Last night we dissolved a committee! Always a good thing, I think - the fewer the committees, the nearer we are to the Kingdom. But this has been an important part of our life here at Blomsbury over the years, and its passing deserves notice.
The Central Committee dated from just over 100 years ago, and was part of a plan put in place to keep the church here at this site, and functioning. Drawing on resources and personnel from the wider Baptist community, the committee played a variety of roles over the years - often largely financial until very recently, and also a place to explore ideas, to try our possibilities, and to draw on wider wisdom. For the last few years, it has focussed less on finance, and more on helping the church, and the ministry team in particular, explore ways forward. With the changes in charity law, and with different ways of relating becoming stronger, the legal place of the committee was no longer necessary.
And so, with barely a blink, the committee dissolved itself.
For any who remember the huge place this committee has played over the years, it does feel rather as if it has ended not with a bang, but with a whimper.
But I think it has ended with grace, satisfaction and an alertness to the moving of the Spirit.
By voting itself out of existence, the committee has contined the practice of recent years of showing grace in the giving up of power, the letting go of control.
The committee has every right to be pleased at a job well done. Brought into being as a way of keeping this church functioning in this place, it can cease to function, secure that, in so far as we can every know what will happen, for the moment, the church is not only surviving, but thriving. And, a small part in the great effort, the committee has played its part in that.
And the committee has been alert to the movement of the Spirit, and been ready to respond as things have changed, and patterns have developed in new ways.
In its dissolution, the committee has offered one last service to the church it has served so faithfully. It has reminded us all as the people of God here and now, what it is to be graced, to be pleased with a good job, and to be alert to where God might lead us next.
To those who have served - representing those who served right back for over a century - thank you.
We dissolved a committee last night. It was a God-filled moment.

Can you see us?

Despite our prime location in central London, on a street which probably has one of the highest footfall counts of any locally, we as a building remain to many invisible. What is even harder to credit is that local residents - admittedly divided from us by a busy and rather messy road junction - don't credit it us with being a community that seeks to engage with them.

Where have we gone wrong? Surely if we are true to the Gospel we should be engaging with the local people as well as with the big global issues for which we do have a reputation that attracts attention?

Somehow we have failed to connect. Locally will claim to know we exist, could if pressed even give directions to find us BUT don't see what we offer as relevent to them or their needs.
Despite our best efforts over the last forty years and more (perhaps even since our founding in 1848) Bloomsbury has to be a community that has international, national and local concern.
Our programmes, especially our lunches on Sundays and Tuesdays, do appeal to some in the neighbourhood but many who do come from around and about the area have been doing so for years. We're not connecting with recent 'incomers' or those who have been around for years and who probably have long since dismissed us as irrelevant.

Struggling to get our identity right, grappling with public perception of us, living with the physical barriers of our isolation on a 'traffic island', all make it hard for us to be a church 'serving the community' - the strapline on our church coasters.

I guess waking up to the realities that these challenges present us is a first step to seeking to find solutions.

getting the rhythms right....

It's been a very Christmassy week this week here at Bloomsbury - for some of us at least. We have been finalising plans for the various events over Christmas, and producing material for the Christmas edition of the magazine. I was sitting at the keyboard doing some of it when I got a text from a friend asking what I was doing. Writing up stuff for Christmas I replied (some soon to appear on Christmas.org - check it out!) And then I commented that it felt very odd to be doing it so early in November. My friend texted back pointing out that Starbucks were advertising their Christmas red cups that week too. I was in good company.
I'm not sure that it made me feel much better, but it was a good reminder that it is not just in church life that the calendar can get dislocated. During my years in pastorate, I have got used to doing most of my thinking, reflecting, creating - and praying - about Christmas at the end of October and the beginning November, beginning to think about Lent on the day after Boxing day, and trying to get my head round Easter Day weeks before I have been able to engage in community with Good Friday. It is ones of the joys and challenges of trying to make sure that we don't hit the major festivals unprepared.
Does it matter? I'm not sure. After all, if the truths these festivals celebrate are the truths in which we live, they are not attached to particular dates. If Jesus is born as a human being, this is not only true in December, and the hope of the resurrection is not only vaild on a variety of dates in March and April.
However, I think there's something important in the rhythms of the year, moving through the story in order, and regularly. It helps us to keep anchored to the story, and not to remove it into some kind of timeless system of principles which are detached form the experience of living in time and space. It stops us from staying only in the safe places of the bits of the story we "like" - if we move through the story in order, we cannot separate the baby in the manger from the fleeing refugees or the slain infants. We cannot isolate the angels proclamation from the pain of the betrayal in the garden, and we can't live in the joy of the resurrection without weeping at the Cross.
And even more fundamentally, by telling the story in order, by tracing it through the year, event by event, we keep it fresh, we don't get bored with it, we meet, with delight and with some trepidation, the promises and challenges that come to us with the various aspects of the gospel.
You see, I think in this, Starbucks has got it right. They produce the red cups once a year. They are anticipated, they are enjoyed, they are missed. But there is no chance just to take the for granted.
If we listen carefully to the rhythms of our faith, let these rhythms shape our lives and responses, we will keep alive to the wonder and the mystery of the life God calls us into.
And if you want to know what we are doing at Christmas, keep an eye on the website calendar. All news will appear there soon.