Recently in The Church Category

It's been a long, long time since I've been here - same for you I suspect - but with a New Year on the horizon, restarting blogs is a bit like restarting at the gym... only this one I'll aim to actually keep!

Provoked into action by finding my friend - and part of the All Souls team now - Luke Taylor, Pastor to the Ivybridge Community Church - on film. He's in a segment from a Diocese of London video showcasing mission and outreach work in London. You'll find the few minutes with Luke and the Ivybridge team, church and teens (including one or two other faces you'll recognise from All Souls) around three minutes in to the piece:

London Mission from London Diocese on Vimeo.

How would you describe All Souls to someone who's thinking of coming along?

That's the question we set in the survey. Some ninety responses later and I'm scratching my head to know how to communicate the results...

But try this:
It's a wordle - from a terrifyingly addictive website, where you simply enter your text (you can put anything into it - "War and Peace", the lyrics of U2...), it strips out common words (like "and" or "it"), counts the rest and assigns size according to popularity.

The more popular the term, the bigger the word is shown.

And I haven't touched the data before entering it, apart from the obvious stuff: removing "All Souls", taking out people's names and (in just one instance) a rather misleading word (someone wrote "not boring", so wordle just selected "boring"!!)...

Every single survey response went into the pot.

It's the image that's going to be on the front of postcards dropping through the letter box of every house in the area during the week leading up to September 6th - and they'll be available to take away as invitations from church too.

God's good - this isn't down to us, it's what He's been doing here... and there's plenty more to come!

Been a while since I've quoted Seth Godin's blog on business, leadership and marketing, but once again he strikes a nail firmly on the head - ask yourself what the church in this country could do if it took this seriously....?

"You've probably seen it. The fish monger sees a decline in business, so they have less money to spend on upkeep and inventory, so they keep the fish a bit longer and don't clean up as often, so of course, business declines and then they have even less money... Eventually, you have an empty, smelly fish store that's out of business.

[Godin then says much the same of "The doctor [who] has fewer patients..." and "The newspaper which has fewer advertisers..."]

As Tom Peters says, "You can't shrink your way to greatness," and yet that's what so many dying businesses try to do. They hunker down and wait for things to get better, but they don't. This isn't a dip, it's a cul de sac. It's over.

Right this minute, you still have some cash, some customers, some momentum... Instead of squandering it in a long, slow, death spiral, do something else. Buy a new platform. Move. Find new products for the customers that still trust you.

Change is a bear, but it's better than death."

Spent today in rather remarkable company - most of the London Bishops, Archdeacons and Diocesan figures, together with a veritable who's-who of London anglican church leaders of all sorts of stripes, but one thing in common - a commitment to church-planting as a key part of a London-wide strategy for evangelism and growth.

People talk often of the death of the CofE, but someone hasn't told this bunch - the leaders of HTB, St Helen's Bishopsgate and All Souls, Langham Place, together with many others (including myself, Charles and Dave MacDougal, representing the St Stephen's plants) have been speaking with passion and belief about reaching London...

The conviction at the heart of the meeting is that the Diocese wants to be a "can do" and permission-giving organisation, rather than one that puts barriers in the way - that's not always been the way it's been seen (nor, perhaps, acted), but I do believe that's the intent and it's exciting to hear.

Most of the readers of this blog will know that All Souls is a "twice-planted" church. One hundred years ago by All Saints Isleworth into a newly-populated part of their previously rural parish and then nine years' ago, a fresh start following years' of decline as St Stephen's Twickenham sent a team to get things going again.

It's that second experience of being replanted that, of course, gives me the passion for the effect this can have. The alternative for this particular community would have been a huge church building that was turned into flats (we've even met a builder who had an offer in on All Souls!) and no church community within walking distance. That would have been, as our previous Bishop of Kensington recognised, a complete disaster for Christian witness in St Margarets and Isleworth.

Instead, we've now got a thriving church increasingly populated by people who live locally, many of whom weren't going anywhere to church previously and others who've moved into the area and are delighted to be able to choose to go to a local church.

What's been glorious today is hearing church leaders talking about nothing but outreach, passionate about people meeting Jesus for themselves and willing to do anything they can to make it possble.

Hurdles there are a-plenty, of course - the problem of opposition from other church, the money needed to get buildings usable (something we've known only-too-well here), balancing big-picture strategy with local vision, the need for people resources and key leaders and many more.... but the over-riding feeling of the day has been a positive one of possibility, passion and promise.

Nice to go to a day that invigorates and challenges. Probably more reflections as I mull over the day in the coming week...

What next for All Souls? Well, first, we're effectively planting within our own building on a Sunday afternoon. Perhaps one day we'll be looking to plant elsewhere... what we've been given by the risk-taking of the church-planters of St Stephen's, we want to pass on.

I've always been a bit of a fan of Chris Moyles, the load-mouthed, opinionated (and, imho, genius) Radio 1 Breakfast presenter - though I don't get to listen to him much these days... and he's created a bit of a stir this past week on the Christian facebook / YouTube / twitter channels with his remarks - and subsequent animated discussion - live on Radio 1 about a Songs of Praise Pentecost service from Kingsgate Community Church in Peterborough.

It's a wonderful 6 minutes of Radio - he's been bowled over completely by watching a service that has "life", "enthusiasm" and "a bass guitar"... but isn't it surprising how surprised most of us are that he's responded like that?

There's a whole chunk of people we've assumed will never respond to church positively - the 'cool', the cynical, men, teenagers, rich people... you name it, we've written them off.

It doesn't have to be that way though - we've seen that many, many times. People can find what they don't expect in church, something that cuts through their childhood experiences (Moyles was brought up Catholic), prejudices and cynicism.

Who would you ask to church, but have assumed they'd just laugh?

Our kids love pouring over the family photo albums. Sad, really, that most of our photos are on a computer now, since they love lying on their tummies on the bed, flicking through the (real) pages and asking "who was that?", "why wasn't I there?" ("Because you weren't born then..." "Why not?"). They're a celebration of the past and, I think, give them a sense of security for the future - who they are, where they belong.

God's people are shown doing this sort of thing over and again throughout scripture - sometimes it's with rocks rather than photos (as when crossing the Jordan), other times with words (as many of the Psalms retell the past), but each time, it's stories of God's grace that are celebrated together.

It seems to me that it's one of the very most important things that a church community can/must do - celebrate God's goodness in their midst, tell one another stories of that goodness... open the family photo album and enjoy the snapshots of grace.

Church Annual Meetings have a rotten bad name in CofE circles - but they really needn't. Our's is, genuinely, one of the most spiritually uplifting evenings of the year for me and for many others. We focus on 'snapshots of grace' as a way of understanding our written reports (and by having them written down and minimising elections, we keep the business part of the meeting to less than 30 minutes) and then, in the context of worship, have an 'open mic' for people to bring out their own snapshots - or testimony, I guess - of what God's been doing.

Last Thursday evening, we spent nearly 50 minutes doing just that - and ran out of time for more. People spoke of God walking with them through dark times, mending relationships, answering prayer, helping them belong, challenging their parenting and building faith.

We need to go on finding ways of opening up the photo album - it's encouraged and challenged me no end!

Bishop Tom Wright has prime space in the Times today (and available to read online too) to talk about Easter and - no surprise - grabs the opportunity with both hands.

It's a wonderfully concise and stirring piece on the significance of a bodily resurrection for a world that "lurches between anarchy and tyranny" and a church that needs to take up the tasks of "beauty and justice".

Here's a flavour from the last few paragraphs - do go and read the rest.

Easter is about a new creation that has already begun. God is remaking His world, challenging all the other powers that think that is their job. The rich, wise order of creation and its glorious, abundant beauty are reaffirmed on the other side of the thing that always threatens justice and beauty - death. Christianity's critics have always sneered that nothing has changed. But everything has. The world is a different place.

Easter has been sidelined because this message doesn't fit our prevailing world view. For at least 200 years the West has lived on the dream that we can bring justice and beauty to the world all by ourselves.

The split between God and the "real" world has produced a public life that lurches between anarchy and tyranny, and an aesthetic that swings dramatically between sentimentalism and brutalism. But we still want to do things our own way, even though we laugh at politicians who claim to be saving the world, and artists who claim "inspiration" when they put cows in formaldehyde.

The world wants to hush up the real meaning of Easter. Death is the final weapon of the tyrant or, for that matter, the anarchist, and resurrection indicates that this weapon doesn't have the last word. When the Church begins to work with Easter energy on the twin tasks of justice and beauty, we may find that it can face down the sneers of sceptics, and speak once more of Jesus in a way that will be heard.

Time Magazine has just run a great piece - thought-provoking even if (perhaps especially if) you don't go with all their assumptions - about 10 Ideas Changing the World Right Now:

There's some gloriously provocative stuff here that's endlessly quotable and could sustain several blogs for months, but I homed in (naturally enough) on:

3. The New Calvinism

Here's a flavour of the piece...

If you really want to follow the development of conservative Christianity, track its musical hits. In the early 1900s you might have heard "The Old Rugged Cross," a celebration of the atonement. By the 1980s you could have shared the Jesus-is-my-buddy intimacy of "Shine, Jesus, Shine." And today, more and more top songs feature a God who is very big, while we are...well, hark the David Crowder Band: "I am full of earth/ You are heaven's worth/ I am stained with dirt/ Prone to depravity."

Calvinism is back, and not just musically. John Calvin's 16th century reply to medieval Catholicism's buy-your-way-out-of-purgatory excesses is Evangelicalism's latest success story, complete with an utterly sovereign and micromanaging deity, sinful and puny humanity, and the combination's logical consequence, predestination: the belief that before time's dawn, God decided whom he would save (or not), unaffected by any subsequent human action or decision.

Sadly, the 'take home' from the article is the backbiting between Christians (including the 'flame wars' in online forums!), but it's an interesting observation of the way religious movements often oscillate between extremes - and tracking them by way of their worship music is a particularly appealing method.

If you've been a church-goer for long enough, what have you seen change in the music focus of the churches you've been part of? And is it just the lyrics that are significant? I reckon you could track a lot by style/feel and even key?