Yesterday I did a mammoth day – leaving the house at 9 in the morning and not returning home till gone 11 so I could fit a load of stuff into my day in London.

After meeting up with Richard and some other YFC people to look at how things are going, targets for the next period and so on I ha a little bit of time between meetings to kill so found myself a table in the Tate Modern cafe and wrote a few bits down for some YFC stuff I am working on at the moment.

After this I then shot across London to All Souls Clubhouse for a Soul in the City Meeting – a meeting in fact to explain what the plans are for the future and how to become an SITC networker. The values for SITC are clear and can be seen here.

Before giving my thoughts on what I heard this was a great opportunity for London workers to meet up and network. I met a few great people and their was a great atmosphere of love, hospitality and respect. That may sound strange but I have been to Christian events where it has been very hard to break into cliques and chat with anyone and end up standing alone wishing the session would start! This was not such an event!

I left the meeting enthused and in realisation, again, how naturally cynical I can be sometimes. In some ways I have become a ‘big organisation/festival reverse snob’. By that I mean that I have subconsciously written off big events, big youth festivals and so on as a mixture of ‘fluff and hype’ with no substance, no sustainability and make no real difference to our country.

I guess to some point I still hold this view partly, though not as strongly. I do have a question though – after years of Spring Harvests, Soul Survivors, Easter Peoples, Living Waters and so on and so on where people leave enthused to spread their story of Jesus … why after all this does the country not change? Why are our communities still not recognising God? Why are churches still n decline? Why do people still shy away from, ‘mission’?

I had blamed the events themselves as using hype, but maybe, actually, that is very unfair. I think of the term ‘you can lead a horse to water …’. The people running the festivals are sold out for God, their faith has made a difference to their lifestyle. It’s not fair to blame the event if mass transformation does not take place. I realised that was what I had been doing.

Last night helped me, in part, to see the error of my ways. I think it is all summed up in the word ‘sustainability’.

I learned last night that SITC is going to continue, but rather than continue s a big organisation it will be a network sharing information of what is happening around the city and offering support to groups of churches wishing to involve their community. SITC was a great success last year and the people on the ground have decided that things need to continue, that this cannot be a one off and that they should ‘naturally continue’ what has been started.

If this happens then SITC has transformed the thoughts and outlook of Christians in London. Christians who previously did not want or know how to engage with their communities are now trying to do so. Importantly they are doing it in different, appropriate, small, real ways with two way relationships and flow of information and ideas. From what I heard Christians are not saying ‘e must go and do this’, rather they are asking ‘what can we do together in our community’.

People gave stories of changed lived from this joint working together in the community, exciting stories of forgiveness, of lives transformed, of people for the first time considering a God who is interested in them.

I left incredibly excited by hearing that. Could that be real mission?