I am involved in a discussion on the emerging church info discussion boards on ‘what is church’. Quite a contenscious subject always guaranteed to get people talking.

Yesterday, being Sunday, ‘church’ was excellent. As a group of people we had lunch together in the church to welcome our new curate, Jim, and his wife, Mags, to the leadership team of St Marks.

This is the first time in ages that we have done something like this and the atmosphere was excellent, warm, welcoming and loving with people who normally rush off quickly home, stayed, ate and chatted. I spoke with loads of people that I had never met before and we were able to share bits of each others stories.

We went home and for the first time in ages I feel that I had really experienced a full expression of church, rather than just a partial expression.

Somehow, in our churches, we need to give space for community to develop. I don’t know how we do that but feel it is important that, somehow we look into that and try stuff out.

Yesterday was rounded off excellently by spending some time with Andrew and Sarah, my brother and sister-in-law. With them we were able to discuss the community side of church to greater depths. Funny how conversations like that are always aided by glasses of wine and decent beer. Thanks guys … lets not leave it too long before we do that again.