Sorry – I’m going to name drop and all the rest of it – but I had such a cool day today.

Today was a day I have been quite excited about, and looking forward to for a little while. Today I was at the National consultation on the London Olympics, held at Methodist Central Hall.

At the picture shows, David Lammy, Brian Mawhinney and Simon Hughes were there to speak, along with others.

The purpose of the day was to ask two questions:
To see how the Christian church can work together for the Olympics in 2012.
To decide what legacy we wish to pass on beyond that.

I have been excited about this for two main reasons:
I love sport and think this is such a great God given opportunity to show the love of God to thousands of people while the Olympics run.
We are 6 years away, and already the church is getting its act together now and starting to plan and think – I think that is amazing, maybe even a little miracle in itself.

Some words from the ‘3 in the picture’ surprised me, Mawhinney in particular: ‘We should be there because we have a gospel message that can transform the world’ First time in my whole life that I’ve ever agreed with anything a Tory said! I even clapped him, although that bit felt strange!

There are loads of things church can do, from hosting families, to running festivals, to volunteering (apparently at previous Olympics, people from churches have been 3 times more likely to volunteer)to chaplaincy …. the list could be endless.

There was one good strong message that came out, though – we need to present a united front, one church in London, in the UK – if we do that we could see real transformation that will last beyond 2012.

This was a good, as well as exciting, meeting. The organisers were wanting to genuinely hear opinions and gain a mandate, but came with a ‘prayed and thought out’ proposal so that we were not starting from cold.

Matt Bird delivered a possible 5 fold strategy:
to CONSULT the full breadth of the church
to COMMUNICATE with one voice for the church
to COORDINATE the church and its response
to COLLABORATE by helping us to work together
to act as a CLEARING house to the London Olympic Committee for churches

This made loads of sense with the following 4 tiered structure presented by John Baxter Brown:
Council of Reference
Trustees
Executive group
Task groups

There were a lot of people there today – but the organisers, mainly Transform Newham, EA, CTIE and Christian in Sport, are very aware that they will not have invited everyone. Today they asked us all to be ambassadors, to let others know and to show them how to get involved with comments or offering skills, I’m doing that now – you can email them at:
olympics@transformnewham.com

Today was exciting, I spoke and met some new friends, as well as met a few others that I had not seen for a while. Today my faith in church has been restored a little.

6 years and counting!