Have you had an unformed idea or a hunch, that you’ve sat on for years, about the future of the church, mission and ministry? Sharing these ‘slow hunches’ and ‘half ideas’ might be a vital step in helping them come to fruition. For many years in ministry I tended to keep my ideas to myself, but watching the video below radically changed this protective tendency.
There are many ways that your slow hunches might be shared with others. Time could be built into local deanery meetings or at regular conferences. You could establish a blogging platform, like this one set up for Anglican School chaplains to share their ideas and encourage the contribution of others. The important thing is not to simply sit on hunches. They need to be released and discussed so that others can consider them too. That way your hunches have space to be explored and can come together with other ‘slow hunches’ or ‘half ideas’ to create something truly innovative.
The sharing of ideas is also vital to the work of mission planning. It is easy to become conceptually stuck and use the same approaches to problem solving that have always been used. Ted Bolsinger’s book, ‘Canoeing the Mountains‘, has much to say on this topic, offering insights and practical suggestions to help us navigate ‘off the map’.