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2020 Conference: Beyond Blame: Accountability Now?

This year’s annual conference, run in association with the Susanna Wesley Foundation, will take place on Tuesday, 1st December. Given the restrictions due to Covid-19, while we haven’t given up hope of offering physical participation as well, the conference will be fully accessible virtually whatever happens.

This day conference will look head on at the challenges of accountability whilst opening up our own work to the same questions. Three people who are in positions of being held to account and holding others to account will be asked to open up about the challenges they face. Alongside this Dr Helen Cameron will summarise some of the current academic thinking about accountability and relate it to themes in Christian theology.

We think that small teams of colleagues who attend together will find this particularly helpful.

2019 Conference

MODEM’s 2019 Conference, in partnership with the Susanna Wesley Foundation, was held at Sarum College from lunchtime on Thursday, 21st – lunch on Friday 22nd November. This year’s conference built on the ideas generated at 2018’s conference, and is entitled ‘Losing Control – Enabling Withness’. We explored ideas that Sam Wells has been developing in ‘A Nazareth Manifesto: Being with God’ (2015), ‘Incarnational Ministry: Being with the Church’ (2017) and ‘Incarnational Mission: Being with the World’ (2018), and how these can relate to ideas from organisation studies about emergence and non-imperialistic forms of organising and non-control. We related these ideas to experience and wisdom from local churches. A Nazareth Manifesto has been described as ‘nothing less than a call to rethink Christian witness and mission, based on a profound re-telling of our relationship with each other and God’. This conference was an opportunity to think together about how church organization might better facilitate such a retelling. The ideas follow on naturally from our consideration of witness in the 2017 conference and asset based community organization in the 2018 conference.

Speakers included Sam Wells, Nic Beech and Paul Hibbert. Click here for more information, or watch Sam speaking about ‘Being With’ here:

Book Reviews

We regularly provide reviews of newly published books that are relevant to leadership, management or ministry. Check out our book review page.

Archbishop of Canterbury supports MODEM’s work

“The work you do in bringing together perspectives on leadership and ethics from church and commerce is immensely valuable and I am grateful to you for developing these channels of communciation.”

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Most Revd & Rt Hon. Justin Welby sent MODEM a letter of “warmest good wishes” for its 20th anniversary conference in 2013. He challenged MODEM to continue its work with a reflection on “the love of Christ urges us on…” from 2 Corinthians.
You can read the full letter in a special conference issue of MODEM Matters.