Thursday, March 24th, 2005
e~mergent kiwi: plans “expresso”
As per my usual practice, here is a link to a guy in New Zealand in the planning stage of something… It looks like he sees it as another congregation in a church of 200 people. Interesting to hear anyway:
The expresso leadership team met last nite. 5 of us gathered to talk about how we are finding God spiritually, what is church and what a new congregation at Opawa could look like.
Excellent discussion. My summary:
- We’ll meet weekly; with a cycle of 3 weeks of discussion, 1 week of mission, 5th week of fun.
- Looking at Tuesday nites, 8-9 pm, in a local cafe.
- Discussion nites will have an opening ritual and a closing multi-sensory prayer. In between is discussion, with the group choosing the topic/question and different people taking turns to ‘kick-start’ each evening discussion.
- We’re not yet sure about how often we should do communion.
- This will be a congregation of Opawa, seeking to offer a complete church experience, yet seeking to develop it’s own life that could look very different from existing ways that Opawa is church.
- We talked about the tension between small group and being church. How good can a conversation be amongst more than 12 people? If we talk around tables, will that still give us good conversation with a growing mix of one yet many, big yet small? (Any thoughts out there? Can you experience good community in a cafe with 50-70 people clustered around tables talking about one ‘kick-start’?)We have gone away, with different individuals working on opening and closing rituals, others on logo’s, others on ‘group guidelines for a healthy learning experience.’
Persistant aren’t I! Liz gave me an article from the Times on Saturday 5th as well the other day. It talks about the radical approach of the Oxford Diocese for experimenting with new forms of church. They were given a huge pot of cash and so decided to ring fence for these new enterprises [6 of them, i think including maybe, contemplativefire, hOME, i-church]. hOME is led by a guy called Matt Rees. Interestingly he was in Derby for a year on a yerar team a long time ago, and, believe it or not, I was his mentor!!!! I met him at the Inclusive Church conference i went to last December - funny how things go around!! Another friend of mine goes along to hOME and thinks it great!! The article quotes a dream Matt has:
One of his ambitions is to open a cafe “with great local art on the walls and a poetry open mike and free internet access, and a space for adult literacy classes and debt counselling”.
Sounds fun and similar to my “imagine” thing…
