The narrow way?

We've been using the Just People course at WCF over the last few weeks. It's a joint effort between TEAR Fund and Livability, and focusses on justice, compassion and integral mission. And it's been very good, has "grabbed" people and moved conversation along in the whole area of church, community and mission.

Last night we had a couple of guests who I interviewed as part of the evening; the local PCSO and a local councillor. It was an excellent time, eye-opening, challenging and practical. But at one or two points it also raised questions with me. It comes down to this, I think: It would be easy, in a predominantly middle-class community such as ours for the church's community involvement to be co-opted into becoming part of the overall "Let's keep a nice village feel to the area"movement. That may or may not be a good thing; and also may or may not reflect the values of the Kingdom of God. The challenge for us is to walk the tightrope of getting involved without finding that the agenda we are working too is basically someone else's other than Jesus'.

Engage conference

Just back from a full day at Care for the Family's Engage conference. All in all an excellent, thought-provoking day, with lots of great stories and examples of churches that are really making a difference in their community. And some healthy realism as well, in the midst of it, with some helpful talk about doing one thing well rather than trying to do everything. Lots to think about and work and pray through about what it means for us in our context in Wilmington; but there are some exciting possibilities ahead. Some questions to ponder too, that aren't new or unique to our situation by any means but that doesn't make them any less real:

• There is a journey to go on so we're all understanding that getting involved in the community isn't ultimately "about" getting people into church, it doesn't need to be "sneaky evangelism"
• How do we best discern what the real needs are in our community and match them to the resources we have available?
• Are we big enough to get things wrong some of the time and not give up just because it doesn't all happen at once?

Obviously there are plenty of resources available to help with these kind of questions, but the answers have to be owned or else all our efforts could be short-lived. Finally a couple of observations about the day:

• Considering the event was in central London, and given the high proportion of Christians in London who are part of Black Majority churches, they didn't seem well represented at the day. There could be all sorts of good reasons for this, but I was a bit surprised I guess.
• It was encouraging that two of the plenary speakers (Rob Parsons and Ian Coffey) made a point of anchoring part of their talks at least in the Bible; but also interesting that most of the attendees didn't seem to expect that. At least, I didn't see anyone who had Bibles obviously with them or open on their laps (in fairness I didn't get mine out of my bag either). Read into that what you will!