Ordained Entrepreneurship

Matt Jamison, impressively confident and capable radio presenter at BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, on his Easy Sunday programme today. I was there for an interview about being an ordained entrepreneur (Thanks, Matt! Thanks, Heather! Thanks, Vanessa!).

A short while before there was a piece about churches dealing with the challenges of buildings to maintain and assets to protect. Or the opportunity of bringing the community into the church and finding everyone's best ideas of how to make best use of what we have to offer...

I'm hoping that kind of challenge and the stories of churches that have tried different approaches will be exactly the kind of thing we'll be featuring on churchcafe.org.uk, the free national podcast series launching in September. Not so much from people with ideas, but from ordinary people (including ordinary ministers!) who've tried things that have worked and things that haven't.

I'm also hoping to connect with someone as passionate as I am to give Cambridge entrepreneurs an opportunity to connect with the entrepreneurial Church (and that's the only kind we've got, however often we forget it).

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Finding my Voom!

There are lots of approaches to understanding how people relate to one another: there's every chance you've come across a few.

One of the most useful in practical situations is Belbin's Team Inventory, which gives insights on how people work together (or how they don't!).

In this, I turn out to have two very strong peaks: top is Shaper (also called Driver), next is Plant.

Here's a nice page giving some succinct definitions.

Shapers like to make things happen; plants generate ideas. Now you already know quite a lot about what I do best: take an opportunity or a situation and generate new creative ideas; take someone's idea and turn it into reality.

That's not a usual combination - in fact most definitions of Shaper suggest these are the last people to generate ideas. And most definitions of Plant suggest those people tend to be a bit removed from the practical 'how-to.' But I have a suspicion that 'type infinity' maths people may often show this combination: being able to do maths means plucking inspiration out of the void, then relentlessly haring down the answer.

An ideal team needs all the roles: the tool helps to build balanced teams and to understand the dynamics when people are operating out of their optimal team role. It's helped me to understand how to seek out individuals whose strengths lie in the other critical areas so that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts rather than less, which is the default for teamwork.

By a fluke for which I can claim no credit at all, I've spent my whole working life either in or connected to startup businesses or companies considering major change. You won't be too surprised if I tell you that in my experience, startups don't start up and certainly don't succeed without someone being the shaper. You might be surprised that although it's my natural lead role, I don't particularly enjoy being the overall boss: my technical skill area is marketing and I'm happiest in the Marketing Director role where on the Board I lean to my Plant side - looking for new opportunities and new ways of seeing situations - while day-to-day I love to lead marketing operations.

For similar reasons I secretly enjoy working a way down the organisation with teams that have something great but maybe not the political clout to deliver. (And in this context I take secret delight in turning finance people into effective sales pitchers: more than once that's been the secret weapon that's got projects resourced and executed.)

It also helps explain what can also seem like a contradiction: I'm a tactical strategist. The maths thing again seems to deliver without much conscious effort insight into big strategic issues; then the shaper kicks in to act.

So you can ask me what Voom! is. It is, of course, what Dr Seuss's Little Cat Z produces from under a hat to sort out the mess. And it's that bit of me that I've had to hog-tie in college, because it's always straining to make things happen, and frustrated when people set their sights too low and achieve even lower.

I'm enjoying letting my Voom! out again, if only for short bursts.

Faith as risk

I've been training towards C of E ordination and a full-time paid curacy. Now that's in question. Here's the story, or its bones at least.

Selection is understood as a process of discernment - the object being to understand if the sense of call to ministry is experienced by the individual and recognised as appropriate and timely by the church.  My call came in 1984. How it came and how I was on the run for over twenty years is a whole other story. Buy me a beer and I'll tell you.

Right in the middle of the selection process, as a family we decided we were going to move to Cambridge. Our timing couldn't have been worse in so many ways: it was a costly move in a lot of ways, but also one which we experienced as totally right. This felt like a calling too - and not just to me individually this time.

It meant a jitter in the selection process, but Ely Diocese (Cambridge is part of Ely from the C of E's point of view) put me back just a couple of steps, not right back to the beginning. I was selected, and accepted at Ridley Hall (theological college) and by Sidney Sussex (matriculating college), hallelujah! 

Also costly, though. A couple of years of minimal (but still generous - who else pays people to train these days?) financial support, another tranche of downsizing. But we knew, at least, that at the end would be a curacy which would provide a family home and an income (stipend in church-speak - money paid to enable ministry, not technically a salary).

A seismic moment came last July, when I learned that that curacy wouldn't be in the Diocese. On reflection, this was an opportunity to rethink things that might have saved some trouble. Oh, the joy of rear-view mirror vision! However, after a couple of false starts I found and agreed a curacy: if you're on our Christmas card list you've had the details.

And now, after serious reflection and what I would again describe as call we have now agreed not to take that up. It's possible that something else will come up that meets our circumstances, but it's an unlikely possibility.

Where does that lead? Very probably it means finding work outside the church for the near-term. Lots of wise friends and associates are contributing to that decision; the key choice is something we'll have to make this month.

I'm excited and alarmed in roughly equal measure. I have strong marketing credentials and a passion for business, but now isn't a great time to be getting back into the market, especially after a two year break. 

My thinking at the moment is that I'll rebuild my portfolio career - combining work with small and startup businesses with projects for larger businesses in the technology space. And I know there's a great deal of risk in that. So here's my own challenge of discernment - is embracing that risk together with the risk of faith in Jesus Christ where God is calling me?

Somehow even the thought is energising, nourishing. And, yes, scary. Not very much like the comfortable talk of 'living on the edge' in lecture rooms. That would be a good thing.

Putting this on my blog feels like a big risk in itself. Because we've swapped tracks from a route where things are clear and safe from any outsider's point of view, to one that has a whole lot more questions than answers. Honesty is potentially rather costly.

So if you're the praying type, do feel free to adopt the Parsons family as a cause to place before God. And if not, well, say one anyway, what harm could that do?