>This week has seen the 2010 restart to our church, Conversations, and another new venue. Vodka Revolution might be a surprising venue for god-bothering, it might not be an obvious place for people to worship God and enjoy fellowship with one another but on the basis of this week it’s going to be a great location. There was an air of excited expectancy amongst those of us who were there on Wednesday evening and a real buzz around the venue and its public that had been lacking in some of the other places we’ve been.
One of the things that’s integral to the way we ‘do church’ as Conversations is not to leave our relationships at face value in services but to be active in supporting, praying, encouraging and seeing each other during the week. One of the ways we do that is through cell groups. That’s not cell in its negative connotations but in the organic sense – following the imagery of the Body of the Christ and recognising that we hope to grow and eventually multiply from one to more.
Thursday nights are cell night and it was great to have fellowship with each other over food wonderfully prepared by Mrs Wellers. As we digested we chatted about what the coming year might look like. The upshot of this, in a delayed New Year Resolution styleee, was commitments around 4 Cs (only because Christians need alliterative groups of cheesy words, not because we’re sticklers for grammatical accuracy):
- Our Celves (I did warn you)
- Our Cell
- Our Church
- Our City
One of the amazing things about cell is the space it allows us for accountability, relationships and confidentiality so I’m not going to blog about those except to say that together we’re going to support each other in continuing the commitments we wanted to make for ourCelves and revisit them as the year progresses.
We’ve committed to making our cell work, to ensuring that we meet for cell but beyond that we are a community, not just people that meet up once a week.
We’re committed to our church, to supporting the work it does in prayer and by turning up but also in making sure that the welcome we’ve had is true of the experience for anyone else who visits on a Wednesday night.
And in doing this we’re committed to York, to our city, to loving it and supporting it and encouraging it. By more prayer, through the work of Besom and Street Angels and in being a credible and relevant example of Jesus to those around us.
If you’re around us hold us up to those standards, help us to get the balance right between being part of Conversations, part of our cell and part of our city and challenge us if we’re falling short of these standards.
I have a funny feeling that 2010 is going to be a good year. Exciting.