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Nehemiah: 1

September 15, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 1 Comment

These are my sermon notes from last night (Wednesday September 14th) shared with the community at Conversations. We’d had some difficult news in the preceding week relating to the future of the church and its leadership which makes our series on Nehemiah feel helpful and timely. You can read a bit more about that in my other post from today.

Let’s start with a bit of context:

The events of Nehemiah 1 take place 1,000 years after Moses and 400 years before Jesus.

Israel is in a desperate state – the Babylonians have conquered Jerusalem.

When they did that they deported almost everyone from the city – for 70 years Jerusalem was a ghost town. Potentially set to be forgotten to history.

The Jews began to make homes for themselves in Babylon. They settled and although they continued to follow God, they didn’t hold onto the idea of a Promised Land.

Some of them ended up in prominent places – Daniel, Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-Nego leaders in Babylon; Esther a Queen in the courts of a Persian king.

After those 70 years they had the opportunity to return home, to the Promised Land. Only 50,000 out of 2 or 3m returned. And that’s what the book of Ezra is about: rebuilding the temple and laying a spiritual foundation for Israel.

So, Nehemiah starts 15 years after the Book of Ezra ends, about 100 years after the first exiles return to the Promised Land and about 150 years after Jerusalem was destroyed.

The walls are still ruined.

They’d tried to rebuild them in Ezra 4:6-23 but had been stopped by their enemies. No-one thought this could be overcome so the walls lay in ruin and the people exposed to the danger of an unfortified city.

The book of Nehemiah is about a man who left a place of safety to put it all on the line to defend his city. To go to a place he was called to love, and to love it back into full strength and rude health. It cost him, but it glorified God and it transformed that city.

¹ The words of Nehemiah son of Hakaliah: In the month of Kislev in the twentieth year, while I was in the citadel of Susa, ² Hanani, one of my brothers, came from Judah with some other men, and I questioned them about the Jewish remnant that had survived the exile, and also about Jerusalem. ³ They said to me, “Those who survived the exile and are back in the province are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been burned with fire.”
Nehemiah 1:1-3

Nehemiah hears about Jerusalem.

We find out he lives in the citadel – that means he’s important.

Nehemiah’s heart is in Jerusalem. He wants to know how the city and his people were doing. His heart was not on himself, but on others. Jerusalem was special to God, so it was special to Nehemiah too.

Walls are good

June 10, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

Glasswall by JanneM, on Flickr

My life is pretty transparent – if you Google me you’ll find a pretty lengthy trail of bits and pieces strewn across the internet (although I claim no connection at all to Beat The Rator, whatever that is).

I like freedom. I like openness. I like sharing.

If you follow me on Twitter, are my friend on Facebook or read this blog then there’s very little you won’t quickly learn about me. And I’m entirely comfortable with that.

But that’s not true for everybody. Continue reading

Cumbersome processes

May 25, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

Just a quick thought.

Tomorrow the new Lord Mayor is getting installed and beforehand all 59 councillors have got the opportunity to press the flesh with the different directorates and service areas that make up Hull City Council in a marketplace event.

It’s a pretty good idea – councils are massive and it must be pretty daunting for any newly elected councillor to get a handle on what it is we do. And there’s value in taking a similar approach for communicating that breadth to the public (Walsall100 is a practical demonstration of that).

Anyway, in preparation for this event the different service areas and directorates have been pulling together briefing notes. In the Regeneration Directorate are two services: Economic Development & Regeneration and Physical Regeneration. And that covers a further 11 distinct areas of activity (BSF is part of Physical Regeneration). So putting together something brief that communicates everything from new schools to museums with European funding in between is not straight forward.

What we’ve ended up with is succinct and (hopefully) helpful in giving a nice overview of the directorate. It was the result of three different people working on it in their own spheres of influence – someone from the Economic Development & Regeneration wing, someone else from the Physical Regeneration arm and also the BSF team. In the end it’s come to us to wire the different bits together and produce a single document.

There’s no trouble in doing that but I yearn for a day when we might together, in our three separate offices, have been co-authoring a shared document and discussing the amends in real-time rather than the slightly delayed and cumbersome fashion that has seen slightly different versions of the same basic document flying about whilst different additions ping into inboxes; there is a better way to do this…

1 John:4 – Love Wins

May 20, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

1 John is a book that sets out some of the most fundamental characteristics of who God is and what being a Christian, part of His family, looks like.

And John’s quite blunt really. He sets it out quite clearly that God is holy, we are sinful and Jesus is our only hope.

Then he says that if you say you keep God’s commands, and don’t, then there’s a problem. And he says that if you’re more in love with the world than you are with God, then there’s a problem there too.

So we end up with an ideal of what we should be aiming for. John tells us about the need for right doctrines, right lifestyles and right relationships. It’s almost as though there’s something of a tick box exercise happening – tick all the boxes and well be called children of God and we’ll be like Him. If we live in Him then we won’t sin any more because Jesus has destroyed the work of the devil. So we should love one another and when we do that we know we’ve qualified for eternal life.

Sounds straightforward – the Eye-Spy of Christianity. An easy reference guide against which we can mark ourselves and score those around us.

Thankfully God isn’t sitting on a cloud waiting to smite us for cocking up but is desperate for a relationship with us that isn’t about legalism and transactionality. Continue reading

Remember Tom?

May 20, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 0 Comments

In 2003 Tom Anderson helped launch MySpace. It wasn’t the first social network but it was the first to capture the world’s imagination.

Even for those of us who’d been using IRC and ICQ, or the Messengers of Yahoo and MSN Myspace represented something very different: a website, not something you installed.

You might have been invited, in which case you’d have a friend. Or you might know what you were doing and be confident. But neither of those were guaranteed, there was every chance you’d be joining this strange and alien world without any friends.

With nobody to hold your hand or guide you through it Myspace did something very clever. Everybody who signed up was welcomed, hosted and befriended by Tom. Continue reading

Where should they sit?

May 17, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 3 Comments

Yesterday Dave Briggs spotted that Stoke were looking for a new web editor, somebody to be ‘the councils (sic) on-line champion’. And they’re not alone in allocating a specific resource, Hull’s recent restructure included a new e-communications role with a similar brief. Both these roles are in Communications.

This prompted a discussion on Twitter (Storify here).

Brief conversations like these are one of the great side effects of using Twitter. But not everybody will see those tweets. So I thought I’d try to start capturing interesting exchanges in case there’s some value to those outside the conversation (the Alpha(Local)Gov post was originally prompted by something similar).

So what follows is my adding a bit of flesh to the opinions communicated in 140 characters. As you might have seen if you’ve looked at Storify, the discussion asked whether Communications is the right location for ‘social media’ (although neither role is Twitter Tsar). Continue reading

Alpha(Local)Gov

May 13, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 1 Comment

This entry is part 1 of 7 in the series Local government digital service

I’ve added this post and the second on Government as a Local Platform to my series on ‘Local Government Digital Service‘ because it’s a helpful original piece, reflecting my perspective from before joining GDS.

I started this post at the start of April, returned to it with the demise of Flip but finally finished it after Andrew Beeken shared his own thoughts yesterday.

April saw the demise of Flip. Despite being the leading camcorder brand in the US, parent company Cisco judged the marketplace to be unsustainable in the face of the competition posed by our mobile phones.

Given that they paid $590m for the technology two years ago it’s a bold move. Equally, their quitting from a position at the top is shrewd because of the inevitable future of hand-held video recording.

I really like my Flip camera and when the product was first introduced it disrupted the market but I expect to get similar functionality from my next mobile phone without having to carry something else in my pocket. Whilst convergence is not good for the 550 employees at Flip, the rest of us benefit – we get one thing where once we might have had to use more.

It’s that sort of approach which lies behind Martha Lane Fox’s vision for a single government domain and over the last three months it has been brought to life by 11 people somewhere in London. There had been glimpses of what they were working on and The Telegraph had featured a couple of screenshots as well as some interviews but this week we were able to get our grubby mitts on this “proof of concept prototype“.

York’s local election

May 8, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

In the aftermath of York’s election I was interested in the sort of things that might get talked about at a general election in terms of a picture changing from election to election. The simple picture was a crushing defeat for the Liberal Democrats as Labour swept to power but in the spirit of Whitehall Watch is there a story in the votes rather than the seats?

First up, the makeup of the chamber before (taking into account the by-election results since 2007):
City of York Council 2007

After:
City of York Council 2011

And you can see from a quick glance how the vote changed from 2007 to 2011

Labour recorded 18,000 votes more on Thursday than they did in 2007 and increased their share of the vote from 27% to 37%. Much has been said about Thursday representing an incredibly bad night for the Liberal Democrats but in York the result was not down to the complete evaporation of Liberal Democrat support. The ruling Liberal Democrats (only) lost 5,000 votes across the city, a similar figure to that dropped by the Conservatives. The other party to shed votes was the BNP whose support shrank by 70%.

Party	Votes 2007	Votes 2011	Change
BNP	3,582	1,076	-2,506
Conservatives	37,172	32,788	-4,384
Green	14,337	19,196	4,859
Labour	36,746	54,874	18,128
Liberal Democrats	43,764	38,818	-4,946
Others	829	1112	283

Swing is a favourite statistic to work out and in order to calculate it you take the increase in votes from one party, add it to the fall of the other and divide it by two.

This means a swing to Labour from the Liberal Democrats of 8% with a similar figure for the swing to Labour from the Conservatives of 7.7%.

But there are some more nuances to what actually happened in the city. Although the Conservative party vote fell by 5,000 this is more connected to a reduction in candidates from 47 to 33. In 3 wards, which had contributed 3,724 votes in 2007 there was no Conservative candidate at all. Despite their share of the city’s vote falling to 22% their average vote per candidate increased to 994, more than any other party except Labour.

In contrast, the Green party’s significant improvement overall comes from their fielding an additional 15 candidates. In Clifton, for example, they tripled their candidates and secured an additional 10% of the vote (although their leading candidate only increased her votes by 33). But, apart from Skelton, Rawcliffe and Clifton Without (the neighbouring ward) where they picked up almost 12% more of the vote their performance across the city was fairly static with the average number of votes each candidate received falling by 74.

The Liberal Democrats don’t seem to have simply lost seats due to dissatisfaction with the national political picture. In Strensall, Haxby and Wheldrake they lost seats to their coalition partners (Christian Vassie’s loss of Wheldrake compounding a miserable 12 months in politics after last year’s general election when he was unable to dislodge Hugh Bayley).

So the convincing nature of Labour’s victory seems to be much more down to getting people to vote rather than seeing a massive drop in support for either the way the Liberal Democrats ran York or in the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition in Westminster. In 2007 the turnout was 41.8% (approx. 136,000 voters) but this year the extra 10,000 voters in a turnout of 44.7% seems to have made all the difference rather than disgruntled voters switching from one party to another. Edit: of course, I’d failed to think about the aggregating effect of wards where individuals got more than a single vote. The difference between 2007 and 2011 was actually closer to 4,500 voters.

Mind you, given that the majority of York wasn’t voting last Thursday I wonder whether any of these thoughts are in any way relevant.

If you want to pick over the data and point out any of the flaws in my data literacy there’s a spreadsheet on Google Docs.

‘Stagnant and Lost’

April 1, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 1 Comment

Last week I had a week of holiday. Amongst a lot of doing very little it provided an opportunity to reflect on life ahead of Christine finishing her phd and starting work in Huddersfield at the start of May.

I effectively spend 12 hours of every weekday on the way to, or at work. And I realised that I wasn’t happy with either the commute, or my role. I was summing myself up in two words – stagnant and lost.

But on the back of this evening I’m reclaiming myself and rejecting those words.

I’ve just got home from a prayer meeting where it became apparent that God was gently mocking me. Five things neatly coincide in a way that has reset my thinking. Continue reading

Is Storify the answer?

March 12, 2011 / Benjamin Welby / 2 Comments

Photo by Hungarian Snow

Twitter is still evolving but thus far nobody seems to have come up with a clever way of combining the thread of a discussion on Twitter with contributions from elsewhere.

It’s something that has come up in looking after Vital Bradford. I’ve found Twitter an excellent companion to supporting my football club and there’s a very active community with considered opinion and not the sort of stupidity that can plague footballing message boards.

One of the reasons it’s a pleasure is the way you can capture a sense of the match in real-time from all corners of the ground. But even though we are the most followed #bcafc account it’s only a fraction of those who might be interested.

Whatever the subject matter we need to be careful that the coverage of any event doesn’t get stuck inside Twitter. Your updates can get missed by your followers so it’s good to keep them on record somewhere. But it’s actually quite hard to record and curate a specific time-bound period of activity, especially if it involves many voices. Continue reading

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