So, I had been ambling along doing what we are doing with the thought that, when the community centre, always 12 months away, is completed we will start filling it with stuff – toddler groups, drop-ins, Messy Church and Sunday worship. This was in the future, always a year away.

But last week, it struck me that 18 months is a more likely timescale, and we can’t wait that long without a proper venue – not least because by then I would be three years into my five-year post.

What we are doing at the moment is good – the new-mums drop-in group is going and is slowly becoming established, the Bible study is established and has been augmented with children’s teaching in another room, relationships with the football blokes, book group and on the development are deepening too. Most exciting, men’s Curry and Questions is going to start next month with three men. These things all fit into the network vision, but the next stage has to begin.

As a core team, we need to start worshipping together which I plan to begin once a month. A wider family ministry needs to begin too, such as messy church (one or two people have been asking for something after our successful Christingle). We are also hoping to develop a regular meal, where the emphasis is on belonging and eating together rather than worship or teaching.  These will need a venue that is flexible and larger than my front room! It was time to go away and think and pray.

Plan B is to find a venue.

The trouble is, every venue on the development has some drawbacks – that’s why I was holding out for the community centre which will offer a more usable community space with few constraints on the use. One may not appreciate too many children, another cannot be used in school hours or Sunday morning, and another is a bit too much like a bar (because it is a bar!). Two of these three places also probably won’t allow us to self-cater, which, if we are constantly buying catered food in, will get expensive (although I haven’t actually had the conversations yet). There is a community centre on a nearby development, but because it is not on our development, would change the focus of the ministry if we were to hold certain things there. I knew all that, and I needed to start looking past each venue’s deficiencies in order to make progress.

Although each venue in itself is flawed, a combination of these buildings might suffice, the only down-side being that, for the moment, we won’t have a single place of identification. The community centre on the nearby development will do fine for invitational events, like our recent Thanksgiving meal, but not for drop-ins. The school cannot be used on weekdays or Sunday mornings, but the rest of the weekend is free and they would allow us to cater. The other venue, a retirement village, might make a good location for our core team worship, and who knows whether other Christians might then come out of the woodwork!

Last week spurred me into action. I need to have some conversations, and then start planning.

The outline planning permission which was approved in May 2011 can be viewed on the WNDC website, searching for reference 11/0041/REPWNN. This follows adjustments made in 2011, which can be found on the Northampton Borough Council website under reference N/2011/0519. The May agreement supersedes a previous outline planning agreement from March 2009 (07/0004/OUTWNN).

Maximum dwellings allowed according to outline planning is 550 residential units and 4000 square metres of commercial space, most of which, I think, will border the Weedon Road.

The timescale is to start building early 2013 according to the developers. The person I spoke to today at Persimmon claimed that they have full planning permission from the council, although as of Jan 2012, the council claim that it is still outline planning permission as above with no finalised layout agreed.

The Section 106 attached to the outline planning permission has surprisingly little information in it about public open spaces, the implication being that a later planning document will fill in the details. It does specify 2.5 hectares of public open space. Additionally, a consultation document with the borough council states:

“Financial contribution towards educational and community facilities and provision of Primary and Secondary School places is to be made… The provision of an area of open space to include a Leap, and a commuted sum and upgrading of  the Neap at St. Crispin”.

I’m not sure what Leap and Neap stand for but I would guess it is to do with parks. The extra money for community facilities may be what is required to get our community centre built to the desired standard.

Persimmon said they are looking to build 535 dwellings on the site, 15 less than the maximum, and these will be from flats to detached houses. The Section 106 document specifies that 35% of these should be affordable housing, which would make 118 units. These would be a combination of housing association stock and key worker houses.

Encouragingly, the consultation document also recommends that:

“The County Council and St. Luke’s School explore the possibility of pedestrian access to the school begin provided to the site”.

This would be welcome and relieve the congestion which is currently experienced around the main entrance to the school at dropping-off and picking-up times.

What does this mean for us? I would doubt that there would be another community centre on the Princess Marina site as this is not mentioned at all in the planning document. However, the quote above indicates that monetary contribution will be made to surrounding community facilities. Therefore there is no need to be thinking of another focus for community activities for the Princess Marina dwellings. The new residents will still be using our community centre (as yet unbuilt) and our shops on St Crispin’s. (This is unlike the proposed Upton Lodge development whose outline planning permission for up to 5000 homes is still being discussed and where community facilities will need to be built). The extra development would simply mean an extension of our notional borders for the work, and a wider geographical area to work within.

launching more sustainable, more holistic, more measurably transformational Kingdom solutions.

And in some of these pioneering initiatives he claims

Some church planters are delaying the worship service piece of the pioneer missional ministry for as long as possible and sometimes indefinitely.

There’s plenty in his post that resonates with me as as pioneer minister in the UK. Briefly, his nine reasons are:

1. Lack of Biblical Precedent. [this is a dubious one]
2. they concentrate too much on numbers and ignore “more vital signs of a transformed society”.
3. They mostly attract de-churched people or those with a Christian background, failing to attract those who are truly unchurched.
4. They can fail to take the gospel effectively into a new culture (he even mentioned sheep-stealing).
5. Too meeting-focussed resulting in a consumer mindset.
6. Maintains a high institutional recognition (a problem in some countries).
7. They are resource intensive (a problem in a recession)
8. Mostly are middle-class or wealthy, ignoring the poor.
9. If the Church already has a bruised reputation in a context, encouraging people to join a new one is a hard sell.

Some of these are clearly not applicable to our situation (#6 and #9),  #4 is subjective and I could argue over the first one too. Others can clearly be a problem for a traditional church plant (particularly #2, #3 and #5). So we agree that a pioneering style can grow up a more incarnational church.  However, I do not believe that ‘delaying worship indefinitely’ is the right move. (I’m struggling to think of a single situation where it might be). It just depends on what you mean by ‘worship’.

It is true that taking a long time doing the ‘kingdom’ stuff is important, setting down roots, building and serving the community. We have not started a worship service yet as whatever we would have started would have reflected the preferences of the Christians in the Core Team rather than whatever might have been most appropriate for the wider community. However at some point I envisage that something approaching ‘church’ will have to start. This comes down to a couple of reasons, some of which are down to the language and definitions that we use.

I am busy building relationships, serving people in my community, and getting into all sorts of interesting conversations. There are are a small group of people who are interested in taking the next small step. I am very conscious that the next step is not to usher them into a worship service and get a ‘bum on a seat’ but in taking them on a journey of discipleship. At some point when, by the grace of God, they are ready to consciously follow God, they will need a regular way of expressing their worship. What form this will take or when, I do not yet know, but I’m sure it will be required to maintain the onward growth.

Therefore if you define church as a community who are journeying toward Christ and are reading the scriptures, praying, and celebrating the sacraments (in whatever form), at some point a group that is doing that which has come out of pioneer initiatives will become ‘church’. As a matter of definitions, is this not planting church from seed (instead of by graft)? At some point church will emerge.

As with many pioneers, we are ‘focussing on a wider range of transforming Kingdom activities’. This is great, but it all depends again on what the pioneer means by this – again a robust definition is required. Kingdom Work is not just opening up a soup kitchen, looking after the poor, campaigning on matters of justice. Although they are all good things to do, they are not Kingdom Work unless, in some sense, they are pointing people towards Christ (not necessarily through words). Some churches have, for years, been positively and actively engaged in the communities and have done great things, but have neglected to “speak of the reason for the hope that they have” (1 Peter 3:15) and have failed to give adequate opportunities for people to explore the substance of the Christian faith. One church I once visited, I remember the vicar being very downcast as the council were now providing most of the support services that the church used to offer, and he was a little as a loss of what to do next. Yet he had never thought of giving opportunities for people to understand the faith. Transformational Kingdom Activities must have both aspects in them.

Models of church planting depend entirely on the context you are in. The UK is currently in an era of post-Christendom. We used to be able to call ourselves a Christian Country, in some sense, and most people identified themselves as Christians and many more went to church. Society is more pluralistic and people have a diminished sense of allegiance to any institution.

This means that traditional evangelistic programmes will not be as effective, as TallSkinnyKiwi rightly pointed out. However there are still segments of society where a traditional church-planting model is effective. HTB in London has planted over 20 churches around London in the last 15 years. Each time they send a pastor and a group of 50 people. It is undeniable that people still become Christians this way and that the new churches have a positive impact on the surrounding community. This method certainly wouldn’t work in my context but it seems to be working among a section of the population there. They will still need pioneering initiatives to go alongside those planted churches and reach sections of society that their traditional model is not reaching, as no single model is all-encompassing any more.

The highlight for me was the second St. Crispin’s Christingle service. Last year the Residents Association used it as their Christmas event, but this year they decided to do the outdoor sing-a-long instead. However, as it had been so successful in 2010, we teamed up with Forefront Church (the local baptist / NFI church who meet in the primary school) to put it on again. Local residents were still very keen to come and help make the Christingles, as they were last year!

The former hospital chapel, a delightful listed building, was kindly loaned to us by the Greek Orthodox church who owned it and we went ahead with a Christmas Eve Christingle service.

Every seat was taken. I think we welcomed about 200 people in and gave out all 100 Christingles (to children only). It was a beautiful atmosphere, especially when the lights were turned off and the church was lit solely by candlelight. I led the service, explained the meaning of the Christingles and the pastor of ForeFront Church gave the talk.

This was one of my highlights of the year. A great night and a great start to Christmas.

Main Street was a place of interaction not just business. You would certainly run into other that you knew and would pass the time with them. There were plenty of places to sit and chat, from the outside bench – provided by the business owners and places on the sidewalks right outside their doors, to the bars, cafe’s and soda fountains in the drug store. Main Street itself was the third place that made up the focus of the community.

The key, I have no doubt, to the sustained level of activity lay in the fact that the great majority of persons who visited the places along Main Street and did so with the desire for company in mind did so alone. It is this characteristic that modern communities fail to achieve and that is so much missed in modern life. Those who have found a place where you can stop in as lone individuals and find association and camaraderie awaiting them are indeed as rare as they are fortunate. Most of us have had to go with friends to a place in order to have someone to talk to when we get there. We must plan, we must make arrangements, we must try to establish a set time as well as a set place in order to regularise whatever certain association we can claim. In small towns like River Park, before home entertainment and fast highways took or kept people elsewhere, a lone individual could find company and diversion virtually without effort. [emphasis his]

Without such places, where to people go to meet others? I remember when I was about 24, about a year after starting work with a new computer start-up company, a fresh intake of graduates joined my department. Most had moved in from another town or city after completing their degree, and didn’t know anyone in the new area. A few months in, one of them asked me where I went to meet people. He did know anyone outside of work and didn’t know how to get to know anyone. This is a trend I see happening. Friendships are kept from school or university. New friendships can be made at work. Very occasionally you might get to know a couple of neighbours. But in general, people don’t know how to get to know others any more. Small Town, USA, was certainly home to a very static population, but it seems that Main Street gave plenty of opportunities to get to know others in the town.

There is also another insightful observation in the quote: we are not short of public meeting places today. There are plenty of coffee shops, bars, restaurants etc where people can hang out and chat. But most of this places run on a ‘bring your own friends’ basis. People come in groups, chat in groups and leave in groups (or come alone for some alone time), but very rarely do individuals or those who had arrived with different groups interact.

In chapter 5 he laments about the lost German beer garden or beer saloon. Unlike the Irish pub or American tavern, these were family places with a small bar counter – socialising was to be done at tables – which served weak german beer on which it was hard to get drunk. They were about socialising, letting you hair down, chatting, spending time away from work or home. Men would often chat and women crochet

Many beer gardens were successfully set up in the US by German immigrants in New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee among others, but these have sadly lost out to the format of the Irish pub – stronger beer, men only, and an environment where you came to drink, rather than meet.

He looks at what has replaced it and partly blames, among other things, the [American Protestant] church. Over draconian Sunday trading laws which miss the spirit of Sabbath mean that church and home were the only things to do on a Sunday. Restaurants weren’t open, buses didn’t run and there was nowhere to go and meet others. Rest from work meant idleness at home. By contrast, the Germans would spend their time as a family in the beer garden, eating reasonably priced food there, relaxing with their families and other neighbours, resting and walking in the park and attending concerts. (Most of them would go to church too). Together, this was food for the soul. The Germans would not be just physically rested after their weekend, but their spirits would have been lifted. The loss of these third places was a loss to the individual and the community.

Oldenburg then describes two American attempts to recreate such a thing. Of course, these recreations turned out to be overpriced kitsch versions of the real thing – A small town (German founded) sausage festival which turns into a town junk market with cheap sausage, poor beer, queues everywhere and a proliferation of stalls selling ‘amateurish pottery… glistening with heavy layers of epoxy’. This reminds me of the German Markets we get in the UK – places where you can buy some nice continental foods but which do nothing to engender community

The other was an annual picnic held in a park of a small city. It was well attended and included games, food and drink. However it was marred by broken bones in a softball game, individuals who drank too much, wives upset that their husbands were paying other women too much attention, and husbands upset by the opposite, lost personal possessions and equipment and of course, food and drink ran up quite a bill for those who bought it.

“One might surmise that those folks weren’t civilised, or contrarily, that they had a pretty good time. It may appear that they were overdue for such an outing and, understandably, went overboard when the chance for celebration finally came….  by contrast, the controlled and inexpensive revelry of the lager beer gardens – all those good times at little expense and no disruption – meant that they could be indulged frequently. And they were.”

There are some similarities to the events that have held on our development. I didn’t see too many people getting drunk at these events (there were a few at the first fireworks event in the evening, but not many at the afternoon picnics), which is good. Other positives include the fact that people were meeting and chatting with neighbours that they hadn’t met. But the reason we couldn’t do this every week is because it is all too big and too expensive. I couldn’t afford to eat and drink at those prices every week (albeit, by today’s standards, they were fairly reasonable), but the sheer amount of effort in setting up and taking down could not be reproduced every week. These events are by nature occasional.

Where is the ‘controlled and inexpensive revelry’ in our society. It doesn’t exist. This is what the author is lamenting for his own society.

Highlights include each day’s Bible teaching on 2 Corinthians 3-5 from Paula Gooder. She is and extremely gifted communicator and Bible teacher and 2 Corinthians is her main area of study. She was able to plumb its depths with us and communicate it in a very clear and challenging way as we were encouraged to look for signs of God’s glory in us and in others and to embrace the new creation age that we are living in. I took copious notes (adding to the notes I took of the same talks when I heard her at a conference on Prayer in 2009!). Her notes from this conference can be found in the handouts section of her website.

It is worth noting that every person there, regardless of ecclesiology was lapping up every word of this high quality, verse-by-verse, thought through, expositional Biblical teaching. Other dioceses can take note – if they were thinking of dumbing down in order to try to include everyone.

I was also encouraged to hear Bishop Lindsey Urwin who is the leader of the Anglican church at Walsingham, which is a known as ‘England’s Nazareth’. In 1061 there was a vision of the Virgin Mary and a command to build a replica of the house where Jesus was born. It has become a centre for pilgrimage for Catholics and Anglo-Catholics. I have to admit my stereotypes, but I wasn’t expecting Bishop Lindsey to speak quite as wonderfully as he did – exhorting each of us to dig into the Bible and, when times are tough, to find God’s joy in the promises and doctrines within. He also does an excellent impression of one of Santa’s elves and tongue in cheek, he advocated burning father Christmas by the beard and using real manure in nativity scenes! Excellent stuff.

We were also entertained by novelist, comic author, and vicars wife, Catherine Fox who gave a hilarious after dinner speech.

But overall, it was wonderful simply to spend time relaxing with colleagues and meeting other ministers in the diocese for the first time. The encouragement that comes from chatting, over a pint, about how God is working in other areas cannot be underestimated, and I enjoyed explaining what I was doing ‘outside the box’ of the church.

A thoroughly wonderful diocesan conference, and I’m looking forward to the next one in 3 years time!