Filofax 2001
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06.12.01 / 01 / Church as third place
The Spider House seemed to me to be a perfect model for church as third place, but when I got back to London I couldn't find anywhere with the same cozy timber vibe. At the time London coffee shops were hard and modern. Cargo in Shoreditch was slightly more like it - having seen it for gigs I went back and took some photos. I put together a 'mood board' from my own photos and one or two cut from magazines. I did some drawings and spoof branding and put it on smallritual.org. It wasn't what I really wanted, a first iteration of something that developed as an environment and a vessel for community and will no doubt develop further.
Imagine the unlocking of the doors.
Imagine the re-emergence of church interiors as public spaces in the city.
Imagine if the worship installations could stay up all the time.
Imagine your local church building as an open-doored hangout.
Imagine sofas, visuals, newspapers, books, food, drink.
Imagine a church with good coffee.
Imagine a church with plenty of places to plug in your laptop.
Imagine opening hours 10am to midnight.
Imagine spiritual resources and personal space available at all times.
Imagine a place to work, rest and pray.
I still think that's a good manifesto. Newspapers are kind of over though.
15.11.01 / 01 / cpu
I wrote a manifesto which began like this:
what the church needs now is a creative projects unit.
a centre for creative thinking not tied into specific agendas
run for the benefit of the whole church without denominational boundaries
with freedom from short-term goals
a remit to do long-term strategic and analytic thinking
support and networking for creative projects happening elsewhere
plenty of academic research being done, but little or no work on embodying research into the actual forms and processes of culture and material happening
meanwhile creative projects that attempt to embody new theologies struggle on the margins
isn't it high time for an official creative projects unit - whose job it is to visualise and embody the latest theoretical thinking on christianity and culture - to feed back into the theory - to support and link the creative work done elsewhere on the interface of christianity and contemporary culture regardless of denominational or national boundaries
run without strings other than the broadest commitment to orthodoxy - not having specific pastoral responsibilities should relieve some of the fears and risks of experimentation.
an ideas lab to think the unthinkable or crazy
to mock up, visualise, prototype
to disseminate ideas and how-to knowledge
to advise those involved in creative projects of their own
This became CPU with a nice animated Flash title that won't work anymore. I tried to get funding to put it into practice but was told that all available funding streams were too conservative or too parish-based for what I wanted to do. That's why I wanted to do it - it was a missing piece. The very idea is outside the culture of the church.
16.10.01 / 01 / smallritual.org goes live
I had had the domain since September 2000, bought along with smallfire.org, but didn't get round to launching my personal site until now. I blogged about it in 2021 on the 20th anniversary, but repeat it here in the right place.
This is how it looked. The first two are the splash page with title rollover in Flash. The others show the menus as black bars in Flash which appear on rollover, hence all the white space to the left. The sections Jellyfish and Bus were named after the section header photos. The pages in each section were accessed from the horizontal bar. As well as Flash it was done in frames, so none of it works in modern browsers.
The jellyfish and bus photos were taken at Perranporth on the morning of 9/11, before it happened in America. When I walked into the beach bar early afternoon hoping for lunch, it was live on the projection TV. People like myself would wander in happy, and their happiness would die as they realised what was going on. I stayed until the towers fell, and then went back to my hotel. It was the first day of my holiday.
24.09.01 / 01 / labyrinth uk tour first venue
The Labyrinth UK tour opened in Canterbury Cathedral 24th-29th September, and would continue until 2003. It was never as successful as we had hoped based on the reception at St Pauls, Greenbelt and in America. Maybe other cathedrals had fewer visitors than St Pauls, and we had the same percentage. Maybe it was too weird. Maybe people thought it was for children or teenagers - the biggest numbers were for school groups - although it was really too sophisticated for them! At the time few people in Britain had encountered labyrinths, many Christians were suspicious or critical. Maybe the tour helped to pave the way for the greater acceptance that followed.
30.08.01 / 01 / Hexstatic at Cargo
We had a taste of Hexstatic at the Xen gig in April, but this time it was all them, touring their Rewind album but with plenty of other stuff. VJing at its best and funniest.
24.08.01 / 01 / Greenbelt
Grace did two services, Breaking the ice and Breaking the bread. The former was our excuse to do the suspended ice block from the Vaux Jubilee 2000 service again, so I could photograph it. We had no nobler motive than that, but people read profound meanings into it! Some even copied it in later years. Sometimes we do something just because we feel like it, to see if something deeper emerges behind the impulse.
You will notice the use of Hexstatic's 'Deadly Media' video as the intro to 'Breaking the ice'.
By this year Jonny had set up the 'New Forms' venue for alt worship. Since most groups used similar technical setups it made sense to have a venue ready-equipped - the memory of Grace's five nights in a marquee at Greenbelt 1997 was still sore! New Forms became a showcase for alt worship from all over the world until the festival left Cheltenham after 2013. Sadly no such venue was available at Boughton.
23.08.01 / 01 / labyrinth.org.uk website
Now that the Labyrinth was a continuing event a website was required. labyrinth.org.uk was in fact a triple website. One part was the explanatory site made by me. The second part was a Flash interactive labyrinth, crated by Bruce Stanley and very beautiful. The third part was a discussion forum run by YFC - it was felt that people impacted by the Labyrinth might need somewhere to talk about their experiences and receive counselling. This triple site needed a splash page giving links to the three parts. I made this with a Flash animation.
The forum didn't attract an audience and was closed, so in 2007 I rolled the interactive labyrinth into the main site and removed the splash page as part of de-Flashing the site. By 2011 YFC had forgotten that they hosted the site and owned the domain, so they transferred it to me.
01.08.01 / 01 / labyrinth uk tour materials
Designing business cards, flyers, posters in early August. Specific details for each venue were added when known. The materials for 3-5 venues were printed at a time, every few months I would do another batch.
28.07.01 / 01 / move to ealing
I had been in my lodgings in Surrey for over ten years. My whole life was now in London, apart from sleeping, but I couldn't find the opening to move. Then the Bakers asked me to be a lodger in their new house in Ealing. I decorated, bought stuff from Habitat and Ikea, packed a van and left Surrey never to return.
Finally all Grace events and people were within walking distance, and I could collaborate with Jonny on a daily basis, but it was harder to get to Vaux and Epicentre so I went less. My commuting costs dropped a lot, but duration didn't since the tube is slower than mainline trains.
06.07.01 / 01 / ibook
My 1996 computer was hitting its limits, it was time to move on. I bought an iBook G3 'Snow'. It ran MacOS 9 out of the box but the upgrade to OS X 10.1 came in September. From this point I have only had laptops, though I kept the 7200/90 and its CRT monitor until 2007 for various reasons.
People were mesmerised by the futuristic white iBook. It was the first all-white Apple device, before the iPod, so it was like science fiction. The concealed 'sleep' light which pulsated gently like a breathing animal made it seem alive. It was delivered to my office, and the militantly pro-Windows IT guy couldn't stay away from it, round-eyed with desire. I took it to Truro cathedral on holiday (not wanting to leave it in my hotel room), and as I sat in the nave working, a street person who was begging off the tourists hovered around. He wasn't after money, he had just never seen anything like it, but neither had anyone else. My life as a laptop warrior had begun.
It is a good machine. The small but thick book-like form factor makes it satisfying to handle and use (although it is heavy by later standards). I reckon on replacing devices at five year intervals, but this one lasted six. I still have it as a legacy machine running OS 9. The screen backlight has a worn connection and goes off when opened more than about 45˚ unless carefully manipulated. I found a tutorial for repair but it takes 68 difficult steps to even get to the part, so I haven't bothered.
28.06.01 / 01 / greenbelt insight
Insight was a magazine section of the Greenbelt website, which I was asked to edit. I was offered a salary for this, one of very few people to get paid to work for Greenbelt! It took a while to set up (partly because there was a festival to make happen), launching in January 2002.
28.04.01 / 01 / Xen at Cargo
The major gigs this year were all Ninja Tune. This was the Xen multi-artist show at Cargo in Shoreditch. Coldcut, Hexstatic, Kid Koala, Mike Ladd, Robert Townsend, etc. Cargo was one of the models for my Church as third place stuff.
27.04.01 / 01 / labyrinth uk tour
Given the success of the Labyrinth in St Pauls Cathedral and at subsequent stagings, Jonny persuaded YFC to support a tour of cathedrals in England. It would use the original cloth and kit, and be run by a small team of youthworkers travelling with it. At this point I started on graphic design.
16.03.01 / 01 / austin texas
Epicenter/Tribal Generation was a four-day event in Austin Texas, curated by Andrew Jones. Epicenter was the worship event, and Tribal Generation was a gathering of people involved in church planting movements across the globe. I wrote about it all here. Many of the connections and friendships made have lasted to this day.
I was invited to Epicenter to run the St. Paul's Cathedral Labyrinth. Somehow I managed to get a large suitcase with 25 CD players and sets of headphones into the US and back again without being questioned by customs or security.
I was also invited with Andrew and John Stark to the 'Light Up Texas' Church Planting Conference in Waco, to attend some of the sessions and to run the labyrinth in the foyer. Somehow, at Andrew's behest, I had four beers in my bag to smuggle into the hotel because it was a 'dry' county. I had to be very careful not to let the bottles clink, especially when we were accosted by someone who wanted to sit down and talk to Andrew.
We didn't have many people on the labyrinth, probably because of the time commitment required. The last participant was a young woman in a headscarf from a fundamentalist church. We wondered what she would make of it. Participants walk the labyrinth in headphones to hear the soundtrack, so she was in her own soundworld. She forgot that we could hear her, as she reacted to the soundtrack. It seemed that God was speaking to her. We remained silent and pretended not to notice. Afterwards we wondered if the labyrinth had gone to Waco just for her. It doesn't matter how many people come, as long as it's the right people.
Andrew took me to the Spider House. It seemed like a great model for a church. This idea would run and run.
06.02.01 / 01 / alternativeworship.org
Paul Roberts wanted to create a web directory of alt worship groups and resources, and approached me to be the designer and editor. In the 90s the Greenbelt website had a directory of alt worship groups, but it was short, UK only, and not kept up to date. A replacement was sorely needed as the movement was expanding.
Calling the new site alternativeworship.org caused controversy. The term 'emerging church' had emerged, which many people felt to be more satisfactory. Really Paul wanted to ensure that the term 'alternative worship' continued to refer to our movement, so that we were not thrown off our own history. Later on this would be useful, when Emergent in the USA got into trouble and people started to pick up the term 'alternative worship' again to differentiate themselves.
06.01.01 / 01 / prayer path kit
During 2000 the Labyrinth began to have an impact in the USA, through the major youthwork publishing organisations Youth Specialties and Group Publishing.
It was shipped over to feature at Youth Specialties' autumn conferences in Anaheim, St. Louis and Atlanta. Hundreds of youthworkers took part each time, and YS made their own cloth to use for worship at future conferences.
The editor of Group magazine visited the Labyrinth during its initial run in St. Paul's Cathedral. The video he made so impressed his colleagues at Group Publishing that they wanted to make a Labyrinth starter kit as a resource for churches in America. They worked closely with us to create the kit, which went on sale in January 2001 and became their biggest selling product.
The Labyrinth soundtrack was already on a CD for the participants, and for sale at the event. This formed the basis of the kit, which added video loops (on VCR!) and a leaders' guide.
There was an argument over the title of the kit and the text of the leaders' guide. Group wanted to distance it from any New Age connotations, and from Lauren Artress, the pioneer of the labyrinth revival. We were sensitive about any attempt to water it down for conservative Christians, and thought it disingenuous to omit Artress from its history even though we didn't agree with her theology. They wanted to sell it as widely as possible to churches, we wanted to create a space for spiritual travellers outside of the church.
An entirely unintentional misunderstanding arose. The soundtrack says that Christ "ate, drank, and was probably merry". This was misheard by Americans as "probably married" - a great theological upset! Apparently people were not familiar with the phrase "eat, drink and be merry". This part of the soundtrack had to be edited.
