This week we are having new carpet laid in the foyer, thanks to the Central St Giles people; part of their ethos is to undertake community projects. Last year, the school Seyan was governor of was repainted; this year, our foyer is getting redecorated. And it will look good. The walls are already repainted, and look fresh and clean. And by the middle of this week, there will be a new carpet as well. Joy!
Carpet is one of the things that makes Baptist churches different from some others. Forget baptism, music and appraoches to preaching. carpet - and particularly carpet in the church itself is one of our distinctives.
This is partly because many of our buildings are newer than parish churches - both Anglican and Roman Catholic - and newer buildings in those traditions will also sometimes have carpet. And of course by no means all Baptist churches have carpet. But look around. You'll see that we do often, and that it is one of our particular features.
Why do we do this? My theory is that we have the deep-seated intention that our church is a home, not a place visited for short periods, or a place of function and business, nor a museum. It is a place where we come in, take of our coats, and settle down with our family to share some of the things that are deepest for us.
We had a service recently in which we reflected on the various symbols around our building; the bread and wine, the baptistry, the peace candle, the weapons man, the flowers and so on. I forgot about the carpet. But it is there, and it does say something important about who we think we are, and what we intend to do when we meet together in worship. We are at home. We are the people of God, the family of God. We can be comfortable, we can relax because we are accepted and welcomed. We don't need to put on special airs or hide parts of ourselves. That old definition; home is the place where they know you thoroughly and still love you - not always true for all of us. But please God, it is a truth we try to live out as a church in our building. And as we enjoy our carpet!

Well now, it's been an interesting couple of days. Off I go on Wednesday, all innocent like, to a Board meeting at IBTS (if you don't know this wonderful institution, see here http://www.ibts.eu/ ), and within hours of arriving the airports were closed, and life began to look a little more demanding that I had planned for! Only one of our Board could not get to the meeting, coming, as he did, from Norway, but it became increasingly clear that my flight home on Sunday was just not going to happen. Like so many many people around the world, I was miles from home with no idea what to do next. However, unlike so many, I was fortunate to be in a place where there were all sorts of folk with skill and determination to get me home. I was booked on one of the emergency buses - got the last seat - and, although it's not a journey I would like to do too often, I was home only 24 hours after I had originally planned.
While it was deeply comforting that there were people there to do what needed to be done, and who knew how the systems worked, what was more comforting was that I was among friends and those who feel like family; I was in another part of our Baptist world, and so, even away fom home, at home.
One of my friends once commented that she regretted the decision of the second Vatican Council, when the Roman Catholic Church decided to conduct the mass in the language of the country, rather than Latin. Until then, she told me, she had been able to go to church in any country and feel at home, because it was the same. Well, this experience has been rather different from that, but that sense of being among my own people even far away has been deeply reassuring, and made it possible to keep on with what I was there to do, instead of getting paralysed by anxiety.
I have heard people talk about how important our capacity to welcome is, at Bloomsbury; the importance we place on welcoming people in, especially those who come from overseas. We put effort into it, and we take it seriously. Helping people feel at home, giving them a sense of belonging when they feel dislocated, enjoying people's company. Let's never forget just how much fun that can be, as well as how helpful it can be.
The language about the Christian family can sometimes feel over-used and a little ciched. But I have been grateful this week to have discovered it in a new way - and to have been able to come home as a result. I pray that we as a congregation will go on discovering more and more of how to make these phrases real - to bless those who come to visit our city, and to dicover the blessing of new friends.

We have a new webgroup - a wonderful and enthusiastic group of people who are going to be taking responsibility not only keeping the website details up to date, but also developing the site itself further, and exploring more of what we can do with it. If you are a regular visitor to our site, keep an eye out for their creativity and new ideas. When we launched the site in its present form - about 3 years ago, - it was state of the art, new and fizzy and all the things a website is supposed to be.
But things change very fast in cyberspace, and without our changing, we have become rather staid and dull, because everything around us has changed very fast. We are fortunate to have people among us who can help us rethink and keep up.
But it is a little disconcerting. Just at what point did we move from being bright and new to being dull, staid and old-fashioned. Did it just happen overnight - or was there a Monday when we were fine, and the following Monday we were out of date?
And does it matter?
Well, yes, of course it does! It is important that we stay in touch and find all the ways we can to communicate - and if we are going to use a medium such as the web, then we need to use it in the best way that we can. Doing the best we can is an important part of our presence - our witness - in the world. Churches have long had a reputation for doing things in an amateurish way, sometimes even in a cheap way. And in a world where appearance matters - and where "professional" appearance is relatively easy to achieve - that does us, and more to the point, the news of the gospel, no good at all. Why should people pay attention to what we believe we have to say about how life is and could be, about what it is to be human in a world created by a God who loves us and identifies with us as far as the Cross - and calls us into a new world marked by Resurrection, about justice and peace and all the other richness of life that we believe we can speak about, if our way of speaking is slap-dash, or out of date, or apparently something we have not taken seriously.
So, it is right that we do the best we can, be as "professional" as we can, in order to be as effective as we can.
And yet......
The temptation to be captured by a culture that judges us entirely by appearance, that assesses worth only on the basis of achievement, that gives value only to that which fits the dominant scheme is surely one we should be aware of, and resist. Here is the challenge of being in the world but not of it; how do we communicate, live in and function in a world where the values that dominate are not all ones that accord with our gospel story, without getting lost in those values and assumptions, and letting them shape and distort us. Answers on a postcard please - or perhaps, using the new media, leave a comment!

Easter

Christ is risen! Alleluia

It is our life, our word, our hope, our faith.

The Lord is risen; he is risen indeed.