragmatic applications for. Just reread that last post-colon half-sentence, because it shows why this model of Church is a potential game-changer - in ways nobody, but God, can fully imagine.

   Hirsch does make clear distinctions between the capacities as lived practices and as the categories for which people might be expected to 'pick one': he argues that all humans do have all five latent within them, which within properly developed spiritual communities we might expect people to become proficient at performing all five elements - but it is more common to see individuals excel at one or two;* and it is this that makes us, as the Body, an interconnectedly-self/Christ-reliant psychosocial system in order for these quotients to be effective. As I mentioned earlier - there can be derived a pretty strong theological gist for the meta-existence of 5Q as being latent within literally all of Creation: I'll not delve into his arguments here as this post's already quite long and you know what I get like when metaphysics are involved, but the keys provided by his arguments and model unlock a view of all humankind whereby I can now kind of see what he means, with the apostolic and prophetic and evangelistic and teaching and shepherding tendencies designed for the Church but usable to all - handled, to greater or lesser degrees of actual efficacy through relative faithfulness to these quotients' intended purposes - by all, and in all things. It's a crazy new view that I can't unsee; and that I just wish to God the Church by and large would come to embrace wholeheartedly very soon - because it gives linguistic legs to the workings of an organic mechanism that is already there, but well overdue its MOT.***

   If you're a church leader or planter or thinker or attender or whatever - this, above all the other books I've read this year - is the one I'd most ardently recommend. I'm actually getting well excited just typing about it - and liably expect a second post as I reread soonish.

* I have since done the APEST online test to determine which of the fivefold quotients I'm apparently gifted in - I'd recommend checking it out here - and if Alan's test instrument is to be believed, my strongest element is the prophetic - which, by this stage, wasn't any much of a surprise** - followed relatively closely by evangelism, which did surprise me.

** One of my colleagues really freaked me out earlier this year - as after everything that I'd been unlearning and learning last year she completely unbidden one day in January as she passed my desk said to me "I think you're a prophet"; and other than the fact that I'd read a verse or two from Jeremiah at that day's noon prayer moot I had no meaningful idea where that could have come from other than the usual place, which is the source of all true hunches, which is God, which annoyed me a bit as it meant I had to learn how to be this thing that I'd only very recently decided I seriously believed in as a spiritual vocation. Ol' King Jesus has a pretty funny sense of humour like that. Anyhoo, I doubt you're reading this, Alison Wooding, but you kickstarted my maddest not-career path yet - so - cheers?

*** There's four pretty handy appendices also, though two of which I found particularly of impact and topical heft. One dealing with the plague [don't think he uses this word but as far as I'm concerned now it basically is] of cessationism that has been a quite powerful stumbling block to the development of many church communities' 5Qs. And a second that roundly and somewhat dishearteningly tells the story of how a lot of churches, and to not-inconsiderable degrees Christian cultures at large, have basically exiled the A/P/E functions to seriously retain only in any meaningful strength the Shepherding and Teaching, as this facilitates a model of church where Bible-knowing elders can be in, and stay in, control; without any of those pesky prophetic reminders/questions or apostolic hazardous horizon-shifting or God forbid! the influx of those ignoramus noobs that evangelistic members of the congregation would otherwise keep dragging in. Most of this sentence is my own sentiment but echoing the same gist as the appendix.

Encounters on the Edge: A Short Intermission

This booklet (online as pdf here) by George Lings (see also) is a practical, example-rich, missionally-minded consideration of how churches can engage with the arts better in a variety of ways, be that to reach new people, develop relations or deepen faith journeys among older ones, or whatever - it takes a much broader tack than just Messy Church, and for anyone in church leadership who'd like to think of ways of bringing creativity into your ecclesial life (which, trust me, is worth doing but bloody difficult oftentimes) I'd recommend checking out this as it's a fab little primer.

Our Story Isn't Over

This book is a collection of poetry* by seven young people** at [past & present] the Amber Project in Cardiff, a Church Army project working with youth at risk of self-harm. The poems in the collection reflect this, and draw heavily on themes of one's own self in relation to mental and bodily wellbeing, exploring trauma, identity, renewal and growth; I bought a copy of this not out of artistic interest but genuine solidarity as the creativity unleashed by these brilliant young people at Amber is truly inspiring. I went to see their pantomime with colleagues from the Church Army head office over Christmas and it was SO FUCKING DOPE, LIKE - I've never actually enjoyed a pantomime until I saw theirs and even beyond enjoying it blew me away with how funny, confident, clever and subversive the whole thing was. Anyway I'm rambling about a pantomime but in all honesty several of the poems in this collection brought a tear to the eye & a lump to the throat also; and further some others are resonant with sheer determination to overcome their struggles and grow into the joy they've found through community, creativity, and hope. Definitely some rough stuff in here so major content warning for mental health and self-harm theme in poetry, but builds on these elements to make an overall booklet that is life-affirming to a grand degree, and I'd heartily recommend getting a copy if there's any left.***

* Didn't want to figure out where to mention this in that horrendous run-on sentence but it also has some lovely intricate illustrations by Aimee Taylor

** Ryan, Nicki, Channing, Louise, Adam, Hanna & Maryanne

*** All proceeds go toward the Amber Project's work with Cardiff's youth.