tautoko int.

Ok, I think I should write some stuff about the time in London. So I’m in a little coffeeshop in Karlsruhe, got some beautiful tunes of Beady Belle in my headphones and so I’m ready to give it a try. I’m making a kinda big thing out of this because I was sort of running away from writing this. Because this time in London I had a problem with the language barrier more then ever before. It was pretty difficult to engage in complex, personal conversations, translating everything said all the time and then expressing what I think and feel. I mean, a lot of London was about topics I find it even hard to express my thoughts about in german. Well, anyhow. I’m gonna translate some of my german blog-articles and kinda weave them together. We’ll see what will happen.

The time in London started with me being very distant to all that’s happening. I had a hard time figuring out what this was all about. We only got very vague information about the themes of this week. I knew that Karen Campell, a friend of Doxology, had invited some of her friends from the USA and us from Kubik. Rumors had it that this week was about bringing over people with a lot of benjamins from the states to meet with some Kubik folks to network and figure out ways to bring some funding to Kubik. That sounded nice but to be honest we were a bit cautious about this because on one hand we don’t want to be dependent to anybody and on the other hand, coming from the 37signals kinda thinking, money spoils you. A lot of creativity at Kubik emerges from the lack of money. So arriving there we hold back not being sure what it is the americans wanted from us. So we were very relieved when we realized that this rumor wasn’t true. The idea for the week was as Karen put it “ministering to the ministers”. She believed that each participant could profit and learn from the others. Each one would give and receive. And it pretty much worked out that way.

What I really like about the time was it’s openness. There were nearly no scheduled meetings. The whole week was planed out on the experience that the really important talks happen while eating, in the tube and while walking. Anybody could bring as much into the whole thing as he liked. There was no pressure on participation.

Even after realizing what this time was really about I still had a hard time getting into it. I was constantly asking myself the question why I was there. The problem is that I tend to have a little problem with my self-esteem when I’m around a lot of fancy people who all are very important like pastors, counselors and artists. And this might sound strange to you if you know me but it really takes me time to connect to people. So if I have five days to connect to about ten people who are all older, wiser and more important then me, speak a different language and come from a country I have my prejudices about, I have a problem. And this is what I was fighting with for the first two days. Well, things changed, thank God. And here is how I wrote about it at my german blog.

I’m gonna be pretty honest here. Let me tell you a story about prejudices. I admit, I have a ton of these. And a great deal of them are connected to citizens of the United States. Over the last months nevertheless I have managed to cut them down as far as realizing that not everybody in the states is like the texans. However as I heard that a bunch of americans would come over for the week I was a bit contained. I automatically anticipated that they would bring a distinct sense of mission. I expected unasked answers to the everyday-life of an emerging church and how life works. One more confession: I tend to have a certain arrogance about Kubik and the european emerging church. I like to think that we have grasped a lot more. So I kept my distance for the first two days until I realized that there was something different about these americans (most of them from Texas). They asked questions, they listend carefully, they were polite and they never imposed themselves. More and more I began to realize that they had come to London to learn and to serve (and I mean serve us and not their egos). In short, in that time in London I met the most humble americans I know. There goes my prejudice. As this thought finally got into my pighead, I realized that I was about to become what I thought the texans would be like, arrogant and unwilling to learn. Kinda scary how this creeps in. The realization came right on time and so the rest of the time was really nice.

Well, there is tons of stuff more to tell. But I kinda got the feeling that I have lost most of you already until here. So I’m gonna end my very personal recap of the time in London.

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