OK - so this guy has some detailed ideas about taking and filing notes in a way that means you can keep track of them, and find them easily… It’s pretty old school (pen and paper). You may well find that using a phone / tablet takes a lot of the hassle out the system! The second video is a Ted-x talk on visual / sketch noting, which gives a different angle on the whole thing, that you might find more helpful
the unspoken desire of any authentic congregation:
We need help in keeping our beliefs sharp and accurate and intact. We don’t trust ourselves; our emotions seduce us into infidelities. We know we are launched on a difficult and dangerous act of faith, and there are strong influences intent on diluting or destroying it. We want you to give us help. Be our pastor, a minister of Word and Sacrament in the middle of this world’s life. Minister with Word and Sacrament in all the different parts and stages of our lives: in our work and play, with our children and our parents, at birth and death, in our celebrations and sorrows, on those days when the morning breaks over us in a wash of sunshine, and those other days that are all drizzle. This isn’t the only task in the life of faith, but it is your task. We will find someone else to do the other important and essential tasks. But this is yours: Word and Sacrament.
One more thing: We are going to ordain you to this ministry, and we want your vow that you will stick to it. This is not a temporary job assignment but a way of life that we need lived out in our community. We know you are launched on the same difficult venture in the same dangerous world as we are. We know your emotions are as fickle as ours, and your mind is as tricky as ours. That is why we are going to ordain you and why we exact a vow from you. We know there will be days and months, maybe even years, when we won’t feel like believing anything, and won’t want to hear it from you. And we know there will be days and weeks, and maybe even years when you won’t feel like saying it. It doesn’t matter. Do it. You are ordained to this ministry, vowed to it.
There may be times when we come to you as a committee, or delegation and demand that you tell us something else than what we are telling you know. Promise right now that you won’t give in to what we demand of you. You are not the minister of our changing desires, or our time-conditioned understanding of our needs, or our secularised hopes for something better. With these vows of ordination we are lashing you fast to the mast of Word and Sacrament, so you will be unable to respond to the siren voices… even when they are ours.
There are many other things to be done in this wrecked world, and we are going to be doing at least some of them, but if we don’t know the foundational realities with which we are dealing - God, Kingdom, Gospel - we are going to end up living futile, fantasy lives. Your task is to keep telling the basic story, representing the presence of the Spirit, insisting on the prriority of God’s Word, speaking His command and promise and invitation…
taken from: Eugene Peterson, The Contemplative Pastor, 138-139
Is preaching still relevant?
The Failure of the Church to disciple us… (ii)
It is a well worn aphorism that we don’t know what we don’t know. My sense is that there is such a collapse of the idea of discipleship in our Churches that we don’t even know what we don’t know about discipleship. We barely have the cateogries to understand how little progress we have made in our apprenticeship of Jesus.
The loss of any sense of what it means to grow as a Christian has left us vulnerable to a raft of alternative projects and visions. There is an old sermon illustration about how those trained to spot counterfeit currency don’t spend their time studying counterfeits. They study the authentic article, so that they are able to recognise counterfeit money when they see it. Without an original to establish a clear idea of how things should be, we are incapable of recognising when things are not as they should be. And so it is in our discipleship.
Nature abhors a vacuum. That is as true in the ‘unseen’ dimensions of creation as it is in the ‘seen’. And there is a vacuum left by the slow and imperceptible implosion of our understanding of what it means to be ‘transformed into his image with ever-increasing glory’ (II Cor.3:18). But instead of seeking genuine models of spiritual development, instead of re-discovering what it means to be trained to produce a harvest of righteousness (see Heb.12:11, also 5:14), we have succumbed to a host of inferior forgeries that we mistake as spiritual growth.
We craft endless ‘visions’ for our life together as Church, plans for outreach and Chuch growth, endlessly tinker with our services of worship, and then make inflated claims about out expereince of God’s presence, pursue charismatic giftedness in pursuit of authenticity and significance. And while we have invested vast amounts of energy and money into such pursuits, we have reamined spiritual infants, living on milk, lamenting our poverty of Biblical understanding, and barely recognising the need for doctrine. Yet we do not want to be ‘preached to’, at least not for more than 20 minutes at a time... We have accepted as normal the idea that the prayer meeting is the least attended meeting in the Church calender, and that people can be Christians for years without ever attending one, or praying out loud. We welcome erratic patterns of Church engagement with an understanding nod, widespread disenchantment with ‘traditional’ service structures of worship, and are impatient with Biblical components of worship such as liturgy.
Many have never pulicly owned to being a Christian, and few have actively shared their faith on any but a handful of occasions. A significant number (likely a majority) readily confess that they dn’t understand their faith well enough to confidently share it with others. Hardly anyone in our Churches has actually led someone else to faith.
We are beset with recurring patterns of sin; and with a failure to find our joy and satisfaction in Christ. We are inexperienced in many of the spiritual disciplines, not even sure what some of htem are, or why we should do them; and have little grasp of a specifically Christian understanding of life, worship or spirituality. And the little grasp we do have simply adds to our frsutration because we have even less experience of the Spiritual power available to make it a reality. We struggle to see how anyone could seriously be expected to live in the way the Bible teaches us to.
And yet in spite of our manifest inexperience of the momst foundational elements of Christian life and spirituality, we still think we know what it means to be a Christian. We think we are making progress. We think we are maturing. The truth is that those of us who have grown up in such an impoverished context, and for whom this has been the extent of our spiritual formation, are not well equipped for discipleship and mission. Indeed, we barely know enough to realise how ill-equipped we are.
The Failure of the Church to disciple us... (i)
This is what the Lord says: ‘Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, as where the good way is and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls’ (Jer.6:16).
By whatever matrix we use, the Church in the UK is in chronic decline. There are exceptions to the rule. There are Churches and networks here and there which are growing, some through genuine evangelism and some at the expense of other Churches. But they remain exceptions. And tragically inadequate to balance out the overwhelming implosion of indigenous British Christianity. The trends are deeply concerning both in terms of longevity and universality, and the trajectory seems fairly entrenched. In addition to the numbers game is the sense that our culture is becoming increasingly hostile to (the Christian) faith as it veers towards an increasingly intolerant secular humanism. In such a context, religion and faith are assumed to be implausible and untenable at best: unnecessary and irrelevant at best, likely dangerous and oppressive at worst. A creeping aggression lays siege to the Church.
While these symptoms of decline and the growing hostility of our culture to the faith that gave it birth are hardly controversial, the question of how we should respond is much more contentious. Everyone has an opinion, though few of those opinions have been ‘road-tested’ in the life of the local Church. And those which have are subject to hopelessly a-theological, short term, pragmatic and reactionary matrix. Such over-promising, under-delivering grandstanding is financially catastrophic, and destructive to the structures of spiritual leadership and life of the Church.
And of course, this isn’t simply an institutional issue. The Church is the people. The result of dysfunctional ways of doing Church and engaging in mission is that people end up struggling to be Christian in any meaningful sense of the word. Indeed, we end up lacking any coherent vision for Christian living and spiritual formation. The Church’s failure to disciple her people is breath-taking. But not as breath-taking as the realisation that we have so lost sight of the fact that making disciples is our fundamental mandate, that few recognise we aren’t doing it.
Having reduced ‘Church’ to a series of programmatic events, what we actually do is then train people to function within those programmes. This creates the illusion of spiritual growth, whilst actually hindering the development of genuine discipleship. This locks us into a downward spiral which, by its very nature, blinds us to the very resources that would halt our terminal decline.
