Excited about Church

Although my home life remains in much turmoil since the departure of my niece, as often seems to happen, in my 'church' life is flourishing.  In fact I have just looked back at old posts to see how often I have blogged about Church - there are 18 posts labelled, and almost all of them are quite negative.  One in particular however caught my eye, you can read it here .  I cannot believe it is more than 2 years that I wrote this.  The excited news is that it is all coming to fruition.

Since that post, our then curate has now become our vicar (a very unusual step for the Church of England to allow this!).  The passion for Local Worshipping Church Communities has remained - and in fact the words that God spoke to me in that conversation with our curate are now happening.

After many months of prayer and much support from a vibrant church in a near by city we have now started a new service at one of our churches.  At present it is in the evening,  as a family we all love it, though my youngest (10 years old) tends to take colouring and enjoys having a head massage as she gets sleepy.  My 11 year old son is lapping it all up, on one occasion when I was not able to make it he came home and practical repeated the sermon for me (I did tell my vicar who had done said sermon!).

There is still much to be done, there is great hope that a second morning service is going to be set up in the near future.  At present we have approximately 80 adults attending the evening service, and many of those are still splitting their time between our church and the 'other' one as their children want to continue with their friends.  Much will be needed to be done in order to be able to accommodate a lot of children, at present we have only two very small rooms where junior church and a creche is held during the service that is currently taking place at our church.

The hard work does not faze me at all though, it does nothing but excite me to see God at work, fulfilling hopes and promises that lots of people have been holding out for. 

The other unexpected return that we are having from experience of waiting and now building is the effect on our children's faith.  It has led me to consider the advantages and disadvantages of 'perfect' church, as children might see it.  For our two, I feel we are equipping them by going through this experience with them.  They might be involved in the development of new churches and services in the future and I pray that this experience will positively impact on their journeys. 

They have had to experience a lot of angst during this time.  They have had to attend junior church where the pace of change has been very slow, but have seen it move on. 

They have gone along with our experimentation when we have not wanted to attend 'church' and have done some wacky things like having 'family church up a tree'.

They now know the complexity of how services are made up and the number of people that this can take.

They and we have made some fabulous new friends and I know a lot of those friendships are just at the beginning and are hopefully going to grow and grow.

So hopefully you will see this is a positive and excited post about 'Church', it does help to have positive experiences when it it where you work as well as worship!