Thanks Phil

Chris — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:58:18 +0100

I met a bloke called Phil yesterday. Only very briefly, but I want to publicly register my thanks to him. It was like this.

I work part time as in sales for a small IT firm in Romsey. Heading back from a meeting with a prospective customer in Ringwood I met Phil Turns out Phil is a great salesman. As I passed him he gave me a friendly smile and simple greeting. I couldn't help but engage him. He was so unassuming and, well, just plain friendly. It's hard to ignore that kind of thing.

So now, on the table next to me, is a copy of the Big Issue. Phil even seemed surprised when I asked him if I could buy one (maybe it was the suit).

I learnt something about selling from Phil yesterday. It's easy to say "no thanks" as you hurry by someone who shouts "Big Issue" at you as you walk past. Yet with Phil, I couldn't do that. I had caught his eye, engaged with him. It genuinely didn't seem to matter to Phil if I bought one off him or not. It must have done; it's the difference between eating or not to him. The result was I actually asked him for one. If I lived in Ringwood, I'd get one off him every week.

I also learned something off him about being a human being. Phil seemed more interested in having a few moments of friendly interaction with me than he was in selling me a Big Issue. Is that how I am with people? I am in it for them, or just for getting out of a situation what I want?

Thanks Phil.

Fixing Snowdon

Chris — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:41:56 +0100

I remember whilst I was a young person and student, I was encouraged to do something useful with all the spare time I had - endleass summer holidays and all that. You know, things such as spend a few weeks helping with a Christian holiday, or going on a "mission trip". Doing good stuff with your time. No arguements.

Whilst trudging up Snowdon, not much to see and with by surprising weighty 6 month old daughter on my back, I wondered at the amount of work that went in to building paths that hadn't been there the last time I walked up there with my Dad. You see with all the boots hitting the hill, erriosion is a big problem and will blight the awesome landscape as we try to enjoy it. I assume that lots of volunteers, particularly students, must give up their time and considerable energy to get it done.*

Volunteering for things like this would have been seen as a waste of time at my university CU. Why do that when you could be telling someone about Jesus? I totally subscribed to that logic.

It shocked me to realise that I probably still think like this. Is it not possible to help reduce errosion on Snowdon AND tell someone about Jesus? But it's abother example of our dualist thinking that hinders us being effective as the church.

So, if you are a youth or student leader, give some thought to what you encourage your young people to get involved with. Train them to think of life as being one thing, not two. Don't forget to show them how to do this by your example as well. And most importantly (for me), let me know how you do that last bit if you figure it out.

* I might well be wrong about this, it might have been done with some Lottery grant or other. However the idea still works I think.

Choices

Chris — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:34:37 +0100

SAFE are a great bunch of people based in Southampton that work out their faith in Jesus by helping people with self esteem issues to transform their lives. Self esteem can be crippling for people. It can cause long term unemployment, depression and relationship breakdowns. SAFE have developed a course called Choices which works. Not only that, but their way of working is to train churches to use the course in their locality to bring transformation and relationships. Give them a call to find out how they can help your church help your community (their website is way out of date. Maybe you can help them here?).

However the Choices course is aimed at adults. So we are initiating a project to tune it to work for young people. The idea is to use the expertise SAFE have, plus the ideas, ethusiasm and talents in the youth work community in Southampton to produce a great new resource. If you are interested in being involved, let me know and I'll let you have more details.

Lets see the church in Southampton do some great work together to serve our communities.

How do you know if your church is Successful?

Chris — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:24:47 +0100

How do you measure the success of your church? I read this list at the Backyard Missionary. He asked us to ponder and not react which is always good advice. I found them helpful to reflect on what it would mean we would have been doing if these became useful measures.

1. The number of cigarette butts in the church parking lot.

2. The number of adoptions people in the church have made from local foster care.

3. The number of pictures on the church wall of unwed mothers holding their newborn babies in their arms for the first time.

4. The number of classes for special needs children and adults

5. The number of former convicted felons serving in the church

6. The number of phone calls from community leaders asking the church’s advice

7. The number of meetings that take place somewhere besides the church building

8. The number of organizations using the church building

9. The number of days the pastor doesn’t spend time in the church office but in the community

10. The number of emergency finance meetings that take place to reroute money to community ministry

11. The amount of dollars saved by the local schools because the church has painted the walls

12. The number of people serving in the community during the church’s normal worship hours

13. The number of non-religious-school professors worshiping with you

14. The number of people wearing good, free clothes that used to belong to members of the church

15. The number of times the church band has played family-friendly music in the local coffee shop

16. The number of people who have gotten better because of free health clinic you operate

17. The number of people in new jobs thanks to the free job training center you opened

18. The number of micro-loans given by members in your church

19. The number of churches your church planted in a 10 mile radius of your own church

Prince Caspian Resources

Chris — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:46:05 +0100

Damaris produce great resources to help you and your friends use media and culture to think about God. They have recently been commissioned by Disney to produce resources for schools and churches to use. These are available free of charge. Take a look here for more information.

Less exciting?

Chris — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:03:03 +0100

Normally advertisers tell us that cars are fast, shiny and great at cornering whilst causing a wave of spray to arc up from the road. To have an exciting life, you need this car because it is "exciting" is the message.

Recently some car company or other (and it would make this post much slicker if I could remember which one) decided that their car was none of the above, and so was hard to sell as exciting. What it was good at however was putting kids in the back with all their stuff in the boot and driving to places to do fairly ordinary things. The message - doing things with your kids is the biggest adventure you can have.

The way the church does mission is very similar. Serving God is exciting if it involves high impact projects, big stages and tall PA towers. But what about mission that just involves doing things with your kids? Or colleagues, neighbours, friends and family? Might be harder to sell, but is it worth doing?

This post says much more on this subject. I recommend a read. Here's a snippet:

I believe there is a gap between what we think mission and evangelism is and what they are in reality.

Often there is this notion of ‘attempting great things for God’, ‘leading many people to Christ’, or ‘taking the city for Jesus’. I’m sure you have heard these phrases if you have been around church for any length of time.

By comparison, I have rarely heard mission spoken of as loving your neighbour, of living with integrity, or simply falling in line with whatever God asks you to do.

Reflection - Part 4

Chris — Wed, 28 May 2008 10:40:57 +0100

The continuing, if not gripping, story of how we got here. Read from the beginning. Last time I talked about how we felt we had made a mistake changing from a network to a more traditional organisation. But why are networks better?

Since we got into the whole church unity thingy (I mentioned that I was never really into this before in Part 1) I have been caused to rethink what church is. See, I got brought up properly and understood that church is what you do on Sundays. You go there. You sing some songs, listen to a sermon and what-not. There's a vicar (or minister or pastor depending on your denomination). And of course I was told several times that it was important to remember that the church was the people, not the building they sat in.

Church unity tends to be about the leaders (vicars, ministers, pastors) meeting together to talk, pray or possibly organise events that will be useful in expressing our unity, or letting the town know that the church is there. So this is where we turned. We were a youth outreach organisation, we were interested in building unity in the church so off to the church leaders' group we went.

The problem is that, in general, full time paid church leaders are only interested in doing what they think needs doing. I don't mean it in a bad way about them, it's not their fault - that's their job. It's the system we have created. We expect them to act like this. In fact those of us that get to vote for our leaders would probably vote them out if they didn't.

What else should they do? Well, it now seems to me that they should be about facilitating the group to be able to help each other grow to be the people Jesus wants them to be. And many leaders might think that's what they are doing but they just aren't. The way most of us do church is about a few special people who do the important stuff and the rest turn up at the right events and give to the right causes. This is my experience of the way the church acts. The words might be different, but this is the reality that I see.

The clincher for me was this: I had worked for 6 years at IBM. This was a hard place to figure out how to follow Jesus. It was an even harder place to encourage other people to follow him too. Then I left and started trying to encourage young people in schools and parks to follow him. All of a sudden the people at the church wanted to pray for me, that I would do a good job at this. We get a little mention in the notice sheet, "pray for Chris and Becky and the great work they do for the Lord." So it seems that my work at IBM was not important to the church, my work with Unite is. But I now know that my work for IBM was as important to God as my work for Unite.

So as we have explored the church unity thingy I came to the conclusion that church unity is about the whole church, every person who follows Jesus, being united in doing God's work in a place. So, in a neighbourhood there might be followers who can pray together for their neighbours. At work there might be a group that can help each other to be good followers with the special challenges they face there. New mums can form support groups (or coffee clubs as they seem to me!). And a single person can be part of several different groups and activities.

This is all starting to sound like a network to me. It seems to me that networks of small groups, crossing over and intersecting would be more effective than what we do right now. We started out being a network and moved towards being an organisation.

We have found that we have been less effective since we left the network behind. We didn't realise that people have great ideas, great energy, great gifts. So helping people to get make best use of these is much more effective than trying to do everything ourselves. It's just that you kid yourself into thinking your ideas are better. If everyone just did what you think they should do... And, less obviously, other people will actually help you do your stuff. I don't mean they'll get involved in your project, but they will help you do what you do better.

I think God gave us an opportunity to explore this and we went a different direction. In the next post I'll talk some more about things that happened that helped us realise this and helped us move back towards network building rather than building our own empire.

But lastly for now, you might like to read this article for a view from outside the church (thanks Tallskinnykiwi for the link).

That's what I call church.

Chris — Fri, 23 May 2008 22:04:10 +0100

I was really encouraged by my friend Tom today. He is a good friend who lives and works in the Shirley Warren estate. He used to be in the youth group I helped run but now I think he teaches me more than I teach him. I'm happy to be able to say that. That's what I call church.

We were there doing our usual Friday lunchtime bible study. The lads were their usual state of half interested. Later on some new kids came in. It didn't take long to find out that they considered reading the bible "f**king s**t". However they did then challange us to find a bit that wasn't. Tom jumped up straight away with John 3:16. "What do you think of that, you interested?". It seemed they weren't. I was slightly back footed.

Tom wasn't. "You don't find that interesting? You know the world, the stars, the whole universe? God made all that. He did that, and then he came down here to die for you. For you. Who are you? He's God and he dies for you. You think that's not interesting? I think it's increadible" was the gist of Tom's reply, but it was the excitement and enthusiasm that was important and doesn't come across too well written down. I was not on the back foot any more. I thought that it was amazing too. The lads? Difficult to know. Obviously they had to say they thought it was still "f**king s**t". But who knows. It was great to be there.

So tonight on StreetLight (a detached youth project in Millbrook) I felt that bit more confident when telling the kids why we were out there. Tom has helped me be better at being like Jesus. That's what I call church.

Anticipation

Chris — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:43:01 +0100

Just heading off to school to do a bible study group with some kids who have never been to church, think God isn't real and would tell you they aren't even interested. Anyway, they come to bible study group each week. We deliberately call it bible study group to put people off coming unless they really want to. Sometimes we have good chats, other times they just mess around.

Main thing: it's exciting as I get ready to go off and talk to people about Jesus. Whatever the situation, its a great thing to be able to do. Sometimes I can't believe that Jesus actually asks us to help him. He is great.

What will happen today?

Reflection - Part 3

Chris — Fri, 23 May 2008 11:37:45 +0100

Continuing our series of reflections on what we have done over the last few years, hopefully helping us to decide where we are headed. You can read the first in the series here.

At this stage, Unite was a network, and initiative. It wasn't something we created, it just kind of happened. It wasn't just us that wanted to do this kind of thing, we were bumping into others with the same thoughts. A group of lads just out of school decided to start a recording studio where people could come for free and record their tunes. It would build a network in the young, local music scene where people who knew Jesus could get to know those who didn't with a common passion. It was brilliant. Others ended up starting their own StreetLight teams in their area (the much deliberated new name for the minibus project). There was a website where people could post their thoughts, ideas, activities and prayers. Others wanted to get together and pray.

And I think this is where I need to own up to our first big mistake, but one that has taught us a lot about the way the church works in general. Unite was a network full of life and passion. However some of us assumed that to be really successful it needed to be an organisation with a base and lots of resources to get the things done we thought we needed to do. Looking back now, that probably ended up killing the movement.

Why do we assume that we need to be a large, influential organisation to achieve things? Probably because that is the way things get done in our society. It's top down – someone at the top sets vision and direction and people underneath get involved with it to make it happen. I guess it has something to do with wanting power and influence. And it probably has a lot to do with wanting that sense of achieving something that others can see how well you did.

To some extent Unite was different to this at the start – it was a movement of people who wanted to do things and they helped each other to get started. A music based outreach event got started. So did a recording studio. And several detached youth projects. And work in several secondary schools. A website. Some work on the Shirley Warren estate linked initially to the skate park there.

But we were diverted off down the start a big organisation route. Even later, after we realised that this isn't what we were good at and that we wanted to just help people get things off the ground, we seemed to have lost the edge. Unite was about what we did now, not about what you wanted to do. That is a shame.

If we had done things differently, would the movement still have been in action? I'm not sure. Maybe it was just about helping the people we were involved with, and letting them help us. Maybe it would have run its course anyway by now. Who knows?

24/7 Prayer Week

Chris — Thu, 22 May 2008 14:44:55 +0100

Enjoy a 24/7 prayer room? There's one in Southampton next week. It's at Orchard Lane church building starting tomorrow.

All the details here.

There is a growing group of people involved in praying for Southampton in this way. You can find out more information by visiting this website or this Facebook group.

Training in storytelling

Chris — Mon, 19 May 2008 19:05:17 +0100

Schoolswork.co.uk have organised a set of training days around the country looking at the area of story telling. Looks really useful. As their blurb says:

Imagine you’re taking a school assembly, or a lesson, or just talking to a bunch of young people. It’s hard to get very far without telling a story. Maybe it’s the day you got stuck in a lift and realised you believed in God; the drama of Mother Teresa’s life or your favourite tale of the day potatoes took over the world. Stories are the way we communicate and you can’t work with children or teenagers without telling a lot of them. So why are they so hard to tell well? Storytelling is a skill, something to be practised and developed. That’s why, in June and July 2008, we’re holding a series of creative training days: to inspire and equip Christian schools and youth workers to tell bigger, brighter and better stories that communicate the biggest story of all.

All the information, dates and costs are currently to be found here.

Reflection - Part 2

Chris — Fri, 16 May 2008 11:01:07 +0100

This is the second in our series of our story so far. This is more of a personal reflection than anything else, hopefully to help us decide where we go next. You can read the first part here.

It took over a year to plan, organise, fund raise and the nerves were high as the doors opened on the first Lift event. The music was great, the punters had fun it but the testimony from one of the bands went on a bit too long. Enough people turned up to make it worthwhile. However it was whilst reflecting on this that we realised the flaw in the plan.

There was no strategy, we just put on an event. A good event. But what use is it? It was run almost in isolation with what was going on around the city. We hadn't talked to other youth groups. We hadn't got involved with others working with teenagers in parks, schools, estates so that they could come and use the event as part of their ongoing work.

It was reflecting on this that we figured that for our event to be useful we needed to get working with others. That's where the Unite bit came from.

We also decided it was a good idea to start a detached project working with teenagers in estates. Initially this was called “The Lift Bus” project, as it involved getting a bus and writing “Lift” on the side. I love this story. It really helped me to see how God works. I'm going to tell it for the thousandth time. Sorry if you have heard it before.

We applied for £5000 to buy the minibus. We got rejected. Unbelievable ... what is God up to? We needed that money. The next day I got a call from Colin Baker. He had a very old bus, a bit of a wreck. But we could have it for free. OK so far. Oh, it needs storing off road as it has no road tax. Ahh. Mike and Ruth live just round the corner. We can leave it on their drive for a few days whilst I think of something.

A few days later Mike cornered me whilst out at the Soul Cellar. “That old bus on our drive....”. “Umm, sorry about that, gonna move it” and such like. “No” he says, “I've been thinking about it”. And on he went to explain what needed doing to fix it up. “Whatever you think best” he said. I had no idea what was best. He seemed to. Maybe he would be in charge. Great, he would. And it turned out that Ben would help. And so would Katherine and many others. As filler replaced the thin air where the rust had been, paint rubbed down and more slapped on and various bits fell off and hit people; a team formed. A team that wanted to go out into the streets and tell teenagers about Jesus. We hadn't had a team before and now we had. And if we had simply got a nice minibus that didn't have rust and holes we still wouldn't have a team. God had a minibus and a team and I'll never forget that.

It seemed that God was helping us. It felt exciting. We were organising monthly prayer meetings and people were coming from different churches to pray together for the young people in the city. We met at a little church in James Street on the Golden Grove estate ate bacon sandwiches and asked God to do stuff. Our little organisation was taking off.

Who's serving who?

Becky — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:29:08 +0100

Sometimes (or maybe always) when we are trying to serve, we think we are the only ones doing the serving. Let me explain.

When I go out on StreetLight, I think I am there to serve the teenagers in Millbrook. I give them drinks, I talk to them, I offer to pray for them. I serve them. Last Friday, I saw another side to what God is doing in people's lives. A very drunk, and quite possibly drugged-up, guy came up to us quite aggressively and we moved off. Half-way up the field, we turned back to see him getting into a fight with some boys that we had been spending time with. These boys then caught us up, seemingly uninjured. One of them (let's call him G) told us that the fight was because the aggressive guy wanted to come after us, but G had persuaded him not to. G served us. He served me.

God doesn't seem to make the distinction I do. He made us all in his image.

Seeds

Chris — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:35:49 +0100

I love the way Jesus taught about seeds. He taught about them but he also lived the same way. He seemed happy to drop a thought into someone's head and then leave them with it. Or to act kindly towards someone and let them think about what it meant. He trusted that his Father would use the seeds.

I was talking to my friend Dave Thorpe yesterday. He works with young people mainly using drama to help them explore issues such as drugs and bullying.

He told me that he was in Millbrook school recently helping a group to think about issues around being on the streets. One person played a homeless man and the others had to invent a character that might interact with him. Charlie, lets call him, approached the homeless man and offered him a cup of hot chocolate: we are from StreetLight, how are you doing. Anything we can do to help?

Dave pretended not to know about StreetLight to ask Charlie what it was about. Charlie explained they were a bunch of religious people who come out and help you, give you drinks and talk to you. They are really nice people.

Dave tells me he thinks God is working in Charlie. He is awaiting a trial at the moment and may well go to prison. But he thinks God is working with him.

As far as we can remember, we have never had anything but trouble from Charlie. He is a pain. He's one of the people that when see him in a group ahead your spirits fall a little.

Yet maybe God is working with him. Maybe he did notice all those times when he was making our lives hard and we kept trying to be kind to him. Maybe every time he laughed and mocked when we told him what we believed Jesus died for him and us, he was listening a little. Maybe the times he has met Mark or Pete from Millbrook Christian Centre were important, though they seemed not at the time. And now he has met Dave. Charlie might go to prison. I wonder who God might have waiting there for him?

Non of this is to highlight that we might have done well. It is for two reasons. Firstly to encourage people to keep sowing seeds with whoever they meet. Secondly it is to help me remember that God is good at surprising me.

Reflection - Part 1

Chris — Fri, 09 May 2008 10:19:30 +0100

As explained here, this is the first in a series of posts we are going to put up over the next few weeks talking about how Unite came about and where it is now. We are hoping that this might help us to figure out where to go next.

In 2003 Becky and I were involved with the youth group at Above Bar Church in Southampton. Because she knew vaguely what she was doing, she got paid to do this. At this time letters to her were addressed to Ms Thornton. Mrs Ward was my mum. I was working for IBM.

You know how when you go on a residential you often decide God has told you to do something, you get all excited. Somewhere between 2 days and 3 weeks later, it's all blown over and you decide you aren't going to chance the known world after all. In the case of John and Andy, the last bit didn't happen. Not for a year or two anyway.

Having two young people that wanted to change the world, or Southampton at least, was a good thing. As they came to the end of school, they began to look around for something exciting to do for God. At that time, staying in Southampton didn't seem an option – there weren't many options to do this, and none that involved starting and running outreach projects to young people. Many conversations later we'd come up with some money, Ruth to work with them a few days a week to give them “direction” and they got started.

The vision was to help the young people in Southampton to get to know Jesus. The strategy was to find ways for churches to work together to achieve this. I don't really remember when exactly they came up with the name “Unite”, but it seemed to work and as it was their project it was their decision anyway.

Personally, I had never had the faintest interest in church unity. My view was that there were good and sensible reasons that people met in different congregations in different buildings on Sundays. Everyone has a different personality and preferences, so it seemed natural that they would want to meet in different ways. I had always had a passion for working with young people, and this seemed exciting, and I wanted to be involved.

I think I lasted about 6 more months at IBM before I decided to leave, sell my flat and live off the profits so I could be involved day-to-day. Becky was our top advisor, doing what she would continue to do which was help me see things more clearly.

So, that's how we got started. In future posts over the next few weeks, we'll write more about where things went and how we began to be changed as we went on. Stick around and we might even admit to some mistakes.

Reflection - Introduction

Chris — Fri, 02 May 2008 16:53:02 +0100

So here we are. Right here, doing this. But where next? Man, I don't know. It's got confusing. It all seemed so simple. Time to figure it out.

Lots has happened since we started out doing the Unite thing in 2003. Things have changed. We've changed. Some people have moved on, new people come onto the scene. Some of us got married, had children. Others just moved to Shirley Warren. Each to their own.

We figured it would be a useful exercise to write about how we got started, what's happened and what we have learned. It might be interesting for you to read. Hopefully, it will help us get a grip on things and help us to see the way forward.

We haven't written anything yet, so I can't say how many there will be or anything much else really. Watch this space I guess.

Freecycle

Chris — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:36:12 +0100

Steve tells me that Freecycle celebrates its 5th birthday today. If you aren't part of it, you should be. From their website:

Our goal is to keep usable items out of landfills. By using what we already have on this earth, we reduce consumerism, manufacture fewer goods, and lessen the impact on the earth. Another benefit of using Freecycle is that it encourages us to get rid of junk that we no longer need and promote community involvement in the process.

Things we should all definitely be interested in. The best thing we have been given is probably a highchair for Mae. But way better than that is getting rid of 9 large concrete paving slabs from my garden. It would have taken me at least 2 trips to the tip in the car to get rid of, but instead the Freecycle community meant that they got picked up and someone's mum now has a new patio.

Giving is definitely better than receiving.

Lunch Club

Chris — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:50:52 +0100

God is really good in giving us opportunities to go into schools to serve them. We run a weekly lunch club in a local secondary school. We play some games with the kids, do a short thought to help them think about who they are, what the world is all about and the possibility that God is interested in them. Its not uncommon for us to attract kids that, well, might not otherwise be popping down the shops to buy the teacher an apple.

We have this at the moment, and we are struggling to know what to do. We do get opportunities to tell them about what we believe about Jesus, but its hard work and they often make a mess of the classroom. On top of this they have put off others from coming to the club. We are close to banning them from coming - something we have never had to do. Please pray that we can help them to be better people and that they might meet Jesus. Thanks

Mike Frost Tour

Chris — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:10:36 +0100

I'm pretty interested right now in the question "are we doing it right?". The it would be the church, the we would range from me to the West (I know I can't be church on my own, but I am part of it).

That has sparked off lots of other questions in me: what is it, who is it? That kind of thing.

So it's really useful that my friend Dave Couchman from Focus arranged for Mike Frost to come to Southampton in October this year to help us think about all that. You can find out all the details here.

For a flavour of what it's all about, take a look at this video.