Barney & Sara are church planting close to the South Coast. Read their story. After reading if you want to send them a message you can either click on their names above to see their profile on the site and send a message or leave a comment through the the link at the end of the story. To use these features register on the site. You can listen to Barney and Sara talking about their experiences in our podcast here
I was working as a youth minister for a church, situated in a rather upmarket commuter village, when I discovered Warren Park. Warren Park is less than half an hours drive away but culturally a million miles from our village.
Warren Park adjoins a larger estate called Leigh Park. Leigh Park has around 35,000 residents and is in the top 10% of most deprived wards in the country. Warren Park has around 7,000 residents and is in the top 2% of most deprived wards in the country. As well as many problems that you would find in an urban estate, it also suffers from a sense of rural isolation.
After forming a relationship with Leigh Park Baptist Church, they agreed to employ me as student minister and asked me to look at the feasibility of church planting on the Warren. That was four and a half years ago, after two years they released me to start a separate congregation on the Warren.
We were well aware that this was not going to be easy, and we knew of others who had tried to plant on the Warren and failed. Initially I had in mind a quite traditional church plant. However God challenged me through Acts 2:42-47, to realise that building an attractive missional community and not a Sunday morning meeting needed to be our focus. Nevertheless we recognised that it was important for the community to have opportunities to gather and so café church was born.
Café church meets on a Friday night in a community café. Our teaching is mainly through conversation, facilitated from the front but taking place around each table. As far as worship we take the line, “worship is a response to revelation from God” this allows us to have a bigger view of worship and to find different ways of responding to God. One hour of our two hour meeting is spent eating, drinking and just enjoying one another’s company.
As the church grew we were eager not to lose the close sense of community that comes from a small group. We decided therefore to start other opportunities to gather, taking the pressure off just one meeting point for the community. Some examples of those meetings are messy Wednesday where we all bring food to share, and then we visit different stations around the room based on a theme. There are craft stations, teaching stations, prayer stations all designed to engage all ages. We also have home groups, a monthly worship meeting and a group called CRE8 exploring the use of different artistic gifts in worship.
We have seen many new people join the group through events, such as day trips in the school holidays, children’s events and the annual church holiday. However the real key has been relationships built through living incarnationally on the Warren.
In talking to people involved in a previous attempt to plant on the Warren part of the problem was that no one was prepared to live there. Christian’s came in and ran activities but friendship and trust was never built with the locals. We live on the estate, our children go to school here and we have joined activities run by others, not just set up our own and expect people to come to us. We have also sought to serve the community as school governors and by supporting other agencies who work for the good of the Warren.
We do not know what the future holds, we have had discussions about a shop front, so that people have easier access to us through a café or similar community project. Or perhaps we will grow more small groups, but that takes more leaders. We take it a step at a time and trust that as we move forward prayerfully that God will provide the guidance and the resources.
Some of the questions we are asking:
- At the moment we are able to operate because of the generosity of others, how can we become financially independent, whilst remaining mission focused on an estate where many are in financial difficulties?
- Raising up an indigenous leadership takes time, recruiting others from outside has it’s own difficulties, do we deliberately slow down growth in order to retain quality?
- Is a community project, such as a café a time consuming distraction or on opportunity for greater engagement with the people of the Warren?
