re:generation
Growing a new generation of leaders: the story of re:generation, Romford.
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Author: ben-clymo
Video story: Reconnect
Reconnect
Building community and recreating church: the story of Reconnect, Poole.
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Focus Service: Sheffield Church – update Dec12
The Focus Service, a church for adults with learning disabilities, was founded in 2000 by Baptist minister David Middleton, who continues to lead it. Assistant minister, Keith Blinston of the Church Army, gives an update.
Focus was originally launched as an informal ecumenical project through the collaboration of a number of churches in south Sheffield. In April 2012, it became the first ecumenical BMO in the Church of England, recognising the fact that Focus is supported and recognised by the Yorkshire Baptist Association and Meadowhead Christian Fellowship as well as the Diocese of Sheffield.
Now, eight months on from the official signing, not much has changed in the way the church operates with regards to its services and fellowship group. However, we are being increasingly recognised and involved in the wider Church life. Representatives attend Deanery Synod meetings and the Baptist area meetings. We also have held our first partners' meeting. It has been so beneficial to talk through our concerns, frustrations and ideas with them and has led us to set ourselves a number of goals to achieve.
After the signing of the BMO we had a church meal to celebrate the end of many years of negotiations; this was the first time we had done this together on such a scale. We invited all our members and their carers or parents and had a wonderful time. It was so good in fact that we are going to make it a regular part of our church life.
As part of the leadership of the church, we have two members who are learning disabled. They provide valuable insight when we are planning services and also remind the rest of us about the importance of praying. This is encouraging as one of the habits we try to encourage at our fellowship meetings is that of prayer. To see how these two (and others) have grown in confidence to pray over the years has been a joy and privilege to be part of.
These past months have seen us grow numerically with two new people coming along. We are also finding that people with similar interests are contacting us to come and see what we do and find out what they can learn from us.
Focus uses the Anglican Church of St Paul's, Norton Lees, as its regular venue. However we are a deanery-wide network church that attracts members from across Sheffield. Meetings are fortnightly on Sundays at 7pm and there is also a Focus Fellowship Group meeting every Monday evening.
Moot launches the Host Café – Dec12
Watch Vanessa Elson explaining how the Moot Community has officially opened its Host Café below.
David Meara, the Archdeacon of London, opened the launch event. Church of England priest and presenter of BBC Two's 'Around the World in 80 Faiths', Peter Owen Jones, gave a short address on the theme of Caffeine for the Soul. He looked at 'How do we understand the needs of the soul today?'
He said,
The act of living is so much bigger in every dimension than we have realised. Living as a soul is about living a radical alternative life of gift, which means you feel the effects of yourself on others, and love is the greater of that experience of being. You can only communicate life by being love. The healing from status, the poverty of wealth, the loneliness of luxury, the impermanence of our physicality, but it is earthed in giving, and it is earthed in being.
Host is a new venture of the Moot Community, a fresh expression of church within the Church of England. It is the realisation of a long-held dream to enable those outside the church to build trust in it again and those inside the church to grow in the virtues of faith, hope and love, through the practice of hospitality and generosity.
Open from Monday to Friday, 8.30am to 4pm, Host serves direct-trade coffee, a range of loose leaf teas, pastries and cakes. Through Host, Moot is aiming to restore the St Mary Aldermary church building in Watling Street to its true vocation as a welcoming hub for the local community and a public space where friendships and connections can be developed.
As part of the weekly rhythm of worship and prayer, Host seeks to nurture body, mind and spirit in an expanding programme of arts, meditation, yoga and discussion groups. These currently include daily contemplative prayer, meditation, Serum spirituality discussions and Living the Questions dialogue group. The arts programme will include concerts, open mic performances, poetry and music.
Urgent! We need to transform the denominations (Michael Moynagh)
Michael Moynagh warns that we urgently need to transform the denominations.
In their book on missional innovation and entrepreneurship, The Permanent Revolution, Alan Hirsch and Tim Catchim comment that the UK's Fresh Expressions movement has only marginally impacted the denominations. Fresh expressions have yet to be thoroughly owned by them.
This has already sparked an energetic online debate through Michael Volland's view piece but the question still needs to be asked, should the denominations being doing more to support fresh expressions of church – and if so, what?
Hirsch and Catchim may well be too pessimistic about the current situation. Some of the denominations have made substantial strides in embracing fresh expressions. The Methodist Church, for example, is writing fresh expressions into many of its policies, practices, standing orders and job descriptions. We know some dioceses are doing this too.
Even so, it is clear that we have a long way to go before fresh expressions are deeply embedded in the existing church. The situation is more dire than many realise. Unless the denominations act more urgently, the window of opportunity could soon close.
Even now, a big problem is that senior managers in the denominations don't have the time to push forward the mixed economy agenda – fresh and inherited expressions of church existing alongside each other in mutual support.
They are swamped by urgent maintenance questions ranging from employment and other policies, to new appointments, to initiating and managing re-organisation (read downsizing), to fire-fighting crises.
The problem is about to get a whole lot worse. On current trends, between 2015 and 2030 huge numbers will drop out of church as the baby-boom generation passes away. The need to manage contraction and to re-organise will increase exponentially. Senior managers will have even less time for encouraging fresh expressions.
Fortunately, as money and time become increasingly constrained, not all is lost. Here are some relatively 'easy wins' to advance the mixed economy.
- As posts become vacant, include 'encouraging fresh expressions' in the job description of the new holder. If this was done steadily and consistently for denominational and local-church appointments, a revolution would eventually occur in the direction of a denomination's ministry.
- Of course, those newly appointed would need support and advice on now to encourage fresh expressions. Each denomination or diocese should, therefore, appoint one person – in a new senior post – with the task of forming 'learning communities' among clergy and lay people who are encouraging or catalysing new types of church. Participants would meet three or four times a year to learn from each other's experiences, set goals and hold each other to account for seeking to achieve these goals. Church planters in Europe have found these communities to be very fruitful. 'Fresh Expressions Advisers', who convene such groups, should themselves be networked nationally (as is beginning to happen) so that they can learn good practice from one another.
- Fresh Expressions Advisers will need increasing financial support as the number of mixed-economy appointments grows. In the Church of England at least, this support should be funded from the rents of some of the clergy houses that are no longer needed due to the falling number of stipendiary ministers. Decline would fund growth.
These proposals could transform the denominations in the medium to long term. Where this has not already happened, they would require the switch of only one post in the denomination or diocese from maintaining inherited church to fresh expressions. Is this too big a price to pay?
Fresh expressions are not the only aspect of the church's mission, but they are playing an increasingly vital role.
Statistical evidence – gathered by Church Army's Sheffield Centre – from Canterbury, Leicester and Liverpool dioceses show that fresh expressions now represent approaching one fifth of the churches in those dioceses. A growing number have been around for more than five years.
Dioceses and denominations that intentionally support fresh expressions do see fruit. They reconnect with and serve parts of society that are outside the church's orbit. So why not take some relatively simple, but bold steps and clear a path for fresh expressions?
Fresh Expressions looks to the future
Fresh Expressions is to continue its work 'well beyond 2014'. Bishop Graham Cray, Archbishops' Missioner and leader of the national Fresh Expressions team, confirmed the movement was 'staying in business' during a speech at its national day conference to review progress to date and to look to the future.
Addressing Following the missionary Spirit – going forward with fresh expressions, Graham Cray emphasised an ongoing role for the team:
We will continue to network pioneers, gather learning, publish stories, and provide the training needed. New partners are joining and longer-standing ones identifying the work that is needed well beyond 2014.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, spoke of missional opportunity and the importance of belonging:
Why should people still be interested in the church? Because the church is what speaks to us about the possibility that all human beings can belong together by the grace and acceptance of God if they'd only just… turn round, repent and believe, turn round and trust, look to the generosity of the God who created and redeemed you, look into the face of the stranger in a completely new way.
So what we've been looking at and thinking about in terms of fresh expressions (of church) is… belonging being created. People who thought they didn't matter, they weren't welcome, are discovering that they are; suddenly finding there's a challenge about community that only the Christian vision or the Christian community can help them with.
In a poignant moment, Rowan Williams was later prayed for by the President of the Methodist Conference, Mark Wakelin; Moderator of the URC General Assembly, Val Morrison, and a group of young adults from re:generation, a Methodist fresh expression of church in Romford.
Martyn Atkins, General Secretary of the Methodist Church – in looking to the future – said,
Fresh expressions have rescued the church in numerical decline… and the introspection and desperation that come about from that. I don't buy the narrative that fresh expressions is simply a knee jerk reaction to how you get more bums on seats, rather I see it as an impulse of the missionary Spirit that rescues is from the introspection of certain kinds of ecclesial thinking.
He also called for an 'evolving and real theological narrative' for the inherited church – as well as fresh expressions.
We must move in the future, at a level of proper theological engagement, from the approach of some people, that the whole of inherited church is all right, to be defended without question, and anything that is seen in their eyes to detract from that needs to be held up to the light every five minutes or uprooted every two years to see whether or not it is growing. Or indeed, to be knocked around the head to be asked if it can still stand up straight! We do need an evolving and a real theological narrative.
Full video and audio files from all contributors on the day can be found on the Following the missionary Spirit page.
Following the missionary Spirit (Graham Cray)
Bishop Graham Cray, Archbishops' Missioner and leader of the Fresh Expressions team, sees the planting of several thousand fresh expressions of church as one of the major achievements of Archbishop Rowan's time in office. As the Archbishop addresses the movement for the final time in that role on November 22 in London, Bishop Graham says it is an ideal moment to take stock of what has been achieved and what lies ahead.
The Fresh Expressions day conference – running from 11am to 4pm on Thursday at HTB – is called 'Following the missionary Spirit', because, in the years since the Mission-shaped Church report was published in 2004, the Holy Spirit has been leading the church in new approaches to mission. It has been an experience of 'seeing what God is doing and joining in'. In effect we have been given a gift of the Holy Spirit, a charism. My predecessor Steven Croft called it 'building ecclesial communities out of contextual mission': the planting of fresh expressions of church, be they new congregations or full church plants, appropriate to their context, to draw into Christian discipleship those who are not active followers of Jesus or part of any church.
That is the purpose of the charism, but what is its nature? What constitutes the gift we are being given?
It is a gift of faith. Ordinary local Christians have been taking small cross-cultural risks, for the sake of Christ. They have been stepping out of their comfort zone, out of familiar patterns of church life to plant something new, for those untouched by these familiar patterns. They have been empowered to take a risk of faith. This lies at the heart of the gift of the Spirit for mission, through which we are empowered as witness beyond our familiar setting (Acts 1.8)
It is an incarnational gift, a gift for contextual mission. We are learning to follow the Spirit as, by his power, Christ's body takes appropriate local shape. It is a gift for contextual mission, a gift for our times and for each locality:
- for our times because both our national culture, and the relationship between church and culture have been changing fast;
- for each locality because we are taking more seriously the uniqueness and complexity of each context.
It is a gift of discernment and of missional imagination. We learn to listen as we allow the Holy Spirit to direct us. The fresh expression takes shape as we listen and serve. We are unlikely to know what it will finally look like when we begin.
It is a gift of diversity. The Holy Spirit gives varieties of gifts (1 Corinthians 12.4-6). One size does not fit all. A recent study of two dioceses revealed 19 different models of fresh expression in each. Some models appear frequently, as is appropriate for a branded society. The reason for diversity is appropriateness to context, not the uniqueness of the model.
It is a traditioned gift. At its heart is our call to proclaim the gospel afresh in this generation. It is not a rewriting of the claims of Christ to make them more amenable to a consumer age, but a more faithful embodiment of the historic gospel for our times. Fresh expressions are an integral part of the Church's mixed economy approach to mission. It is a gift which honours inherited church approaches for their faithfulness to the gospel and seeks to complement them by equivalent faithfulness.
It is a vocational gift. It cannot be exercised without pioneers, those who take the lead in the small and large cross cultural steps which are the inescapable starting point of any fresh expression. One of the most striking features of this movement has been the number of new leaders it has generated. There are Ordained Pioneer Ministers and Methodist VentureFX Pioneers, but the number of these is dwarfed by the hundreds of lay leaders in expressions who were not in any form of leadership before.
It is an ecumenical gift. This involves the Church of England, the Methodist Church, the United Reformed Church, the Congregational Federation and the Church of Scotland, with other conversations taking place. This is a unity which God blesses because it is a unity in weakness, as we all have to learn new approaches to mission in a changing world, and choose to learn together.
It has proved to be an international gift. Requests have come from many parts of the world. The Fresh Expressions mission shaped ministry course is now being taught or planned in Australia, Barbados, Canada, Germany, New Zealand, South Africa, and the USA.
Finally it is a gift of hope. It demonstrates the life of the Spirit through the church, showing that the Church in Britain can grow; that it is not condemned to inevitable decline because of the average age of many of its congregations. The Holy Spirit is restoring faith in the power of the gospel here and now!
The future then is a matter of keeping faith with the missionary Spirit and of remaining open to whatever new riches might be revealed in this gift. It is also a call to perseverance as we maintain our commitment to the re-evangelization of our land. To serve the churches, this call and commitment will see the Fresh Expressions team continue to network the pioneers, gather the learning, publish the stories, and provide the training needed.
* 'Following the missionary Spirit – going forward with fresh expressions' will take place at HTB, Brompton Road on 22 November from 11am to 4pm (arrivals from 10am). Contributors include Martyn Atkins (General Secretary, Methodist Church), Val Morrison (Moderator of the General Assembly, United Reformed Church) and Graham Cray. Places cost £15 (including lunch and refreshments).
E1 Community Church (Cable Street)
It began as an Urban Expression church planting team 15 years ago in London's East End but became E1 Community Church (E1CC) after the merger of three Urban Expression church plants (including Cable Street Community Church). Phil Warburton and Alex Alexander are Baptist ministers who lead the church and they explain more.
Things have changed a great deal since the original Cable Street Community Church was featured on expressions: the dvd – 1. E1CC now covers the south west of the Borough of Tower Hamlets and is based in Shadwell and Stepney.
Originally led by Jim and Juliet Kilpin, we were a small team on a steep learning curve made up of a group of people trying to figure out together how to follow Jesus and love our neighbours.
We remain a small church that struggles in many ways with the seeming chaos of life and messiness of church but there is also a lot of joy along the way and much hope for the future. Today E1CC covers the same geographical area and includes Sunday meetings in the homes of two families from the church and Wednesdays at 6pm in the hall of St Mary's Church on Cable Street. Once a month we have celebrations which are all-age, messy church, café-style, with a meal to finish. We have active children's and youth groups too, who bring us much joy and often speak nuggets of truth to us 'grown-ups'! You will rarely hear a sermon here but we hope, pray and trust that people will hear plenty of what God is saying.
Alex Alexander was called to lead the church alongside Phil in July 2009. Along with other churches in Tower Hamlets, we have set up a Mission House initiative to encourage and enable people with a heart for the inner city to live and minister here. Four local churches are part of the Mission House at the moment and each church has a volunteer who joins in with the life of the church and the local community. Rachel Fergusson joined us a year ago as part of this initiative and it is great working with a team of people passionate about the community and church of Shadwell and Stepney.
What are we about? E1 Community Church have five key distinctives. We are a Jesus-centred church; worshipping and following Jesus together in our daily lives. We are a church at the edge, seeking to be a church of people who have too little rather than have too much and of those who often feel marginalized by society and sometimes by the church. We are made up of people who live in the local neighbourhood and our worship, discipleship and decision-making aim to be relevant to the area in which we live. We aim to be multi-voiced in order to discover together what God might be saying to us. We believe passionately in being people of peace and we try to work at this both within church and within our community.
Each year we have a focus on a particular topic and we work on getting funds together for a charity specialising in that particular field. This year we are focusing on the Olympics to highlight issues of justice, inequality, disability and human trafficking. We are using the Baptist Missionary Society's Undefeated resources.
We are also involved with other churches in Tower Hamlets to run a winter Night Shelter and Foodbank based in various locations through Tower Hamlets, as well as youth and children's work both within church and in our neighbourhood. We are really excited about what God is doing in Tower Hamlets and we want to continue to join in with bringing his kingdom here!
Five things I’ve learned (Jonny Baker)
Jonny Baker shares five things he's learned from the first couple of years of developing Pioneer Mission Leadership Training.
It's been an absolute blast – exhausting, exciting and challenging in equal measure. CMS asked me to develop Pioneer Mission Leadership Training as a pathway for equipping both lay and ordained pioneers and we have now just begun the third year – which means all our modules will be up and running. That has included starting an MA and the first intake of those training for ordained pioneer ministry. Here are five things I've learned since it all got off the ground.
1. 'Not fitting in' is a wonderful gift
People who come as pioneers bring an amazing gift. I have come to call it 'the gift of not fitting in'. It's not that people are awkward; it's just that they see something beyond the status quo or business as usual in the church. Every culture or organisation or church needs this if it is to have a future and not get stuck. And every church needs this if it is to be missional and move out of its comfort zone. We have discovered that the gift is multifaceted and each pioneer has a unique shape and calling. Things go best when they develop some self awareness and minister out of who they are rather than someone else's expectation of what a pioneer might be. The gift comes in some combination or remix of apostolic, prophetic and evangelistic in the Ephesians list of ministries. We have also discovered it's not age or gender or culture specific, exclusively lay or ordained – it's simply given and received.
2. 'Why not?' and 'what if?' are at the heart of pioneering
Imagination is essential if we want to discover genuine newness and move in mission to places beyond where we currently are. When we set out I didn't expect that we would talk so much about seeing and about imagination. This seeing involves grief over the way things are and where we have got stuck, and dreaming of new worlds and communities that are possible. It says 'why not?' and 'what if?' rather than 'why?' and 'what for?'.
We have also discovered that seeing differently has a cost. What seems visible and obvious to pioneers is often seen as irritating, troublesome, a pain and something to be resisted by those with vested interests in the way things are. For this reason, pioneering ministry tends to flourish when there is somebody within the structures and systems of the diocese or equivalent who is also able to imagine things differently – who 'gets it'. They are then able to create the space for the new to flourish and interpret it back to others.
3. The church says it wants pioneers but…
This has been the hardest thing to bear. In many places the church is saying loud and clear that we need pioneers, which is great and true and I'm sure it is genuine. Pioneers then respond and often take risks in the process. But it sometimes turns out that perhaps the church didn't quite mean what it said, or there are some big 'buts'. In other places it is clear she's not interested in pioneers at all – some dioceses still don't recognise pioneer ministry or they suggest that everyone is a pioneer and allocate no resources while their DDOs do their best to steer people away from pioneer ministry as a vocation. We have shed tears, expressed frustration, prayed a lot, and reflected that every journey to the new in the bible – and probably elsewhere – involves going through darkness, letting go, or experiencing wilderness on the way. It's unavoidable.
It seems that the kind of pioneering understood most readily by the wider church involves an outcome that looks something like what we have already; namely a community of disciples with worship, singing, preaching and money being paid back into the centre – preferably all happening within a very short space of time.
Of course there is nothing wrong with that as an outcome but there are two things to say about it:
- it takes time – five to seven years seems to be the experienced wisdom on this;
- part of the challenge the church faces is that the forms of church, or the way we do church is cultural so to pioneer in a new space and community will require an imaginative approach that is able to let go some of the old shape, structure and culture in order to allow something new and indigenous to be born. Outcomes will be important but often this journey in mission involves quite a period of discernment of where God is at work, exploration on the way to the new and surprises. Fruit sometimes comes in places you didn't begin to look.
The pressure that is brought to bear in measurement and counting what's happening too early creates undue and unfair pressure. I genuinely don't know what to do about this challenge. I have wished on many occasions I could fix things for pioneers in incredibly difficult scenarios but I can't – we don't have the power, or the resources. I can't see this going away any time soon and if anyone can offer us wisdom here I would welcome it. There are exceptions to this but the difficult scenarios still far outweigh the good ones. A major part of the issue is resources and I think there's much more thinking and work to be done on how we might resource pioneering mission.
At CMS, we are training pioneers in contextual mission and contextual church. It is how those in mission have thought about this for decades and why the CofE originally asked CMS to get involved – due to our experience in cross cultural mission. It's also become the paradigm within which Fresh Expressions articulates what is going on and what is needed and it was the recommendation for the lens required in Mission-shaped Church.
4. Pioneers thrive in community
The magic in what we have been doing is generated by the people in the room – the learning community of pioneers. It's so fantastic to get people who are pioneering sharing together what they are doing and learning and thinking. I have learned so much from them and been so challenged myself in terms of my own faith and life of mission. We are in a very unique position in this in that our pioneers are not an isolated one or two in a wider community of learners which seems to be the case in many other places. We are all about pioneering mission. The second thing about community that I have become much more strongly convinced of than ever before is that pioneers should connect into a mission community on a long term basis, (a sodality if you like mission jargon).
Mission communities or 'spread out' religious communities such as CMS, the Franciscans, Jesuits, Church Army, the Incarnate Network, etc are those whose charism is prophetic mission. There's a recovery of some old wisdom here in that it's been this structure within the church that has best nurtured and helped this gift of pioneering mission flourish down the centuries.
I honestly think that if I was leading a diocese (don't worry, it's not going to happen!) I would invite the likes of CMS to connect with pioneers in the diocese and link them into a mission community and make a CMS appointment to lead it rather than go for a straight diocesan appointment. This requires a bit of a mind shift – probably in the relationship between sodal and modal (modal is the mission jargon for the local gathered structure like a diocese) and how they could work well together. Amazingly this is exactly the mind shift that our local RTP (Regional Training Partnership) has had in appointing a regional hub co-ordinator for pioneers to be located with us at CMS – and so create a pioneering hub in the region. This has been both a surprise and a great gift in the wider area.
5. We're still only at the start of something
It has been remarkable this year to have three year groups simultaneously filling the CMS café area at lunch time on Tuesdays. There's a real buzz. But we haven't even had a group of students go through the course fully yet so it's very early days for us still. We have a growing sense of excitement that, as we hoped would happen, locating pioneer ministry training within CMS as a mission community will really produce some great fruit: genuine new mission endeavours, contextual Christian churches and communities, and a really supportive context for pioneers in the long term. We shall see!
But I sense that this statement is also true for the wider church – it's early days and we need courage to hold on to the vision of pioneer ministry and to talk and think together creatively and honestly about this gift within the ministries of the church – how we discern, encourage, release, resource and support it into the future. Visit the CMS pioneer website or read the CMS annual report to find out more.
Edinburgh Dreams
VentureFX pioneer Lou Davis tells about the formation and development of a community in Scotland's capital city.
I had been working with the C3 community in Stockport but then applied for VentureFX and was sent to Edinburgh a year ago. At first I spent a lot of time getting to know what was happening in the city, speaking to people and going to different groups. I started by doing Twitter searches for Edinburgh and following people online to see what they were doing in the city.
I have always liked making things; it was a kind of family activity. As a result I always tend to gravitate towards creative people who also make things because it seems a very natural 'fit' for me. At Stockport I went on a pattern cutting course which eventually led to me taking a two year City and Guilds in Fashion and Textiles. At C3 we majored on craft groups but, in Edinburgh, I initially steered clear of doing the same thing so that I could discern what God was calling me to do in a very different situation.
After a while, I felt that making things and being creative was so much a part of me that I couldn't let it go. Things have since moved on and I have got myself a studio at Portobello, the city's seaside! It is great for making friends and building community as a creative hub, a place where people are creating artwork in all sorts of different forms.
At the moment the ministry is developing in three main areas:
- I'm developing a new Christian worship community called The Gathering. I'm doing this with other people from the Edinburgh and Forth Circuit and this is designed to help in exploring Christianity and creating a place for developing community. It is a twice monthly act of creative, community-inspired worship in the heart of the city. We start off with tea or coffee, cake and chat at 6.30pm followed by worship half an hour later and a trip to the pub afterwards. We also have a few smaller groups; we meet up twice a month to share a meal, get to know each other as friends and serve others. As a group we have already found ourselves serving the homeless of Edinburgh.
- I'm also involved with the YMCA in Edinburgh by helping with the drop-in events there. I attempt to play darts but keep hitting the wall!
- I work with different artists and creative types, going to meetings and already established networks. I work with other creatives under the name of Edinburgh Dreams and we have staged events and worked closely with YMCA Edinburgh and the City of Edinburgh Methodist Church. We've got some great plans for the near future, including photography, video, art, fashion and a public art project for Advent.
The concept of Edinburgh Dreams is to build community across the city, inspire creative activity and to build friendships across divides – social, economic and geographic.
I go through phases when I consider how things are developing. Some days it is very exciting and positive – usually when something has gone well – and at other times it seems like I'm just doing endless admin and not getting anywhere at all. But then I may meet someone new, have an amazing conversation about God and it's all worthwhile.
For me it has been really important to keep in contact with the friends I have made in other places. I make sure I don't lose those friendships because I have needed the backing and love of people outside the area I'm working in. Thankfully the Circuit is really interested in what sorts of things I am doing and I'm also grateful for their level of support for me. In the community itself I don't think everyone's totally aware of what I do, at the YMCA for instance I just say, 'I work for the church.' That's usually enough to spark a conversation where deep thoughts about the meaning of life are shared.
My post is initially for five years but it's very encouraging to see how things are already taking hold; whether it be through the friends that I'm making in the artistic community or The Gathering which has been meeting for just a few months now but is finding its feet. We currently get together in a café in the city centre and we do slightly different things each time we meet – music, video, conversation and creative prayer and we always spend time together just chilling out.
Previously I've been part of groups where we wore ourselves out trying to do good things when there were people, or groups in the town, already doing those same things. I didn't want Edinburgh Dreams to fall into the same trap so it has been really good to start slowly, to find out what is already working in the city. It has been really useful to see the work of the YMCA, for instance. That has been a real eye-opener and shows a completely different side to Edinburgh from the tourist city with its tartan shops and castle. There can be a lot of kudos attached to having a project with your name on it in some way but it's vital to look around and see what else is being done and how 'your' own project can best serve the people around you by linking up with others or sharing the load.