Sometimes you meet someone who doesn’t fit the usual categories or pigeonholes in which we put one another. Andrew Jones (a.k.a. ‘Tall Skinny Kiwi’) is one of those people. I had known about Andrew through the comments of friends and through his blog site. We then met several years ago in Los Angeles where he participated in an Allelon sponsored conversation of young leaders looking at questions of missional leadership. Andrew really is tall (at least for me), and he’s also gracious, winsome, wise and affirming. Back in LA I knew he was someone I wanted to listen to and learn from as a brother in the kingdom.
Last month we connected again in conversation. This month’s podcast of that conversation took place in virtual space. I was in Vancouver, he in Montreal. We talked over the phone while computers picked up our voices on Snowball mikes. Through the skills of our mutual friend, Bill Kinnon, we not only had a great conversation but were able to produced a podcast that sounds like we were in the same room rather than thousands of miles apart. We were sharing one part of the reality of this new globalized world – the power of technology to connect us as if time, space and place were no longer matters of human life. It’s a wonderful gift – this capacity to cultivate conversations across networks and among people we might not connect with face-to-face.
At the same time I was also aware of another, very different reality shaping our conversation in cyberspace – I was talking with Andrew Jones, a real, flesh and blood man who lives with his wife, children and friends in the Orkney Islands off the north east coast of Scotland. Andrew doesn’t simply live in cyberspace or on a blog – he is shaped by the ‘where’ of his context. The Orkneys is a real, concrete place where belonging, history, place, time and space are not just happenstance, disposable things of a moment but the core of reality – here the virtual may be present in the form of computers, blogs and other technologies but it’s the concrete, located life of human beings that far more substantively shapes the warp and woof of life. Everyday life in a place, among a people and in the midst of a history is what makes the difference. 
What I found beguiling even more interesting, on my virtual call with Andrew was that I was , I’m interacting with someone in the process of forming a ‘monastery’ a ‘pilgrimage center’ on the island. I’m hearing that this call to the Orkney’s is connected to family roots. Andrew’s mother came from there and thus, there are generations (perhaps a host of saints watch and urge on this strange movement to a ‘remote’ part of Scotland) connecting Andrew there. The Orkneys also communicate an in the area as well as the awareness of a place with a history of Christians gathering and sending. The islands have served as the location where the rhythms of monastic life were worked out and practiced. from this island. Andrew and his family have rooted themselves deeply in their histories in order to participate in an emerging sense of God’s renewed shaping of the church. I am listening to a modern missionary of God who drinks deep of the traditions and stories of the church as he seeks to live out fresh expressions of mission in a changing world.
This juxtaposition captures so well an aspect of the wonderfully imaginative, generative moment we all find ourselves in as God’s people – the virtual (connecting us in conversations across so many of the tribal boundaries we’ve erected or just assumed tribes) and the local (the unending human need to be rooted in a place and time that is shaped by its inescapable history and tradition; the practice of everyday life among ordinary people making do and figuring out together how to shape lives with God). This is the field in which we are privileged to might cultivate and form fresh imaginations and experiments of Christian life in a western culture that’ has lost its connections to the Christian story. I’m struck by the generative gifts of Andrew to so many people around the world. A peripatetic ‘abbot’ rooted in a monastic order on a far off island – this is the context of his influence. At the same time I think about denominational leaders wringing their hands about declining and plateaued congregations (in many system these two groups add up to 80% of the total congregations) often running around looking for solutions that miss the rhythms and commitments Andrew embodies.
I’ve just finished reading the novel Little Children by Tom Perrotta. It’s a story of ordinary people shaped too much by anomie, and a numbing loss of place, time and story in contemporary North American life. They seem unable to embrace adulthood and meet each other face-to-face in the all the ordinariness of their fallibilities and foibles. The fascinating thing about the book is that they live within is shaped within the digital world (internet pornography plays a role and one of the main characters is a documentary producer for a network – the media world is very present). At but at the same time the story is about utopos – no place. Its hard to locate these people – they seem to be in a place without location. They could be living out their characters anywhere. These are people disconnected from place. One cannot locate them in a geography or tradition. And so what emerges in the story are adults who are all little children. It is a poignant story where love is hard to find because without place and traditions it’s hard to become adults, to have faces that have substance.
It seems to me that in Andrew I was engaging with someone who intuitively senses some of the important ways in which we need to shape ourselves as God’s people just now. The move to the Orkney Islands, for many, would seem like a strange decision. Here is a place out of the way, off the map, irrelevant to where things really happen. And yet no! The formation of a monastery catches an understanding of Christian life that can only be known from inside the tradition – 
the rhythm and gathering and sending around practices. One of those practices recognizes that only by being committed to place and spending time with others as neighbors and strangers is it possible to also go out. Then I understand why Andrew is so connected – his blog world of many relationships (the virtual, ‘liquid’ side of his life) comes out and is an expression of this located life of rhythm and practice.
As I listened to Andrew describe what he’s about in his travels I was also aware that he is functioning as what I would call one of ‘Abbots’ of a fresh movement of God. He isn’t running around criticizing the church but listening and encouraging people in terms of kingdom life. I was blessed and energized by this conversation as we talked ideas. I pray that you too will experience this in this podcast.
Andrew Jones blogs at http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com
I am very glad for your podcasts! You are contributing wonderful things to the overarching conversation about 21st Century church/mission. Each of them has left me wanting more...
Your exchange of ideas with Andrew Jones was warm and inspiring. I will make more of an effort to keep track of what he's up to.
I was captured by your description of a North American order, and an October gathering around that notion. I'd love to learn more about that.
Finally, your musings about the suburbs echoed my own -- even to an almost eerie degree! I believe Suburbia is the greatest invisible mission field on the planet right now. One of the reasons it is so ripe is that it hasn’t delivered on its own promises: it was supposed to be a place where neighbors enjoyed one another and where people delighted one another’s “park-like settings”. But we’re hardly even appreciating our own yards.
We’ve started hosting house concerts, and displaying original art in our split-level – and we’re provoking our fellow suburbanites to do the same. The way I look at it, the average cul de sac home has as much space as most bohemian urban clubs, so why not sow some art into our neighborhoods?
Posted by Scott | Posted at 06/18/2007 8:01 PM