Church life seems to have always been a mix of religious and social. Some of you may even remember the days when all social life revolved around the church and you couldn’t get away from the place!  Many people have life-long friendships that began in church, which is wonderful, so long as these friendships also make space for new people to join in and make their own contribution. At the same time churches are (or should be) places of prayer and worship, places where we encourage one another to follow Jesus and to learn what it is to follow the way of Jesus. Often the social life, can attract someone into church life and they discover Jesus – others come seeking Jesus and discover a great group of people with whom to belong.

There is nothing new about this. We are told that in the early church “Day by day, as they spent much time together in the Temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people.” You see that mix of the religious and the social at the heart of their life together.

So, we are trying to get a sense of the right mix of social and religious fellowship at our church – and when and how that is best done. One of the places we have tried to mix some social and some prayer time is Open Church on a Thursday morning – but it is often the faithful few who attend and that can be a bit dis-spiriting. So, we have been asking around – some don’t like the prayer/social mix and would prefer a definite prayer time and a more conventional coffee morning. Some don’t like the morning – and would prefer the afternoon, and of course others have just got other things they want to be doing and will never want to meet at church on a week day.  

So let me list some options – 

1 Keep things as they are.

2 Prayers in church at 10:15 am on Thursday, Coffee Morning in Vestibule (around tables from 10:30am-12noon) 

3 Coffee Morning in Vestibule on Thursday 10:30am – 12noon, Prayers in Church at 12 noon.

4 Tea and Cake in Vestibule on Thursday 2:00pm – 4:00pm

5 Tea and Cake in Vestibule 2:00pm -4:00pm another day in the week. (Bearing in mind that the choir practice is on Tuesdays and Nature & Nurture walks tend to use Wednesday.)

6 Midweek Prayers at some other time, but probably before or after the Tea & Cake. 

7 Stop having a regular midweek gathering.

We will look at these options at our Church Meeting on 28 September, but it would be useful to narrow down the options before that. So please contact myself or Daphne to let us know your own thoughts and we will feed those into the discussion.

In the meantime, I wonder what Bible story I can share about cakes. It could be Ezekial’s Barley cake baked over human dung, or it could be David’s revival of an Egyptian left behind by a raiding party  “They gave him bread and he ate; they gave him water to drink; they also gave him a piece of fig cake and two clusters of raisins. When he had eaten, his spirit revived; for he had not eaten bread or drunk water for three days and three nights.” That seems like a good way to share cake – even if it did lead to the raiding party being discovered and destroyed. We promise to be much friendlier and eat cake in peace. 

be blessed

Craig