For a few weeks now I have had a gut feeling that something is wrong with the way we have been functioning as a team.

Essentially it relates to a lack of cohesion/sense of ‘team’ and the need for us to establish more clearly some of our identity. It took me a while to articulate exactly what I was feeling, but I’d say those two issues are central.

We spoke about it on Saturday night and it would seem we agree as a team that we need more time together to ‘knit’ (no…not that kind of knitting!!) and more time spent on earthing our expressions of church and mission in biblical theology.

The ‘how’ is a little more tricky.

Currently we do this. We have been experimenting with a 4 weekly cycle and while we have been able to generate some positive stuff from our primary communities, it has been very difficult to develop a team rhythm with the focus meetings and big gigs.

Life being what it is, it simply isn’t possible for everyone to be present at everything so we have experienced some disjointedness and real slowness in making progress towards nutting out some issues for us as group.

We agreed early in the piece that as a learning community we will explore ideas and practices and if they don’t work for us we will change them – simple as that. And when they run past their use by date we will change them again.

The loose proposal out there at present is for some sort of weekly gathering for the team members (now 6 families) that helps resolve our lack of connectedness and allows time for input and interaction.

It means sacrificing what we have known to be ‘primary communities’ for the time being, or we could do both… which gets very ‘meeting heavy’.

The suggestion is that perhaps we look at meeting fortnightly for teaching/input/discussion together and that the other fortnight be looser perhaps based around a meal and prayer for our community.

It might work… then again… I’m actually not worried what form it takes so long as we address the deficiencies in our system at present.

The beauty of what we are doing is that we can flex as we like. The struggle is that we don’t have a road map so sometimes we take dead ends or go the long way.

I realise two months doesn’t seem like a long time to experiment with something, but my take is that if we know its not working then we are better off making immediate changes rather than hoping that things will improve.