On Becoming A Boiler Room?

Phil posted some notes onto his Toggie Tales blog

As part of our ‘local journey’ - the slow realisation of who we are as a community of believers together, and what God has called us towards together - we invited 24-7’s Andy Freeman and Lucie Shuker to join with us for the evening on Tuesday.

They arrived (along with my office-friend Andrea Percy) just as Barack Obama was being sworn in as America’s 44th President. An historic day for America, and perhaps pivotal for the entire World. I hope that last night’s conversations with Andy and Lucie prove to be pivotal for our small mustard seed community.

Lucie kicked it off by asking us to discuss/explore three core questions in smaller groups;

1. Where have we come from?
(What is our back-story? What have the significant moments along that journey been?)

2. Where are we now?
(In what ways do we currently express our ‘life together’? What are our regular rhythms of life, our spiritual practices? What are our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats?)

3. Where are we going?
(What is our vision? What would we like to see in five year’s time... and how do we get there?)

As well as the community meals (where we often break bread and pray together, read scripture and sometimes sing together), we realised that we’ve begun to express our life-together in other ways too... in prayer times and story-telling, Bible and book-study, in parties and celebrations, in reaching out to others in different ways.

But in all of this, we realised that it is our relationships that sustain us. “Is this family?” Andy asked. “Is Jesus central? Is it centred around prayer? Can people who don’t know Jesus yet get involved with you? Would they find welcome among you?” When Andy asked what we’d say to someone who asked what we were about, Jon replied immediately; “I’d talk about my friends.”

Rosi; “It’s brought Romford alive for me. I’ve never seen Romford like this before... for me, our community life has opened up my heart for the wider community, and it’s extended into my work too.”

Jon: “I feel encouraged to do what I do better... inspired.”

Ian: “A lot of people talk about ‘going somewhere’ to church... sometimes it’s hard to explain that for me it’s just about life.”

When Andy asked how someone could get involved, I suggested that he ask Miranda, who’s recently ‘got involved’. After joking about my persistent emailing [grin], we agreed that there isn’t really anything to ‘join’ at the moment, but anyone was welcome to ‘join in’, whether they belonged to churches or not, whether they were believers or not.

“Would you call this church then?” Andy probed. And again, Jon was unhesitant. “All the time!”

Because of the mid-week time-pressure, we didn’t explore the third question much - Where are we going? What is our vision? But maybe this is something that we need to do ourselves over the next few weeks.

Phil.