Community ideas...

You may have noticed we are thinking about what it could be for us to rent a house and start inviting people to come and live with us in community and reach out to the area. We feel it may be what God wants, and we are both wanting to get more real, perhaps more "Radical" in our walk with God. The church we are in has many believers who want to reach the local people, but we are following programmes and reaching to a tiny demographic in a village which has a very wide range of incomes and backgrounds, and we feel we need to live in a way that is out of the box. We also want to find an alternative to the twin extremes of style we're seeing and a focus on the style of services rather than the substance of how we live our lives(I'm getting tired of long arguments about Music)

The aim would be to move in together with others, love each other, build community and reach out to people in the village, especially poorer people with different cultural backgrounds, invite them into our home and try and build relationships over cultural barriers and attempt to show people Jesus, in all our mistakes and weaknesses.

Well, last night we talked the idea over with our pastor and his wife and they are both quite enthusiastic about the idea. They are already practicing this to some extent with some people who probably wouldn’t ever come near a church, so we’d simply be doing more of the same, and inviting people to join us.

Now we have a lot of questions about what it means for us, and what this may look like, and some of the more practical details like where we’d live. We don’t know exactly how this would look: we have a few ideas and it would clearly follow the overall community/arts/environment focus we have, adapted for this place and time, and the people we work with.

Of course that is the first question: would anyone come and do this?