And a Happy New Year

I am very excited about the new year, but more of that later. We still have Christmas to talk about, and what a vintage Christmas it has been in the Priest household. No real arguments to speak of and plenty of laughter and enjoyment (and food and beer obviously).

Not sure what my highlight has been as the days have just got better. We had my mum and dad here to lunch on the 25th, then we had a really lazy boxing day followed by some great games of Cranium and Katy’s new pop quiz dvd. The day fater that we went shopping at the sales at the trafford centre then all my family came round for tea and beer and some interesting singing on the new sing star 80s.

Wednesday was another quiet day and then last night we went for a brilliant curry with Lisa and Ian and her family. Today I am having to catch up on some work which is good because it means I havce got the laptop out and I am able to make this contribution before I go for a run and play some games.

All of which is extremely interesting but what of church life and why are you so excited about the new year, I hear you ask. Well Anne led the worship on Sunday (Christmas day) and did so rather spledidly, some good visuals with helium balloons shooting up to the top of the church to represent our hopes and wishes and then tying them to the crib to represent Jesus coming down to help us achieve them. All good stuff and it was nice to see everyone in church as it always is at this time of year.

Of course we should now be getting ready to go away with our oldest friends from church for the new year weekend. This has been a bit of a fixture for a number of years now but, alas, as with all things it can’t last for ever and, as a family, we felt that we would like to do something different this year and spend time with ourselves and our parents (well Anne’s parents as it happens on nyd).

On new years eve we are going for a chinese meal early doors then playing some games and hanging out at home. Relaxed, informal and hopefully continuing the way the whole festive period has gone. As for seeing our new year regulars it doesn’t look like we will all get together as I had hoped. Our problem with them all is really that they have all receeded from church life when the going has got a little tough. This year has been really hard at church and we don’t feel that the support has been there from the people we thought of as close friends. This has obvious repercussions for our relationship, such as it is, and also has a knock-on effect for the church. I won’t deal with the personal issues it raises here as that would be inappropriate. For the church though we have lost something, it’s not that these people were the cornerstone of everything but their input was significant and when it goes it shows.

I guess this brings me onto the new year and my excitement, we have spent the past n years maintaining things that are crumbling, in our case that is buildings and relationships and to take 2 monumental decisions – to demolish the church and to not go away at new year – we have unburdened ourselves. We are looking to the new year to ‘build a new church’ up the road and to (re)build new relationships.

A real sense of out with the old an in with the new pervades our preparations for the new year and if that isn’t exciting then I don’t know what is.

I hope you feel the same in your situation.

Happy New Year.

Merry Christmas

I heard an article on the radio this morning and it was in reference to the news that half of the schools in Wales now no longer have their regular collective morning worship. There was a lot of talk of the practicalities of having a 1000 kids together in one place etc. but eventually it boiled down to 2 opinions. On the one hand we had the bishop of somewhere saying that they (the children) needed to feed their spiritual hunger and this was best done in a central daily act of worship and on the other hand someone else (sorry I was making the tea and didn’t catch the name of the other persons details) was arguing that yes, the kids did have spiritual needs but they were best served by better all round spiritual education.

I don’t know about you but this sounds a little bit familiar to me.

A final thought on Christmas to mull over whilst tucking into the turkey and mince pies – the birth of Jesus did not make the world a better place but the fact that he was born means that it can be. Very profound I’m sure.

what a weekend that was

I have just had a very busy weekend. We finally performed the pantomime (hurrah) which was a great success (oh no it wasn’t, etc…). Then we made Christingles in BCLC and had the carol service in the evening. Between those I made mince pies with Barbara (my mother in law) to serve with tea after the carols and then promptly forgot to take them down to church. So now we have to scoff the lot at home. What a shame.
Last night Anne and myself met Geoffrey, the local ecumenical officer for the district. Geoffrey is the minister at Cheadle Trinity, a Methodist/URC LEP (don’t we like our TLAs in the URC). This turned out to be quite revealing to me and, I hope, a great help in developing BCLC over the coming months.
I now believe that the church (in general and ours in particular) has taken on board all the years of repeatedly stating that it is more than the buildings and is the people in there. Good stuff and about time too I hear you all cry. Well yes it would be, however we now have a different thing that we hold most sacred, more so than the buildings and that is our hour of worship on a Sunday. Think about it, what causes most discord when it is ‘messed with’ and is discussed least in church meetings and the like? It certainly isn’t the buildings, we will happily talk about those til the cows come home, we will even trust the running of them to a non-christian. What we won’t tolerate though is anyone trying to change the golden hour we spend with God each week.
This has made us feel that we have to somehow do something in that hour that will appeal to everyone, not necessarily a one-size fits all, we can have the children in one room and the adults in another. It is widely expected though that if you are part of the church then you go there for the hour on Sunday and if you don’t then you aren’t. Or you might be but you aren’t as much a part.
This has profound implications for how we develop some sort of outreach programme for the church because our tendency has always been to start with Sunday and work from there. The one thing we know about Sundays is that people would much rather do anything than attend a church service, even shopping. So we need to shift our focus from the golden hour to looking at the week as a whole.
This has implications for BCLC. We started this to be different, diverse and yet we are still trying to fit everything into the one hour on Sunday, just different things. What we need to do is accept that that is impossible and look to providing more of a programme of weekly events that is more accessible to more people. Weekenders can be seen to be part of BCLC. Of course eventually BCLC will be LCBC because that is the only way forward for the church.
Plenty to think about wouldn’t you say?

In the beginning….

This is a somewhat misleading title to the post as it isn’t really the beginning of anything, except maybe this blog so perhaps it is apt after all.
So what is Big Church’s Little Church then? Well the title is a sort of homage to the Big Brother sister show BBLB and was coined by some of the younger members of the group. The concept, I suppose could be related to the ‘emerging church’ movement. Well it is really only I don’t want us to get pigeonholed as that is one of the things we are trying very hard to avoid.
We meet, currently, on a Sunday morning. Oh I ought to say who ‘we’ are really, well we are in the main disaffected church goers. Predominantly Christian although with a broad range of beliefs under that umberella, we just all got very bored with what was happening in our church on a Sunday morning and decided to do something about it. Hence BCLC, amid all sorts of objections and misgivings we just decided one morning that enough was enough and did something else. Now that in itself is difficult for most people in the United Reformed Church to get to grips with (that’s right we didn’t wait for the church meeting to approve it, how hard are we??) but when we announced that we weren’t going to sing hymns either, they were apoplectic.
I am not going to say much more about it now, basically we meet and discuss a theme that we have chosen for a particular month and each week we look at it through the eyes of the world, through the eyes of God and through our own eyes. This incorporates plenty of thought provoking (and life changing) discussion, some theological study and some creativity.
We have been going for 6 weeks or so now and enjoying it on the whole.
I intend to use this blog to talk about BCLC, it’s impact on myself and the other people involved and how the rest of the church has responded.
One thing I will note now is that the church has recently voted to close down the buildings we are in and move to share with the methodists up the road. So I shall be recounting some of that in here as well.