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So, what’s your personal vision statement for this coming year? You don’t have one yet? But we’re on the brink of 2010!

OK, what about your ministry aims? Can you outline them to me in the space of three seconds without breaking into a sweat? No?! Alright then, let me loosen the noose a bit: can you present the projected outcomes of your personal discipleship programme (preferably using bullet points) for the next three years? What do you mean, you can’t even see beyond the coming week you PowerPointless wonder? Take me to your seminar leader — on the double!

Picture the scene: it’s 1993 and a fresh-faced art student sits on the floor of his painting studio next to a cross-legged Buddhist.

For the last half-hour they’ve been talking ‘God’. To the outside listener the conversation seems an incoherent ramble. Yet the student knows better. There’s method in his glibness. Unknown to his ‘enlightened’ subject he’s carefully preparing the ground for an evangelistic piéce de resistance.