Category: Avril Chisnall
TANGO – update Sep12
Moving from ‘loving’ to ‘exploring’: TANGO
TANGO (Together As Neighbours Giving Out) is a café and recycling centre for a Merseyside community. It was set up by the local Anglican church in 2000 in an effort to bring 'give and take' and care back into the local community. A purely social service, it nevertheless provides opportunity for Christian witness through action and conversation.
We show God's love first,
says chairperson, Avril Chisnall.
We realised that God's love is out there all the time, that people have experienced it and that all have a story to tell.
Since TANGO was established in 2000, it has grown from one day a week to three.
Wednesdays developed into a craft day for Golden Oldies in the belief that older people still have something to offer. Golden Oldies organises trips out and the 35 to 40 members knit goods that have twice made their way to Romania and Chernobyl.
Listening to the Golden Oldies, a group of both experienced 'faithwalkers' and those remembering connections to God from 'way back', Avril and her team offered a time to get together and pray. TANGO on the QT began in the autumn of 2005 and is attended by 20 to 30 Golden Oldies every Wednesday for half an hour from two o'clock – an add-on to the craft day.
Older people still have something to offer
It's a process and we discovered that there are many at different stages of enquiry or faith, so variety is the key,
says Avril.
Sometimes it's a reflection on a few verses of God's word, sometimes music and quietness, sometimes space for prayer requests. We use a variety of things for illustrating the word: candles; stones; even a box of chocolates. Not everyone goes to a church – but everyone is grateful for the prayer. We find God does the rest – we simply need to open the channel.
Two or three people have had their 'long lost connection' reignited as a result of attending TANGO on the QT. An evening cell held at the home of the leader of Golden Oldies every Wednesday provides the opportunity to pursue faith further.
God believes in creative experimentation: TANGO
This story illustrates the principles of God believes in creative experimentation in the Guide.
TANGO (Together As Neighbours Giving Out), a café and recycling centre for a Merseyside community, was set up by the local Anglican church in 2000 to bring care and 'give and take' back into the local community. A purely social service, it nevertheless provides opportunity for Christian witness through action and conversation.
We show God's love first,
says chairperson, Avril Chisnall.
We realised that God's love is out there all the time; that people have experienced that and all have a story to tell.
Avril and her team invited TANGO customers to a monthly gathering in a pub on Sunday morning (toast and tea all round). Invitations to this were placed on the tables at TANGO and personal invites were given to those Avril and her team knew might be interested.
'We weren't radical enough. We began to follow the same pattern. We should have been in tune with them more and let them set the agenda…'
Over time a few came to what, Avril realised, had become too much like a 'regular church'.
We weren't radical enough,
she says.
We began to follow the same pattern. We should have been in tune with them more and let them set the agenda, putting God's values into that'.
A positive outcome of that time was the baptism of a 'dysfunctional family' (two in the pub and one in church), every member of which now helps out with TANGO's thrice weekly midday café and shop. Good food at a very reasonable cost and quality second-hand goods are set out in a market-type environment for those living on a tight budget.
However, the Sunday morning pub sessions were abandoned, partly because the team realised that a lack of public transport on Sundays was preventing people from coming.
A new gathering, Buddies' Breakfast, was started in the late summer of 2006. From nine until ten o'clock on the first Tuesday in the month, breakfast is served at the old church hall which is home to TANGO. The team put out invitations by card and word of mouth to those they feel might be interested.
'Church people often want quick results. Just serve people, give them what it is they need and wait until the thing blossoms.'
The invitation is to 'partner and support' the new work that TANGO as a community project wants to develop and to encourage a real sense of belonging.
In God's kingdom every person is valued and has a part to play,
Avril believes.
It's being together, serving them, having a laugh and a chat, establishing friendships that prove we can be trusted.
A flow of people has passed through Buddies' Breakfast, which is usually attended by 60 to 70 TANGO volunteer staff and customers.
We have been honest with those customers who have come, and have said that God is the motivator behind all that we do,
says Avril.
Church people often want quick results. Just serve people, give them what it is they need and wait until the thing blossoms. This time we are looking for a sense of belonging and partnership and have already seen two or three people move into the Tuesday weekly cell from which Buddies' Breakfast was born.
Avril also advises,
Keep flexible; if something's run its course, be brave enough to finish it, then wait and see what God starts to do next with the work he's asked you to get involved in.
TANGO
The TANGO community project at St Mark's, Haydock, has been running for 12 years. The project's chair, Avril Chisnall, and co-ordinator Christine Kay explain how a fresh expression of church has become part and parcel of the ministry there.
When we first started TANGO it was quite a difficult thing to know how we were going to bring God into it – especially when volunteers joined us from the community. We didn't want to impose something which involved us standing there quietly to pray so instead we always treated it as an invitation to come and reflect on why we were there as part of the project. And then we always finished with a prayer. Then people began to trust us more and started to join in different ways.
We now do have a cell in TANGO and cell is important to our church but that's OK for those people who genuinely want to go forward with God and enquire and learn more. That's the right environment for them but we've got lots of people in our teams who are sort of 'iffy' about God. We know he's in their lives but they've not acknowledged it themselves so how do we get them to move on?
We've introduced what we call the 'Three Ps' as a way of opening up some of these issues. Chris and her team regularly meet with all the other teams once a fortnight to look at Purpose, Problems and Presence of God. We also have breakfasts when staff and volunteers, which we consider to be our church, get involved with a God slot.
I think people now realise that church isn't doing it to them but church is here as part of the community – and church is not a stuffy old place, a building they have to go to; instead people actually make the church, us and them together.
I've been a member of the Anglican Church for many years and love it but I feel very frustrated that the church is stuck in the way it sees how church should be done and they're still expecting that church can carry on as it is. Many churches are seeing their numbers dwindle but are still not prepared to change their ways of doing things. They might introduce some new songs and various creative ways of doing things but it's still very much traditional church and won't reach the people we live among.
I appreciate that it's scary for church people and leaders to support a fresh expression because it's risky but Kingdom values are the important things. All those years ago, God asked me to do something different with a team of people and the result is that it is 'not the same church as I'm used to'. It's forced me out of a way of viewing church into seeing people differently and trying to communicate his way with them.
I get really wound up when people try to measure what church is. We certainly believe that what we have with our volunteers and community members is very much a church. The frustration kicks in when people come along, ask you to fill in a form, tick boxes, and say, 'How many people have you had in your church this week?' Most of the time I simply do not know the answer to that but we know that what we do here is very much a one-to-one with people. Thanks to God, we change people's lives by meeting them, praying for them or talking about God to them. We can't measure those sorts of things and that's really difficult.
It is often not measurable in an 'official' way but I'm looking at what happens here in Kingdom terms. As such, it doesn't matter that I'm a lay person; I will keep on doing this stuff because God has asked me to do it and pass it on to other people to do as well. We also know that's what we need to do and investment in other people with God's values is vital.
If TANGO goes on for another 12 years that'll be down to God and the investment we've put into the people's lives for them to want to carry on doing Kingdom business in an ordinary way. Lay people are so important to this type of fresh expression it's important to risk letting those who are not ordained take the lead and do what God's asked them to do.
I'd say, 'go out there and have a go and really listen to what God's saying to you.' We've passed the idea of TANGO on to three other parishes but it's not the same TANGO that we've got. They're doing the same sort of things but they are different people in different sorts of community. That's why it's very important to find God's heartbeat for the community in which you live but – for goodness sake – get out of your church and go and do it.
Coordinator Christine Kay adds:
God is the heartbeat of everything that we do; without him it would just be impossible. Every morning, before we open at 9.45am, we have what we call Quarter to TANGO when as many of us as are free come together. It is not a formal prayer time by any means but we give out notices and things that are coming up in the week but there’s also a time to share.
In the past we've done lots of things which we've been brave to do but we've been even braver to stop them when they've not been working. Now we're looking to do something called TANGO on a Sunday. Lots of people find Sunday a very long and lonely day so we've decided to give it a go, it will be in our café – a chat over a cuppa about some question brought up in a very informal way. We're not really sure how it's going to pan out but I feel that God is asking us to do this and we're just watching this space at the moment.
You are not going to get people into your churches in this day and age; they just want you to go out to them. They don't even want that, they don't know that they want that, the only way to be with them is to be where they're at; not threatened by anything that's churchy. That's why we try not to use churchy words at all. We are just ordinary people; they respect that and respond to it as well because they see we're not holier-than-thou. Hopefully they just feel comfortable and safe in the kind of environment we encourage here. God is opening this up for each of us to be part of other people's lives and for them to be part of our lives as well.