I went to a new ‘church’ yesterday. I use the term church about as loosely as I can. This was, I guess, real cafe church in as much as it was in a real cafe, by it didn’t feel much like church.

This is the latest offering from the Sanctus people in Manchester city centre and is aimed at young families. Sanctus has always intrigued be but at the same time has scared me off a little in the way it describes itself as being for city centre types who live the city life and want a city style spiritual activity. I am not a city type (apart from my football allegiance obviously) so whilst the idea of it appealed to me, I thought I would get fingers pointed at me and I would be escorted to the train station and sent packing on the first train back to suburbia.

That didn’t happen, at least not this week, even when I confessed to not living in the city during the many conversations I had with Al and the rest of the people there.

The great thing was this felt so much like the early days of BCLC, it was a tad shambolic at times, but no one was expecting anything different, I don’t think anyone was expecting anything to be honest.

Speaking to Al and his wife Sarah afterwards it was really interesting to hear them speak of people not being building centric and looking at the whole of the city as a series of potential locations for things to happen.

Early days but I think I could get quite attached to this activity for a bit and in Al I think I have found someone in the clergy (he is a Methodist minister) who actually gets what is happening and, more importantly, what people of faith (not necessarily churches) need to do to share their stories with the wider community.

As always, I will keep you posted.

Did any of you see the wonderful ‘Choir’ series on the telly recently? I did and what an uplifting tale of one person’s vision for a community being realised so effectively. For those of you unfamilliar with the concept, Gareth Malone, a choirmaster goes into a community, be that a school or, in the case of series 3, an actual community (South Oxhey) and transforms the people therein through the power of communal singing.

Previously, I gather, he has done this in schools but this time he has taken on all ages from all areas of the town and merged them into a cohesive, and not unpleasant sounding, group of singers. The effect this has had on the town of South Oxhey was quite startling. Here we have a singing group that consists of what were 3 or 4 disparate (and previously non-existant) singing groups. The climax of the series was the South Oxhey Festival, a one day event on a bank holiday to which the whole town was invited to celebrate all that was good about South Oxhey and, of course, hear the choir sing.

To see the pride the partcipants and the watching crowd had in their town was inspiring.

To hear the comments about meeting new people and making new friends made me think back to my time at church. This is apposite as I was invited to a service this weekend on what is known as ‘(please, please, please) come back to church sunday (we’re desperate for people but not so much as we would actually change anything about the way we do anything to make it any more appealing in any way)’. The ‘church’  want us all to go back, to return to the fold. We know that you were led astray by the devil but God is still there every Sunday at the same time, doing the same things and he isn’t even a little bit miffed that you haven’t been in a while. So come on, come back and we’ll pretend it never happened, in fact we’ll pretend nothing ever happens, better still we will actually do nothing so we don’t even have to pretend.

I couldn’t help but contrast this notion of going back and returning to that of the choir going forward, trying something new, inspiring and leading people into new experiences. Experiences that enhance their life and build them spiritually and physically. Experiences that bring them together for the communal good. And with no agenda but that. You don’t have to believe, you just have to be.

The church is one of the few organisations that has the wherewithall to do something like Malone has done but it seems too content to sit on it’s collective big backside and ‘beg’ people to come back rather than get out there and do something for meaningful for them.

So, thanks, but no thanks, I won’t be going back any day soon.

Just got back from Greenbelt 09 where the theme for the festival was ‘Standing in the long now’. On my experience of the weekend I would alter that slightly and call it ‘Standing in the long queue’.

I really cannot remember that last time I had to queue so much and I started the summer going to Glastonbury. The thing was, at Glastonbury (G), there were queues for the loos, that would be expected and it was much the same at Greenbelt (GB). The problem with GB was that everything that was even remotely popular had to be queued for, usually for about an hour prior to the item starting. I think the longest recorded queue from someone in our party was 2 and a half hours for Rob Bell.

At times the enforcement of the queueing was a little heavy handed. Take the 2nd Beer & Hymns session. When I went into the beer tent a good hour and a half before the planned start to have a quick beer with Dylan (whilst he ate our shared pancake) there were already quite a lot of people in there. We sat outside and watched the queue form. Meanwhile some of our friends and family arrived to meet up with us before we moved on to our next activity (we had already done the singing the day before) so I suggested they nip in through the side of the fence and join me whilst we waited for the others to arrive. Eventually the stewards realised that people were getting in this way so they posted someone to stop it. Consequently some of our friends were on the wrong side of the fence. When they wanted to go off and do other things I suggested their children came with us so I politely asked the steward if they could come in for a few minutes and sat with us, whilst I finished my drink.

‘No they can’t’ I was told, ‘we are at the legal limit for the number of people and we would be breaking the law if we let them in’. This was probably the case, there were probably more people in than should have been but there is no way they could have known how many more as there was no way they could have known how many were actually in there. There could have been a conversation here whereby they established how many children we wanted to bring in (2) and how long we would be staying for (5 minutes) but there wasn’t. So instead we asked if our child could nip out that way to be with his friends on the other side. ‘No he has to go through the front gate’, presumably so they could let someone in to keep the numbers precise. So I lifted him over the fence and off he went.

I finished my drink and we all moved off, no real harm done, some people were let in to the ’space’ we had vacated and off we went to queue for something else. The whole thing tainted our weekend though when it really didn’t need to.

So a couple of questions for the GB organisers (lest they be reading this)

• Why were the most popular activities not put in venues that could accomodate the expected interest? e.g. Rob Bell had a 2-3 hour queue fro each of his sessions. Given that he is quite a popular character and he was featured prominently in the guide and he was recommended by a lot of people, why wasn’t he on the main stage?
• Why is there a fence round the beer tent?
• Why can’t the stewards use their common sense?
• Why wasn’t it really sunny?

I did enjoy my GB though, good to see some old friends and to make some new ones (Simon Thomas is on the christmas card list). I really enjoyed seeing and hearing Paul Cookson and Stewart Henderson, two poets that are very entertaining. I also thought that Dans le Sac vs Scrobious Pip were excellent. I would probably not seek out 100 Philistines Foreskins again though (no offence).

So will I be going next year (yes) will I grumble a bit about stuff (probably), still, when you get to 27 you do get a bit tetchy in your old age.

Which is just as well as we are holidaying in the UK this year. So instead of my usual thong and sandals I shall be kitted out in a wet suit and wellies – nice.

I haven’t been on here in a while and when I do return I like to see how many hits I have had and how they found me. It seems that some people came here via a page on the URC web site where they list what they like to call ‘URC bloggers’. So I popped over to see my blog in lights… but what’s this? I am nowhere to be seen!! Have I been removed, struck off the URC blog register!! What did I do to deserve this, has someone been monitoring my recent lack of church attendance, or worse, has someone actually read the bloody thing?

Anyway, whatever the reason, I thought it might be time for me to read a few of the blogs there and after 2 or 3 it struck me what the problem was with mine… I haven’t just got back from a recent trip to the holy land.

It would appear from my (limited) research that the main criterion for getting your voice heard in the URC these days is some holiday snaps from Palestine and a moving account of the terrible conditions in which the people live ‘where Jesus walked’ you encountered on your ‘journey’.

I can sort of see the point of going to Isreal from a historical and political perspective. The place is strewn with so many Biblical reference points and locations and absolutely littered with the tragic victims of an intrangable political situation. But really, it what way does it speak to ministers and religious leaders (on neither side of the political divide) taking time out from their thoroughly middle class, suburban, or even urban, situations?

So where am I holidaying? Well I am going on an epic odyssey to the spiritual home of my VW camper van – Cornwall. I shall be so tired from just waving at my fellow vdubbers on the road that I shall need a holiday, but not one in the ‘land where Jesus walked’, I prefer the land where he walks today.

This has been playing on my mind all weekend.

Friday night at Weekenders and we had virtually everyone there. Some came back after a short layoff. It was supposed to be an exciting night, we were to announce the parts for the forthcoming production. However, we couldn’t. Or rather we weren’t allowed to because some of the little darlings were playing up bad style.

Now we run a fairly relaxed regime on a Friday night, we give the kids some space and, on the whole, they take that and enjoy themselves. They have always mixed well. That is until one of the regulars introduced some of his friends, local lads, who in turn introduced their friends. This was great, we have often worried that it can be a bit cosy at times and it needed a bit more edge to it. And that is what we got and have continued to get for the past couple of months and we have kept it together on the whole. Of course there have been disputes and a bit of ‘them and us’ between the originals and the newbies, but that was to be expected and we held it all together. Until Friday.

The real problem is that the lad who invited the local lads in fell out with them and what started as a bit of needle between him, his brother and these other lads quickly escalated into quite a lot of nastiness and some physical violence.

We had to take some action, the whole evening was being hijacked by a few mouthy types and it was becomeing distressing for quite a few there. So we excluded the troublemakers. It was the obvious thing to do, it was the only thing to do and yet it has troubled me from the moment the decision was taken.

And yet it shouldn’t really. We have always run the club for the kids, they are allowed to make the decisions and they impose their own limits and authority over the thing. That was something we were (and are) proud of, that’s how it worked. These new lads couldn’t cope with that privilege and responsibility.  I am sure that this isn’t their fault etc. and part of me feels rather mean to deny them the chance to experience what is essentially a great place for kids to spend their Friday nights. But they had a lot of chances and blew them all.

Some of them will never get what we do and the way we do it and we won’t see them again. Some, I suspect, will try to come back and we will have to make a call on whether we feel they can step up and join in on the same terms as the rest of the group.

I hope they can.

Someone made a comment on the blog which always makes me feel guilty that I haven’t written anything for ages.

I am going to write something today though, inspired by the many legions of people that search for ‘remember me I’m the one who had your babies eyes’ or ‘get yourself connected’ and end up here.

Weekenders are starting a pantomime on Friday. This is our first real activity since we had the influx of ‘local kids’ in the past few weeks. We have pretty much always been a fairly close-knit sort of group, people came because they knew people at the church or their friends invited them along. Of late this has changed a little with quite a few (we regularly get 25 kids a week there now) locals, who have heard about the club from various places, coming along to see what it is all about. Most of them seem to enjoy it enough to stay.

This is, of course, brilliant. We have probably reached our maximum capacity now and will have to start a waiting list. It has caused some tensions between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ but nothing we can’t handle.

So I will promise here and now to faithfully document what we get up to in the next few months and will extend a warm welcome to all of you to come along and watch our first production in our new home.

Although I haven’t been back to church on a Sunday since we left I am still in touch with people that do still attend. I have found out, for instance, that Inaspace is not doing terribly well since our departure.

This saddens me a little but doesn’t really suprise me. I don’t say that out of some conceited notion that it was ‘all about us’ but I do think that we did Inaspace really well and for one very simple reason. We got it.

If it goes under then so be it. Everything has its time and maybe time is up for this particular activity/group. I understand that in their attempts to breathe new life into things they are going to start doing it bi-weekly and in the evening instead of the morning. Both good initiatives, however, in order to inject some new ideas they are going to troop over to a cafe church in Timperley for inspiration. Quite apart from my general disdain for the whole ‘cafe-church’ phenomenon, how are they going to pick up what will work in Edgeley, ostensibly a poor working class area, from people in Timperley, an altogether more middle class and affluent place?

Moving the time etc. is a good move because it will work better for the people that attend and that is the key to the whole thing. BCLC and latterly Inaspace worked because of the place, the time and the people that attended. Once one of those changed (the place) something got lost along with it that has necessitated changing one or both of the other elements. But it did not and has never, to my recollection, been so bad in terms of content that it needed to replicate stuff that other churches were doing.

And so I fear for its future, but then if it doesn’t die then nothing can grow in its place so maybe it’s for the best.

There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life

So spaketh the atheist-in-chief, Richard Dawkins and thus it came to pass…. people waiting at the bus stop, plastered to the side of  the bus.

I like this story.  I understand that the ‘probably’ is there to avoid the advertising standards council blocking the ad so really they are saying: ‘There’s no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life’.

I have to admire their certainty. To know something so absolutely without a shadow of a doubt is obviously a way to a worry free life, although the only real way to do that, in this sense, would be to know everything. I guess you could argue that a little mystery in life does add to the enjoyment, most people enjoy a thrilling book or film where you don’t know the ending, but again I take the broad sense in what they are trying to say.

And there is no veiled insult to people of belief. No mention of an ‘imaginary friend’ which, of all the ways you can insult someone with a belief in an almighty, has to be one of the most belittling. Whether the atheists like it or not God, for those who believe in the existence of it (gender neutral), is very real. Of course there is no scientific evidence that would be accetable to prove this but then that can be said of a lot of things people readily accept.

If I am feeling happy, that feeling is very real, there could be any number of reasons for my feeling that way none of which I could explain or prove but the feeling is there none the less. Or love, I know if someone loves me and it’s not just because of the things they do for me, it is something greater something transcendental, something I cannot prove or touch or see. But it is real and it exists.

That is what God is I believe. Something very real that I cannot touch or see but know is there.

Sometimes people say they ‘found love when they weren’t really looking for it’. I hope that some of these atheists are not as certain as they claim and that some do find God, even though they are not looking. Not in any religious way (that’s what most of the rest of this blog rails against) but in a way that allows them to enjoy some of the mystery of life and not have to have a rational explanation for everything.

Then you can really stop worrying and enjoy your life.

So, not only do we have the largest brick built structure in Europe, we now have 2 (that’s right two – count em) players in the BDO world-darts-cup-thing semi-final. Why would anyone ever want to live anywhere else?

Following on from calls for financial aid for buy to let landlords, the government today announced plans for compensation to be paid to victims of a scam that  ’sweeps’ offices every year and leaves thousands of people out of pocket and feeling ‘a little bit disappointed’.

The hapless victims invest a hard earned plucky little great british pound in some exotic sounding project, most of which fall at the first hurdle. And even if you are lucky enough to enjoy some success you have to reinvest all your winnings in cakes the following Monday.

A spokesperson for the government confirmed the iniative today, although reports that it might be extended to bingo were quashed because everyone knows that it’s too much fun to play so who cares if you lose a bob or two.