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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.