We had a really great session today.  We have a fun day in the local town centre on Saturday in which we are distributing packs of eggs with a ‘Happy Easter–God loves you’ message and the bus is going to have a healing prayer booth and a prayer deck.  We have been working on a new reflective activity for that day and Andy suggested we trialed it with the group.

It was a good quiet day where we did a lot of talking about all sorts of stuff before Andy took the guys through the exercise which involved looking at a series of five pictures and commenting on them.  It was a bit high risk becasue this group do not have a lot of skills in talking about feelings.  Some things we had expected but not all.

The questions for reflection were: What does this remind you of? and How does it make you feel?  There was also a little tent fold card (above for them to take away.  As they passed the pictures round the hand was rotated and people saw a great variety of things: a child’s hand, beckoning, pointing (directions and a teacher), reaching out for a child’s hand.  The responses to the gardener were pretty obvious.  Worth showing that one first on another occasion.  The thing that really sparked was that Sheila took the picture of the olive branch and siad that see could imagine looking at it when she felt upset and that it would make her feel peaceful.  She is a really quiet lady but spoke for quite a while and the others began to see what she meant.  It led on to some comments about the meaning of pictures and also a comment from one of the others about the fact that it takes time to clarify what you think.  We were well impressed with the response.

They were pretty impressed that Cabaret Connexion had decided to adopt their suggestion of BYO drinks.  Andy was busy recruiting them for the next event.

The content in the group stayed at a relatively low level.  Belief issues stayed in the background.  We found that it was quite difficult to keep the group on track.  Like all of their generation they accept direction but have a tendency to go off at a tangent.  Our attempts to segue into the belief talk part have been tough.  In the end we talked with them about it and have bought a high-class LCD candle (no naked flames on the bus) which could be used to signal that we are focusing in.  We will see how it works

Having said that we did begin to explore the issue of when were these guys aware of their spiritual side.  The descriptions of awareness were quite limited which may have been because they may have a much more exacting criterion for spirituality than succeeding generations.  This term we have continued to talk about the soul and broadened out the category of spiritual a little to the non-material.  To keep the subject open I asked people to bring along photographs which linked them to their past so that we could scan them and share them.

This looks like a rich seam to mine at a number of levels.  We will see what happens.

Alongside all this Andy still holds the respect and attention of the group.  It’s impressive to watch him in action as he produces scones from his oven and Welsh cakes on the hob while people chat and offer him advice.

There were two extra visitors both of whom come from the villge and are members of the church.  Videoing is going to be a problem as one member, the youngest, was very keen not to feature in any video.  However we were able to get Andy talking to the group about the idea of thin places.   I’ll upload it whn I get back from holiday

Report

Yesterday was good.  Andy announced that he had consulted all the users and that they agreed that most of the tables could come out of the lower deck.  How long until it happens we don’t know.  It was Millie’s 70th birthday (of which more below) so we had cake and sausage rolls. 

Andy asked people how they had got on with their prayer sheets.  Several had prayed a few times.  Others had looked at the pictures.  The ‘prayers’ were described as thinking good thoughts about the person rather than intentionally directed to God in the name of Jesus.  It will be interesting to see how prayer develops.   He also sold tickets for the next Cabaret Connexion which is only a couple of weeks away.

Andy and I had agreed that we would lay hands on Millie as part of her birthday celebration and demonstrate a prayer of blessing.  As we were getting ready to do that I felt to grab my ipod from the car and play the group as close to a traditional hymn as I could get.  It was Amy Grant singing, What a friend we have in Jesus.  This led to a conversation which weaved on throughout the afternoon and we took suggestions for hymns they would like to hear.  Two of the women had been to Sunday School at the Gospel Hall and demonstrated Wide, wide as the ocean–word and action perfect!  They also told how the woman from the gospel hall had, whenever she met them in the street, stopped them to lay hands on them and pray for them.  That’s a story worth pursuing.

 Anyway, we did pray for Millie and anoint her with oil and also prayed for Gerald, a local parish councillor and occasional attender at the parish church.  He is really quite unwell and needed to use his inhaler but even then was struggling.

Another interesting thing is that at the end of the After School Club the team pray together.  Yesterday, for the second time, three of the young people asked if they could join in.  Hard to interpret but something’s going on.

Reflection

Millie lives at the other end of Lacock, always helps on the bus and become a follower of Jesus in the past few years.  Two guys from the church met her son at a party and invited him to Alpha.  Millie followed the following year much to the surprise of friends and family and has grown steadily.  She says that for the first time in her life people actually think she is worth listening to.  My feeling is that Millie may be a critical part of the team.  She shares demographics with the group and lives in their culture.  I need to get her perceptions on what is going on.  I am not getting much light on how far we are genuinely planting church.  I need to sit down with Mary (my project mentor).  I also need to read on ecclesiology.  When is a gathering a church?

I didn’t make the group this week so Andy has written up what happened.

The group was bigger today with another couple of people coming from the village. I distributed the printout of the group’s pictures, and there was quite a bit of comment on them and general approval of how each other looked. I began by recapping what we were doing for the benefit of those not here last week. We then remembered that we had wanted some guidance about how to pray. I asked Millie to explain how she prayed. She said she thought about the person and then asked God to bless them, if they had something wrong then should would ask God to help them with it, illness she would pray for healing. I asked the group if they had any other comments, Betty said the difficulty sometimes is getting started and being self-conscious. They felt better about trying it I think. I did explain that they didn’t have to do it, but only if they wanted to. I did say though, that we would be looking for feedback next week. 

An interesting thing happened which was partly prompted by the spiritual exercises today. Lynda came on board today, she didn’t come last week. She wanted to chat to me after the others had started to leave. We chatted upper deck of the bus. She brought up a question that she had attempted to ask me earlier in the year. That conversation had been derailed by interruptions. She talked about how someone had challenged her to upgrade her faith. I shared a bit of my story. I think I can go back to her to continue the conversation. She has been mulling this over for several months now. I am sure the talk of prayer today prompted her to bring it up again.

Today was the first day back for the bus at Corsham Road.  By the time I got there some of the mums were on their way to the top deck with their toddlers and soon after Barbara arrived.  Then came Pam and Alan, Sheila, Mabel and Gerald and Andy went to collect Betty.  Some of these people live a few doors away from one another but only meet on the bus.  Andy had to work hard to break into the conversation.  First he went through the evacuation procedure which rapidly degenerated into laughter about who could jump out of the emergency door, then he introduced the local librarian.  My feeling is that most of these guys don’t need extra access to books, though it did give us chance to ask a bit about access to other media.

Finally Andy was able to get around to suggesting an experiment which he called Spiritual Exercises.  He suggested that we start with a prayer sheet which each person could have as a reminder.  Barbara asked for guidelines.  I suggested that we generated some between us next week.  When I suggested that we could identify things that each person wanted to pray for, I was asked, “What sort of things?”, which will be a great discussion to open up next week.

Reflection

• How far does the event need to be intentional to be a meeting of the church?  If church is everything, then it ends up being nothing.

• I am also interested in the possibility that within my tradition church means something different to the use of the term by Anglicans and Methodists. 

• Stephen’s challenge that EC should be low investment does not ring true from either the DVD or from the alt.worship scene.  What we did in 1973 was much lower maintainence, with no staff, young families and an ability to function out of relationship rather than roles or programmes.  If we wanted to go in that direction wouldn’t we be using ‘simple church’ models–less investment but possibly less mission?

• Andy is keen to introduce the project as an experiment.
• Sally does not want us to talk about gradually moving the meeting place to a home.  The location is important to the residents.
• Sally struggled with the idea of talking about planting church and wondered whether she needed to contact the bishop–Mike Wood.  Once I suggested that the project could be seen as a community of discipleship within the parish, there was no problem.  The last thing we need is to become a Fresh Expression.  It will be worth seeing whether there are complications when working together.  The Anglican thing is remarkably hierarchical and–for all the criticisms made of the house churches over the years–ours is much more consensual.

 Yesterday, Andy and I caught up over coffee.

• Andy reiterated the experiment thing as this would allow people to dip out if they wished.  We will talk of finishing up at Christmas.
• Andy will propose the project next Tuesday and will suggest creating a prayer wall or file which can have photos of each of us and list the topics for prayer and feedback.
• If it seems good, we will suggest the possibility of videoing the sessions.

This is where it all starts.  If you want to get the context of the project you can find out more about the bus at Open Blue.  You can see how we connect with funding agencies for the parent and toddler group and after school club here and some of the feeling in the area in this somewhat dated article.