A week of creative connections…

Much of my reading at the moment centres around the idea of ‘incarnational missiology’. A well-used, much-talked-about term it seems it is easier to discuss than embody. Yet beyond the clichéd, buzz-words I can’t help thinking there is a ‘pearl of great price’ worth discovering, particularly for us, with our ‘blank-sheet’ here in Stratford.

As I read Hirsch and Frost’s bountiful multi-course meal that is ‘The Shaping of Things to Come’ I’m intrigued by the concept of a church built upon ‘dynamic sets of relationships, friendships, and acquaintances’. I’m drawn to a church that ‘enhances and ‘flavours’ the host community’s living social fabric rather than disaffirming it’. I’m captivated by the thought of a group of Christians infiltrating a community, like salt and light, ‘to make creative connections with people where God-talk and shared experience allow for real cross-cultural Christian mission to take place’ (2003:42).

So this week we’ve set about making some creative connections. We’ve met and prayed with one of the MPs for the borough, Stephen Timms. We’ve established a link with one of the local primary schools which means we will now be doing an assembly every week. We’ve chatted with a local Councillor (one of our neighbours who just happens to be an Everton fan!) and listened as he shared his desire to see the Salvation Army flourish at the centre of our community. We’ve discovered that the manager of the football team that I’ve joined actually heads up the Youth Justice team working with the Borough’s young offenders. As we talked before training last night he was eager to see how we could work together to support this marginalized section of the community. We’ve also starting talking to ‘First Fruits’ (a Christian organisation that specialises in ‘social enterprise’ ventures) about the possibility of partnering them with a job creation and work-skills programme aimed at the long-term unemployed. Oh, and we’ve learned that Sure Start remain keen to work together in supporting young families.

Never-mind politics, seven days is a long time in church-planting!