prayer Archives - Page 2 of 3

Night Shift

Night Shift at Hereford Baptist Church runs on Saturday evenings from 12 midnight to about 3am – and was featured on expressions: the dvd – 1. One of its organisers, Mair Granthier, explains how things have changed – and some remained the same – since Night Shift started over nine years ago.

The church's front entrance is opened up so that those in local pubs and clubs can finish their evening with a hot cuppa or coffee and a chat. We have met hundreds of young people, and some not so young, over the years.

A small team of volunteers are on duty each Saturday night to provide a welcome for anyone who comes through the door. Since Night Shift was featured on expressions: the dvd – 1, the process remains the same and what we offer remains the same but there is a significant drop in the numbers of those coming in. This is due to several things: the licensing hours have changed so people filter out of the venues at different times and the local fast food outlets now have to shut by 1.30am so you no longer have huge queues of people waiting for their fish and chip supper.

However, the fact that fewer people are coming in does offer greater opportunity for us to speak to them. Looking back on those early days it was more like crowd control! Week by week, we continue to feel that there is a reason why we are still around. The clubbers now expect us to be there – though it's not just clubbers we serve. We also have the homeless call in on us and people who would be seen as the misfits of society; they view Night Shift as their 'night out' or at least a place – maybe the only place – where they can feel welcome.

Another thing we've noticed more recently is the increasing call on team members' time, which unfortunately limits their availability. The needs of the people we serve don't change so the availability of sufficient staff is really important to us. We always try to have at least three or four on duty at any one time and there's probably about 10 people involved altogether.

We offer hot drinks, toilet facilities, and a safe warm place to sit, wait for a taxi, eat a burger or rest their feet. We've also had people who get thrown out of clubs; they come in to Night Shift and text their friends to tell them that they are 'at the church'.

Some of them we see very regularly, in fact we know most of our visitors by name, but a lot of those we used to see don't tend to go out drinking any more but will occasionally drop in and say hello. We have built up a lot of friendships over the years and it's great to see how people are getting on. We've also had parents and grandparents of young people say to us how good it is to know that there is somebody trustworthy there to help their kids or grandkids if they get into trouble on a Saturday night out.

We have come to accept that Night Shift really is church to quite a few people, and even if they only come in for 20 minutes or half an hour they know who we are and why we do it and who we do it for. There was great joy at Christmas when we gave out carol sheets to them and we all sang favourite carols; they really enjoyed that! We pray that Night Shift will be part of people's faith journey; it may be that someone else does the harvesting, but that's fine.

We have a small prayer team of predominantly older people who support our work. We write a prayer request report for every Night Shift that they use to identify prayer needs; the report is also useful because it means that we have a record of who comes in.

Our greatest desire at the moment is to recruit more volunteers – even if it's just to do one stint every couple of months. Our team members are all getting older and so we would like to encourage others to be part of the welcoming team. They could come along to 'taste and see' what it's like; if they do they could well become hooked on it – just like us! We recognise that very elderly people or those with young families couldn't help us in this way but it would be good to see some new volunteer faces.

The people we meet at Night Shift wouldn't normally consider going through a church door and it's a privilege for us to be there for them. We believe that the church more and more has to be prepared to reach out to where people are, rather than expect them to come to what we call church and 'fit in'.

X-treme

Lyn Edwards, project leader of the Shackles Off youth project in Cumbria, explains the development of its fresh expression of church, X-treme.

Shackles Off provides support, training, a safe space, advocacy and mentoring for 11 to 25-year-olds, as well as youth clubs and activities. We have always had a prayer box on our counter in the former shop we use as a base but we wanted to provide something much more intentional. Some of us decided to sit and pray in the premises on a Sunday morning – whether anyone else came or not. X-treme, as our fresh expression, came out of that.

The project as a whole had started as a result of three vivid dreams that God had given me during a holiday in the Lake District. I returned to my home in Pembroke and announced the move to Seascale. We did that in 2006 and then I became involved in the HOPE 08 initiative. Some friends and I drove a 'HOPE Mobile' – a Citroen Picasso with a HOPE sticker in the window – around the area but it enabled us to get to know the young people. With support from the village's three churches, we gave out snacks and built relationships.

I had walked past the shop I had seen in one of my dreams every day and noticed that the landlord was doing it up. One morning, I plucked up the courage to share my story. He didn't believe in God, but said if someone had moved house because of his premises, he would take my interest seriously. When I said we would fund rent through 100 people giving £1 a week, he laughed, but he trusted me.

After getting permission from the local council to secure the building, Shackles Off was launched. In 2007, we started X-treme as a place where we would talk explicitly about God. It runs from 9.45am to 11am on Sundays though when it first got off the ground, it was more like a discussion time for our young people. They would come with their mobile phones in hand and then we'd sit around. We had much of our music on a CD and they would laugh at us trying our best to sing. Not one of us who started the group could hold a note and the young people would be in hysterics listening to us. I also always did a very short bible study but our young people had no idea who the biblical characters were.

Right from the start we were up front about what we believed in, asking the young people if they wanted us to pray for anything. One of our first requests came from a boy who said his family always had mashed potato on a Sunday, could we pray that it wouldn't be made lumpy again?! But gradually those prayers got a lot more serious with requests like, 'Lord I want to stop drinking, please can you help me?' or 'Nan has cancer and I don't know what to do. Please help me.'

This pattern of meeting went on for at least two years, we'd have 10 or 12 regulars but nobody made a commitment. People used the prayer box; we talked about issues in their lives and made sure that anything we studied in the bible related back to their situations. We learnt bible verses off by heart – in fact they first learnt them by rapping them. Having been a teacher for over 30 years, I thought we had to find a way that they could remember so I ended up going on Google to find out how to rap! We started with John 3:16 and then we started to rap our own rap songs, we formed a group called The X-treme Rappers and the Strangled Duck and we would learn verses or hymns and stories like the Prodigal Son.

So we just kept on going, doing the traditional in a very untraditional way. They would ask me all about the things we can take for granted in church, things like, 'Why do you put your hand in the air when you pray?' 'Can I lie on the floor?' In the end they just did their own thing and nobody had any inhibitions in God's presence.

When we started, the youngest was 12 and the oldest would have been about 18. Most of them were about 14 or 15. On a Sunday there could be two or three coming along or we could have 12 to 15. They were the core who would say to their friends, 'Come and see what we do.' On a Friday night at Shackles Off youth club we would have 45-50. That was all great but I knew that the thing to make it complete would be to know just one person come to know Jesus.

In summer last year, the prayers were answered when we took 11 of them to Soul Survivor and nine became Christians. That totally changed everything. I can see that commitment in their lives and in their worship; it's now personal. It has changed them but, of course, it's a mixed picture. Some are intermittent and are struggling while others would go to a big event without any problem at all. This year we are taking 20 (13 young people and the volunteers).

God saves, not us, and he knows when people are ready. For too long I think the church has tried to force people into the Kingdom or seduce them into the Kingdom but it's got to be fruit that will last. All I'm doing is telling them about God and teaching them all the things they need to know. We go to a church with them if we are invited to take a service – there are usually three or four of those invitations a year.

For ongoing discipleship I tell them there are three things they need to do every day; namely talk to God, worship God and read his Word. To me it's that simple. If they do that, they will grow as Christians.

We have things that are causing big hurdles for us because we are a Christian-based project – not just a social project. We come under the Methodist umbrella but we also work with other denominations. At the Christian end of things we can be seen as being 'too social' while, in the light of our social commitments, we can be viewed as being 'too Christian'. It's an interesting balancing act!

Our next challenge is looking at the question of, 'How do we have communion in our drop-in centre?' We are talking that over with Methodist Circuit Superintendent Philip Peacock but the fact is that we are pushing boundaries and making the traditional churches think about how things have been done in the past and how they may need to change now.

Full immersion baptism is another issue. Some of the young people said, even though they had been baptised as babies, they wanted to publicly declare their faith and be baptised in the sea. We are hoping for baptisms and declarations of faith to take place in the sea at Seascale.

We have broken a lot of rules here but I don't mind because Jesus broke the rules, not the laws. The last thing we would want to do is to upset the churches around us so we get involved and help in any way we can. We come under pressure sometimes because people will ask us to come and plant a Shackles Off youth project in their area. I tell them to get together and seek God's face to find out what he wants in the place where they are – not to take on what someone else has done because it may not necessarily be right for them.

Unlimited Church

James Grier explains how the Unlimited youth church begins to be seen in a new light as it becomes a BMO.

I was first appointed by the Diocese of Exeter to pioneer a youth church in the city and advise and encourage other expressions of youth church. Unlimited, which looks to reach young people who have no experience of church at all, tends to reach Sixth Form students – predominantly from Exeter College. It has been a far harder and slower task than I ever envisaged but I have been in post for four-and-a-half years now and it finally feels like we've made some headway.

We were clear from the start that we were not looking for any sort of transfer growth from other youth work in the city or even to reach non-Christian youth with existing church connections. The missional focus was, and is, unchurched youth – though ultimately we are also looking to include people of all ages.

Early in 2009 we started going out on the cathedral green where most Sixth Formers seem to spend their time, get into conversation with them and say, 'We are starting a church. What do you think about church and God?' Prayer is a very important component of what we do and our aim is to offer to pray for everyone we talk to. We ask whether we can pray for them and ask God to tell us about them. We estimate that about 9 out of 10 young people allow us to do this. Anything we sense might be from God is offered lightly and tentatively so that we are not putting anything on people unhelpfully or claiming we get infallible revelation! Nearly all whom we pray for are shocked by the accuracy of God's revelation. It means that the young people know what we're about from the outset; it may have limited the speed of growth of the fresh expression but – on the other hand – we build on relationship and that develops a strong foundation.

Two years ago we began renting an office at the back of Mary Arches church in the city centre to use as a café base. That's where we also have a worship service three Sundays a month now. We had decided that we would only start doing worship when we saw someone come to faith; now we have got two people who have been baptised and two further people also become Christians. Our worship time must be the world's most casual and informal because our aim is always to reach young people that don't do church. It's a 60-minute service, half of which involves eating toasted sandwiches! After that we have a video clip, some songs, an activity, prayer and response.

Our mission statement is 'Unlimited Church – young people encountering the God they've never met and living the difference' but ultimately we need to be church of all ages if we are to be genuinely church rather than some sort of monochrome Christian group. The young people need older people in their lives if we are into discipleship and not just conversion.

In everything we do as a church, we aim to be:

unlimited by church culture and tradition – where it is unhelpful, unnecessary or inappropriate;

unlimited in our openness to and love of people – treating them as unique and as God's made them to be;

unlimited in our faith and expectation of God – living by faith not inhibited by past experience or fears.

Soon we hope to have the freedom of being a Bishop's Mission Order with the continued aim of converting the young people to Christian culture, not church culture. Lots of churches say they want a youth church but what they really mean is a youth congregation. The BMO evolved when our new converts wanted to be baptised. I asked the Bishop, 'How does that work ecclesiastically?' He suggested becoming a BMO which was wonderful – other churches in the area had initially been rather suspicious of our motives; many were also fearful that we would whisk their young people away. They didn't know if we'd parachute in and then disappear without trace as some sort of parachurch organisation or an outreach. The BMO changes that because it establishes the formal structures needed for right leadership and accountability.

Up until now I have been serving as half time team vicar in five parishes as well as spearheading Unlimited. However, from the middle of December I will be going full time in this pioneering role. My prayer is that Unlimited becomes a viable church of people of all ages which exists to reach and disciple youth who've never really had anything to do with church before.

The main challenge has been to develop a team; some started out with us but have moved away or got stuck into established churches. Thankfully others are now coming through. In future, I'd love to see more radical conversions. We have prayed for 400 young people on the streets since we started but we don't see the fruit of that all the time. I don't want to become possessive but it would be great to see more of them. We'd love to see a turning of the tide as more and more young people in Exeter discover God for themselves and are changed by him and the city changed as a result!

The Upper Room

Hope Cirencester opened The Upper Room in 2008 with the aim of reaching out to people who had never been to church to show them that Jesus loved them in a way they could understand and relate to. Leader Kim Hartshorne tells how a cup of tea and chat can lead to a world of opportunities.

We provide a welcome and a place of acceptance. We felt that society has become quite fast moving and many people are isolated, not heard or noticed by anyone, especially those who are vulnerable. We felt Jesus would want to welcome them and so we became his hands and feet for that. We try to demonstrate Jesus' love for people – that they are each unique, valuable, precious and made in God's image.

Listen to Karen Hartshorne discuss The Upper Room with Karen Carter.Read the transcript

We run a drop in space called The Upper Room above a shop in the Market Place, Cirencester. This is open on Monday and Friday mornings and that's when we listen and welcome everyone with a cuppa. We run meditation classes, eat out together and support local people and charities. Many people who find their way to us have never had any background in church and so we gently offer to pray if they have a problem, explaining that Jesus does care about the small things of daily life. We try and chat in a relaxed way about what the Bible says, but always offering space for disagreement or conversation. We are helping people start their faith journey and travel alongside them as it develops.

We have seen some amazing answers to prayers small and large. It is noticeable in the past year however that we have seen our visitors suffering greater pressures than anything we've seen before in the areas of finance, family issues and mental health problems.

As a registered charity, Hope Cirencester's aims are to show the love of Jesus and alleviate need and distress in Cirencester and elsewhere. It all started when a group of us we were praying for our town and we were really hoping to take church out onto the streets and just get involved in a missional 'day to day' sort of way with our community. We were praying for a building on one of Cirencester's estates but we didn't find one so we kept on prayer walking and calling out to God, 'Where do you want us to do this?'

Eventually an estate agent contacted us to say they had a set of three rooms right in the market place so we asked him for the keys and brought a team of about 12 people here, including some church leaders from other churches in the town. We prayed in the building for the morning and very much sensed the presence of God here so we felt that this was the place to be.

The Upper Room is accessible to those who wouldn't necessarily do traditional church because they feel it wouldn't be for people like them, saying it's only for people who are clean and neat and have nice clothes and drive big cars or whatever. A lot of our visitors are homeless or people with addictions, severe depression or mental illnesses, those who have perhaps suffered abuse in the past, people who just find it very difficult to access things that they just consider to be for the well-educated. Perhaps church is too 'intellectual' for them and they need to 'see' the Gospel demonstrated practically in order to grasp it.

So they come in for a tea or coffee and to talk to us about what's going on in their lives. We offer to pray with them, signpost them to other agencies, and go with them where they need to go or advocate for them if they need us to. Social justice is really connected to the gospel and so when Jesus comes to someone, you would expect to see changes in every area of their life – and that's why we just try and look at where Jesus really would begin to work in their life and we follow on from that. For example we have supported mums learning to read for the first time, sent someone away on holiday for a break, we supply starter boxes to people moving into a refuge and fill up flasks of coffee for homeless people in the town.

The Message translation that says, 'The Word became flesh and moved into the neighbourhood', is talking about Jesus transforming whole neighbourhoods when he comes. So we work really collaboratively with all the other churches, charities, Citizens Advice, local council – everybody that will have a connection with us in order to go and try to build bridges for the sake of the Kingdom.

I'm inclined to say The Upper Room is like a mini branch of social services combined with a prayer room and a coffee shop; just like the church in the Victorian era built schools and eradicated slavery, and Anglo-Catholic revival 'slum priests' ministered to the poorest people. Instead of a binary way of thinking that is 'either/or', for us, it's 'all/and'. That to me is a sacramental view of life – everything belongs to God and so we are 'being' church in everything we do.

We don't have a Sunday expression at the moment but it seems that the Spirit is leading us to consider that and we're really praying and brainstorming and just waiting on God to see what will bubble up. I'm sure something is coming, we don't know what it's going to look like yet, our team is still waiting – but God has gone ahead of us and has a plan.

Our people seem to want things that lead to belonging, they want to be together with each other and be together with us so people will say things like, 'Why don't we go out for a curry?', 'Why don't we invite some people in?' or perhaps we'll have a birthday party for someone. On Easter Sunday we gather at my home for a BBQ to celebrate our belonging – to Jesus and to one another. We're open to all of that because belonging is a big deal in today's society; belonging is such a huge part of faith to me and if we can help people to belong and to feel safe, to join in community and in family together we'll have already done so much of the journey towards the gospel, towards Christ.

Thirst Cafe Church

Thirst Café Church 'officially' started in November 2007 in the community lounge of St Philip's CofE Primary School, Romsey Town, Cambridge, but Sue Butler tells how its beginnings go back a lot further than that.

Thirst has grown out of 11 years of relationship and prayer. As parents of primary school children, we used to meet outside the classroom at 'pick up' time. There were about 10 regulars every day morning and afternoon and we began to chat about our faith with each other – including some who did not profess a faith. We joked that we should have a coffee maker there because we were often hanging around outside school for up to an hour, just chatting and sharing prayer requests with each other.

One friend, Rachel, and I met whilst we were at the checkout in the local supermarket one day. She wanted to pray about something and, out of that meeting, came an idea for a monthly breakfast at which people from all denominations would come to pray if they wanted. That group formed the basis 11 years later for Thirst. As we began to pray for the school, other people started coming to faith and getting healed and seeing answers to prayer in their families. We realised this was bigger than us and much bigger than anything we had anticipated up to that point.

At the same time, things began to move in a different direction in my own life. My children were getting ready to leave the primary school for secondary school, so my personal involvement there might naturally have ended. In 2005 my husband started ordination training at Ridley. I began to increasingly feel that God was saying, that my time and connection with the school was not over but that there was more that God wanted me to do there.

My husband's Ridley friends kept asking me why I was not at Ridley training for ministry as well! I'd reply that there was no chance that I had been called to be a vicar. They used to encourage me to think about it, so much so, that I wondered if there was something that I should not be ignoring about ordination! There certainly was. I have just completed training as a mixed mode pioneer at Ridley, and I'm just about to be ordained with 50% of my time as OPM of Café Church from the Diocese of Ely and 50% spent at the local parish of St Philip's. Somehow God has combined my relationships, family life and calling to a place where he has already been at work. Like Moses, I felt that God asked me to take what was in my hand and use it in a wider setting.

During the same time In our ongoing relationships at school, those Christians amongst us at Thirst became known as people who would pray for people if they wanted it. We would often pray with parents in the playground, many of whom had no idea what they were asking for. We would find that people would simply stand where they were, bow their head and expect us to pray on the spot. When I look back on that period now, I suppose it was a case of God gathering people because they began to get healed, come to faith, and wanted to know more about Christ and how he could transform lives. It was about discipling them through relationship because many of them did not have any links with traditional church at all and some had never entered the doors of a church. They then began to attend Thirst and are an integral part of us now.

I went through a phase of being concerned about the views that some people inside the traditional church have of people outside of the church family. The question was asked of us, 'Why don't some of these (unchurched) people come to church?' My response was to wonder why on earth they would! The church is an alien environment for many nowadays. We ask, even expect people to come and sit on a pew and sing songs, followed by a talk or lecture (as they view it). Both of these activities are unusual for many who have never been to church before. I wonder, what on earth possesses us in church to think that others outside of the church might want to do that? It is the Church that is alien in our culture, we are the unusual one, the minority.

I was talking to God about it and told him, 'It's no wonder people don't go to church.' I 'heard' the question, 'What would they come to then?' I thought of what we did as friends together: breakfast, drink coffee, pray together, laugh together, have relationship and support each other. I said to my friends, 'Let's keep on drinking coffee but, if it's going to be church, it has to have more to it than a coffee morning. It's about transforming the community that we live in through our relationships, and in the power of the Holy Spirit.

We didn't begin straight away because I was too apprehensive of starting something that did not last once it became official. So, we prayed about it for about a year before we started meeting in the school lounge in November 2006. We served good coffee, food, fruit and juice. Everybody invited friends and we had about 30 people there at our first gathering.

From the first Thirst Cafe, we started off by showing Rob Bell Nooma DVDs; I didn't want to get people to come to do things they didn't want to do or feel comfortable with and felt that a DVD was something that people could relate to. They did not have to make any kind of outward or verbal response to it if they did not want to. I was also determined that I wasn't going to start a discussion around the DVD subject. God surprised us again because we showed the DVD, and afterwards somebody visiting asked questions and began a discussion centred around faith. The conversation started and has been going ever since! We very, rarely direct these conversations. They just happen naturally and we discuss all manner of spiritual issues which often carry on long after Thirst is over and have helped to develop and nurture people in the faith.

We do now also have prayer time for those who are interested to pray. After a few months we started to offer one session a week where we have a meditation or devotion of some kind, during this time there is also a five minute talk and discussion on a biblical theme, followed by a spiritual exercise or activity of some type. Because of our relationship and growth together this is natural to people now.

It's interesting to see how things develop in a way you never expect or plan. From the beginning we called ourselves the Thirst Café Community because we wanted to keep the word church right out of it. Within two to three weeks, people started asking, 'Are you going to café church?' They weren't asked to use that description; it's how they saw it. We are still known as Thirst Café Church to many people!

About two years ago we started to think about what it means to be a worshipping community and how we encourage spiritual growth amongst new believers. We introduced a Bible study one afternoon in the week but the big question, of course, has been what to do about Eucharist. It was really difficult to explore ways through this but, in the end, we just thought, that if this is God's feast and his journey with us, then he will show us what to do. We decided to do a simple Eucharist with a short liturgy.

We wanted people to feel comfortable around Eucharist so I told people, not to worry about it, but that if they wanted to participate they should do whatever seemed comfortable for them. I invited a visiting chaplain to lead and she explained the meaning of each part and action of the service and this helped people to understand the Eucharist. It is always a great time and we and we look forward to it and it's part of our regular worshipping life at Thirst.

There are a couple of people now talking about baptism, which will be interesting. The discipleship of new believers is our next and most pressing concern and we are hoping to continue with exploration and reflection on the best ways to do this.

St Philip's School is in the parish of St Philip's Church. Their vicar is supportive of what we do, we are very loosely associated with them but don't see ourselves as 'belonging' to St Philip's. In saying that, we have done things together and the vicar regularly visits us. We supported St Philip's in their after-school Christingle and Easter service, but – as mothers – we are limited with time constraints. We have a very good relationship with St Philip's and they support us in many ways and we are thankful for the relationship with them.

We don't know how Thirst will develop; we don't know what's around the corner. We are wondering about our next step but we know that we need to be obedient to God and follow his leading. Two of the leaders lead an art group and some come to this group who do not feel comfortable in our Friday morning get-togethers. My vision from the start has been for a larger number of small groups, rather than one large group, although of course we are all connected through our relationship networks.

We still don't sing or 'preach' but we do proclaim in many other ways the love and grace and mercy of God. We always pray and we have recently begun Bible reading and daily devotion programmes with new believers asking for Bibles and study guides! We always pray for healing, wholeness and expect God to be present with us and to hear us and answer us, in a variety of ways. People pray for each other because they see us as leaders doing so.

I think people just think, 'this is the way it is done.' They assume this is church because they have no other point of reference. We model our faith and they come with us. They say it's about community, these are my friends, this is relationship, this is church! We expect much of God and he does not fail us!

Ashburton Methodist Church

Rev Kevin Hooke, of Ashburton Methodist Church, Devon, tells how a District Review and involvement in msm helped to change the church's approach to mission – and its impact on the wider community.

As a part of the whole Christian Church our aim at Ashburton is to respond to the Gospel of God's love in Christ and to live out our discipleship in worship and mission.

We always wanted to share the riches of our faith by working through Teignbridge Circuit in partnership with other local churches and a wide range of organisations in the community.

The church is on a large central site with great potential for development in service of the community but there are practical considerations… it is a listed building within Dartmoor National Park and is in need of repair and modernisation. Work on the exterior has been started and architect's drawings have been done on adaptations to the interior to meet modern-day requirements. Major fundraising will be required before any developments can take place.

We attract a congregation of around 30, about 50% of whom are in a more elderly age group with the rest tending to be people ranging from 45 to 65. We got to a point where we knew the church needed to be doing things differently but as half of our congregation didn't have a huge amount of time because of work commitments, we didn't quite know how that was to be achieved.

We invited the (Plymouth and Exeter) District to come and do a Review with us in 2008. One result of this saw 11 members of the church deciding to go on the Pioneer Disciple Course – the specially tailored mission shaped ministry course for this area – during the following year.

The Pioneer Disciple experience proved to be a great benefit for us in that it emerged as a church leadership course because the thoughts of all our folk taking part were stimulated collectively. It was permission-giving as well in that it was deemed OK to take risks and try things. If they didn't work out it wasn't necessarily a failure.

To develop further work within the town, we also employed Youth and Community Worker Martin Parkes whom we share 50:50 with Ipplepen Methodist Church. One of the things we asked Martin to do was develop opportunities for working ecumenically. During One World Week 2010 he put together a whole programme of activities, including a film night and shared prayer space with the Quakers. A particularly popular evening started off as a social and talk on a topic associated with One World Week in a local pub. This was followed by 'sacred jam' at the church: somebody interested in music asked if they could have a 'sacred jam' session by playing some gentle music in an event at the chapel. They had a group of musicians playing and – at the end – some Celtic prayers were said. Quite a few people came in to that. We are now wondering if we might try something similar on a more regular basis.

Many different things came out of the whole mix of the District Review, Pioneer Disciple course and the period of thinking it through, but we didn't know exactly what God was calling us to do. Of course it's a challenge when there is a change in the air – if you ask 30 people as to what they would like to see developing, you will get 30 different ideas! However, it's wonderful to see people having those ideas and wondering about what will work in our context.

One or two people came to join us around that time and lots of ideas were then coming to the fore: film evenings, a puppet ministry, book club. People would say, 'This is my particular area of interest, can I try it?' Each time I just said, 'Have a go. If nothing else it will give you experience and confidence. Nothing ventured, nothing gained – and see where God leads us.'

Regular activities now include daily prayers from 7.45 to 8.30am, a Christian meditation group and a fortnightly Church Community group time for puddings, prayers and discussion. It's wonderful to follow on from the sense of community built up through the course and maintain that momentum by meeting together so regularly to discuss where we go from here.

Visiting preachers sometimes say there is more of a buzz about the church and there's no doubt that people are looking forward now with anticipation. It feels as if we are at a very early stage but it's a good place to be as we seek to use our interests for the glory of God and serve those around us.

Divine Divas

What do belly dancing, Bollywood, Loose Women and Come Dine with Me have to do with a fresh expression of church in North Yorkshire? Revd Sue Sheriff, vicar of Tadcaster, gives the lowdown on Divine Divas.

It all started when one of our church members won the use of a hot tub for the weekend in a church raffle. She used it for a birthday party and we wondered, 'why is it that we can invite other women to this sort of party but we find that we can't really invite them to church?'

I wasn't sure if it was just me or if the other women felt the same so the first thing we did was have Women Who Lunch and Pray and I asked a small group to come together early last year for lunch to talk about some of the women we cared about and think about the type of leisure activities we could invite them to.

We then invited Christian women across the area to a Pudding and Prayer meeting so that we could discuss it in more detail. As a result of this, we decided to put on an event for women, one that was clearly Christian but not off-putting. Divine Divas was born with DIVA standing for Dynamic Inspirational Vibrant Adventurous women. Our first meeting was an experiment, and we decided to go for belly dancing…

We wanted to be very open and honest about the fact that there was the church element, we didn't want to get people there under false pretences and so we decided the topic and invited a friend of mine – a wonderfully 'DIVA' vicar, Laura McWilliams from Scarborough – to come and tell her story and it was great.

People seemed to go for the whole thing immediately. The venue we use is licensed and I think we set the tone by inviting them to bring whatever they wanted to drink. There are always ethical issues around these questions of course and we don't go so far as to provide the drink but we felt it important that they could bring in a bottle of wine if they wanted to. So far we haven't had any problems with this, people seem to respect what we're doing and only drink in moderation. If it was causing any sort of distress, we would obviously think again.

We didn't want to exclude people by always organising active events so we next organised a Loose Women panel. On the TV, they've discussed prayer and spiritual items several times and we thought it great that we could talk about anything and everything. I chaired it with three very lively Christian women who made themselves very honest, very vulnerable – all with a good experience of life. It was such an open and frank debate and I think an eye opener for many in the audience. Cosmopolitan magazine was taken as our source of information in the first half of the evening so that meant we had Christians talking about things like How to have the Best Sex Ever.

We set our age limit as being old enough to discuss childbirth without cringing and young enough to have a go at belly dancing. It's more of an attitude than an age limit but we tend to get 20 to 40 somethings made up of about 25% churchgoers and 75% non- churchgoers. Attendance has never really dropped below 40.

Bollywood Nights featuring Bollywood style dancing was another one that made the programme. It featured the testimony of a young woman, a Muslim convert to Christianity, who told us some of the complications that decision had brought about in her life. People were really moved when they realised the personal cost of being a Christian; that was the event when people started saying it was 'their'church. There had always been relationship stuff going on but that event was certainly a turning point.

Our next event is Come Dine with the Divine Divas. This is a women-only event so the men will help with the cooking and wait on the tables but once they have served the meal, they have to get out! Three of the fellas from church said they would ask some of their friends and they have now got a group together to do just that. We're calling them the Divine Men. They think this is a fun idea because they are doing something rather than coming to something – it could provide a longer term offshoot for the men.

A core group of seven of us is involved in the planning; there is a big denominational spread as we operate across a joint benefice. There are lots of us who are very conscious of the very worldly things around which we are weaving Christian themes in our events. Divine Divas doesn't seem to be a clear bridge to bringing people into church because, for some of them, Sunday church is not appropriate or convenient for them or they don't really relate to it. At the moment Divine Divas seems to be developing a community in its own right but it's very much at early stages.

The whole thing begs the question about what does church mean? What I hope that will come out of this is that people will develop a relationship with Jesus. I do find that, for instance even now with our friends they will ask us to pray and on occasions even non-churchgoing friends who have no particular claim to faith will text and say 'pray for me, this is happening' – sometimes even to sit and pray with them especially when it's something very emotional to do with family.

Similarly in conversation we'll chat Bible stories and talk about things like the woman at the well who had been married however many times and the man she was with wasn't her husband. So much of it relates to people's experiences today so I'm not sure – if Church were to be taken in its 'tight' term – that we will evolve into having an organised liturgy and singing hymns. However if we're talking about evolving to a place where people are happy to pray and to chatter about the Bible then I think it could easily evolve into that. I guess as we chatter together you could call it a cell group or a Bible study or church but I'm not sure we'd be too keen to try and pin it down too much.

Some of the more mature members of my traditional congregation are now coming along to Divine Divas and thoroughly enjoying it. People have been very supportive and they're just genuinely pleased to see people involved with church in its wider sense.

In future I would like to see Divine Divas growing in numbers. It would also be wonderful to see a change in the little slot where we invite a speaker. Instead of bringing in someone from the outside I would love to be able to say to the group, 'so has Jesus done anything for you? Has God made a difference in your life this week?' and the Divine Divas themselves would just stand up and tell their own stories.

Cook@Chapel

A Fresh Expressions vision day inspired teacher Katharine Crowsley to ask a lot of questions about what God wanted her to do in her area. She tells the story of what happened next.

I was interested in fresh expressions of church when I booked for the vision day in Milton Keynes but I had no idea what that would mean in practical terms. That was two years ago; I'm amazed at what has happened since and how things continue to develop.

My church is Hanslope Methodist Chapel in Buckinghamshire; it's very family friendly but I wondered if we were reaching young people – not only our own young people but all those other young people in the wider community? As a secondary school teacher, I feel quite comfortable with that age range and so was happy to consider something specifically for them.

One thing that really stood out for me from that vision day was the story of the 'bread-making church' in Liverpool. For me, it prompted the big questions of, 'What does God want me to do?', 'How is God looking for me to serve my area?'

Somewhere Else was established in a very different geographical and social context to ours with theirs being an inner city church and ours in a very rural area. However, I really liked the idea of praying and worshipping, talking about Jesus when cooking, and then eating a meal together. A lot of teenagers don't want to necessarily sit around and talk to you but many of them will have a conversation while they are doing something else.

As a building, the Hanslope Chapel really lends itself to this initiative. About three years ago, a new kitchen extension was added and the schoolroom totally refurbished. This means we can prepare the food there and eat there too. Perfect!

When I went to the Church Council for their support, they asked me to test it out first. I linked up with a community food worker and we did a six-week trial before I applied for a grant. We drew up different menus and asked if we could do it for those aged 12 (Year 7) to 16. We got the go ahead to run it for the academic year from September to July, and we've just started our second year.

The Methodist Church gave us a fresh expressions grant with our Chapel and local community having to match fund it. The money was found and we got underway. We run Cook@Chapel on Friday evenings for two hours and about 7-9 young people come along, we couldn't accommodate any more than that. Jamie Oliver has fired a lot of interest in cookery among young people but it is our volunteers who have been the experts. I have had to learn a lot myself; it was quite a challenge because I'm not a particularly confident cook! We generally have one main volunteer and a team of two more who will stand in if necessary. The cookery worker has now moved on but is still involved on a consultancy basis.

Young people don't do so much cookery at school now so they tell us what they would like to learn and we do it – things like cheese sauce, chilli con carne, tortillas and lemon drizzle cake. They like all the chopping up and making things, doing things from scratch.

After we've made the food we sit down and eat it together; it's very informal – they really, really like that. They also like to take it in turns to say grace using our grace dice. Conversations around the table and while cooking can be about all sorts of things, a lot depends on who we have got there and also who the volunteers are. Originally I thought I would need young volunteers to link to these young people but I was wrong. The older people have been ideal, they relate to our 'cooks' in a different way and sometimes they can talk to them very much more comfortably about faith issues.

It's fairly equal in terms of male female ratio but there are more boys wanting to join. However they are not allowed to join until Year 7 as we decided that Cook@Chapel should just be for secondary age young people. We don't advertise at all; most of it is word of mouth recommendation.

We did some outreach into the village hall to reach other young people but that didn't work. The only ones who came were those already part of Cook@Chapel so we had to think again about what is right for a particular group of people. Cook@Chapel was building community as a fresh expression of church but we wanted to nurture these young people as they began to explore more of the Christian faith.

The young people who come to Cook@Chapel don't necessarily come to our church, in fact only two to three of them do but questions about faith and spirituality come up quite naturally again and again.

Following up on that I became involved in a youth service called Cross Purposes that takes place every month in nearby town Newport Pagnell, about five miles away. It's a joint Anglican, Methodist, URC and Baptist project at Newport Pagnell United Reformed Church but a lot of its planning and delivery is done by the young people themselves. My vision is to link Cook@Chapel to Cross Purposes – It's not too difficult a leap when it's young people inviting young people to go along and find out more. As we look ahead to 2011 and beyond, we pray that will happen.

Knit and Natter

A fresh expression of church for knitting fans in Ellesmere Port has inspired several similar groups to pick up the needles and wool. One of the organisers Mrs Chris Crowder tells how the original vision has blossomed.

My 89-year-old friend Dorothy was terminally ill with cancer when she received a knee blanket from a church craft group in New Zealand just before she died. I thought of that precious blanket a few weeks later when I visited Somewhere Else, the 'bread church' on Bold Street, Liverpool.

I sat next to Anna Briggs from the Iona Community who runs two secular knitting groups in the city. She had a Knit and Natter bag on her knee; we got talking about what she did and that sowed the seed. Our Minister then met her too and we went on to have a get-together for interested parties at church. I searched the internet for copyright-free patterns and a couple of months later, in September 2008, we opened our doors for the first time to Knit and Natter in the reception area next to the Church.

It wasn't long before we had so many members we had to move to the hall and now our members meet every Tuesday afternoon in term time from 1.30pm–3pm. Over the past two years, have posted off more than a quarter of a tonne of knitted jumpers, hats, scarves and blankets to people in need at home and abroad. These have included the homeless, lonely, ill and bereaved of Chester and Ellesmere Port. We have also sent goods to South Africa, Haiti, Kosovo, Nepal, Kenya, Bulgaria and Eastern Europe, as well as having the pleasure of being able to knit for children by name at an orphanage in Swaziland.

At the start of the meeting we put out a cross in the centre of the room on a table covered with Dorothy’s blanket and members put their completed knitting on and around this table. We also place a collection plate on the table as we take donations rather than subscriptions. Our postage costs are covered by the monies donated: just like the feeding of the 5000, there is always enough.

Our meetings end with short devotions which, initially, we were rather nervous about, but how wrong we were! We were so wary of the missional side of things but it is now at the heart of what we do. Although the majority of our members are not regular churchgoers, they readily ask for prayer and acknowledge answers to those prayers. On the Knit and Natter membership card, it has this from Matthew 25 v37-40: 'When Lord did we ever see you naked and clothe you? I tell you that when you did this for one of the least important of my family you did it for me.'

Knit and Natter isn't just a knitting club making clothes for charity – it is a fresh expression of church which works on many different levels, giving people a purpose in life and sending God's love around the world. There is no doubt at all that many of our members see Knit and Natter as their church, they recognise the fact that we are meeting together in community and God is there.

A team of four of us usually co-ordinate it and we all play to our strengths: the other three are wonderful cooks and make delicious cakes whereas my efforts are rather hit and miss! They are also very adept at setting up the hall and clearing away afterwards. I lead the devotional time and try and write a prayer that's meaningful and pertinent to our particular theme of the day. In that respect, the members tend to think I'm the leader but there is absolutely no way I could run the group without the invaluable support of the others.

We usually knit at the beginning, have cake and tea at about 2.15pm and then have notices and devotions for the final quarter of an hour. I start passing round the prayer list about mid-way so it is complete by devotions time. We finish every week with the Lord's Prayer. We sit in a circle so that all are included and there are no separate cliques; it's as part of this community that concerns and questions are raised.

Sometimes we will have 45 come along, at other times we have 30. If one of our team can't get to a person who needs a sympathetic ear or to a new member who needs to be made welcome, we know that one of the established members will take on that role. Just because most of our members are older in age doesn't mean that they are immune from problems: one lady suffered suicidal thoughts, but came to see Knit and Natter as a reason to go on; another had lost her husband when she first came to us and was very low in spirits – however, she is now talking about approaching the local hospital to ask if she can start a Knit and Natter Group there to help people with mental health problems.

Other members do come to church but haven't been coming for very long and Knit and Natter provides contact with the regular church members and helps them to get to know us. A group come from the other Methodist Church in the town and we have got to know them really well – this has strengthened the bonds between us. We also have some members from other denominations and have also invited several speakers from different church backgrounds.

Knit and Natter has inspired people to start similar groups in Northolt, Bromborough, Lymm, Kettering, Little Neston, Heswall and Chester. The latter is an Anglican group that is going to approach the Methodists to see if it can be run jointly – again strengthening bonds between churches. We have even been Club of the Month in Simply Knitting magazine!

I'd encourage people to look at their own communities, listen to them and decide if there is an opening for a group. If so they should know that it will grow and mean more work than they initially anticipated but it's also gratifying and wonderful. I feel it's where God wants me to be because it's practical Christianity.

We let members knit what they want. I even have a couple of ladies who can only natter rather than knit, but they have proved a real asset in their contribution to the group.

Looking forward, we have been approached by the local Academy to see if they can bring a class of 14-yr-olds to join us to learn to knit and crochet and the local Women's Refuge is also very interested – it's all very exciting!

But for me the most important thing is not how much we produce in terms of output but it is the love that exists between our group both for one another and for the world at large.

ThE DEN

When Chris and Tina Adams received a word of prophecy about their garden shed, thE DEN was born and the Holy Spirit has continued to be at work ever since.

After singing in worship one young person was in tears as she understood for the first time all that Jesus had done for her on the cross. She wrote in thE DEN journal: "Dear God and Jesus, I never really thought about your death in this much detail and now that I have… I am eternally grateful for what you have done and sacrificed for us!!…Thank you for bringing kindness and happiness to me. Thank you for truly bringing the Holy Spirit, you and Jesus to me!!" Another was healed of a persistent eye infection after prayer.

A group of sixth formers now come and join us to worship and support the younger ones. Many have difficulties at home and most have very little or no experience of church. They have begun to grow as a group and are becoming good friends. Their new faith has resulted in a noticeable change in behaviour both at home and school.