Creating Space

The Times has approximately 400,000 readers of its print version and over 100,000 online subscribers. Metro, distributed across 15 UK cities for free, prints 1.3 million copies each day. You do the maths. Last Thursday a very large number of people saw a very large dramatic picture of a 12th century abbey, somewhere in North Wiltshire, with Chris Coombs, in a pink skaters’ helmet, flying through the air on a skateboard. Times readers were each urged by Phil Williams (Christian Skaters UK) to live life to the full as the Bible teaches us.

Long Live Southbank is a facebook Group with 100,000 members and 12,248 likes (I have no idea what I’m talking about) campaigning to save the undercroft skate area right by the Royal Festival Hall, next to the Thames in London. Scott who posted the same picture from Metro of Abbey Skate 2014 commented: "So a church can open up a half term skatepark but developers want to get rid of the home of British skateboarding? There's something wrong with this scenario." Actually there is something very right about this; God’s people are often doing a new thing with the Spirit, and frequently travelling in an unconventional direction. Our bishops haven’t exactly been quiet this week.

Amongst many visitors to the abbey last week (including a couple who slightly oddly said ‘we’re Roman Catholic but we love this’) I also stood with visiting vicars, youth and children’s ministers, and an archdeacon, and watched them enjoy the space. Not the physical space of the Abbey, which copes effortlessly with a skate park, but the space for imagination and mission that our simple 3-day event creates for other people and other churches. It’s this ‘beyond us’ dimension of MAS 2014 that intrigues me. Why would God want other cities in this land to know about this? How could our vocation and the shape of our mission effect elsewhere?

I remember a children’s song which went ‘be bold, be strong, for the Lord your God is with you.’ It is a song so old that you can find it in the book of Joshua. One of the issues about songs like this is there is frequently very little indeed in the corporate life of the Western church to be bold about. When we travel with the church of North Korea throughout Lent, that will be very different, but for us? However, a church with a holy, fired up imagination and a resilient, biblical faithfulness will always find itself in a place of risk, for the sake of the gospel. I thank God, that he has used us, and MAS 2014, to call others to that place.

Icon

It feels like a familiar friend now. Shifting chairs, carrying boards, carting hay bales, moving ramps, setting up viewing areas, turning up the volume, welcoming visitors, calling for paramedics—Malmesbury Abbey Skate is back and it feels oddly normal to have a 21st century skate and scooter spectacular taking place in a 12th century abbey. This year we’ve even added a hula hoop workshop. (I’ve been working hard on a pun on ‘hula’ and ‘hallelujah’ to go here but as we go to press nothing cringemakingly bad enough has emerged.) One of our churchwardens tried hula-hooping out recently and seemed like a natural. The hula hoop I tried seemed to be a bit of a snug fit for some reason.

Ideas are dirt cheap. In a creative place like Malmesbury Abbey there is a continuous stream of them, not least from my own head. I have a rule of thumb that if one person comes forward with an idea I ask them to come back with 4 people totally bought into the idea before the conversation continues. We’re looking build on what God is birthing in the Body of Christ, not just to do random stuff.So Malmesbury Abbey Skate is one of those rare diamonds of an idea that has be born, and grown, and earthed itself in the life of our church  and our community. And more. Malmesbury Abbey Skate has actually made Malmesbury Abbey more like Malmesbury Abbey (that is a long winded way of saying it was/is prophetic.)

I love our Holiday at Home; I love our Advent Carol Service; I love Creative Response; I love working with BBC History & BBC Wiltshire. I love the soft play in the Café and our Weekend Away and our Holy Week Festival, and I love the possibility of drowning the Archbishop of Canterbury. I love our series in John and my new small group. All of these new things of God breathe new life into me and into the mission and worship of the church. It’s all profoundly good, and of God. But the Icon (Skatepark) within the Icon (Abbey) happens next week.

God is always gloriously doing a new thing. In the 12th century the new thing was the abbey we worship each Sunday. In the 16th and 17th century the new thing was the Bible and worship in the English language which still sustains us today. During MAS 2014, next week, I give thanks that the God who built the Abbey has not left the building.

God is here, God is light, God is love. Bring wheels.

passers-by

The violinist Joshua Bell stood with a 1713 Stradivarius in his hands, lifted his bow, and started to play the Chaconne by Johann Sebastian Bach; composed just seven years after Antonio Stradivari made the particular violin he was holding.  The composer Brahms was so in awe of this piece of music that he once wrote that if he had written it the ‘excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven him out of his mind.’ But for this performance Joshua Bell wasn’t at the Boston Symphony Hall, where two days earlier tickets to hear him went for $100, he was busking at L’Enfant Plaza metro station in Washington DC, to see if commuters bustling by on their way to work would stop. They did, to buy their Washington Post and their daily lottery ticket as usual, but would the beauty and grace of Messrs JS Bach and J Bell cause them to break their routine for a moment, would a crowd gather, would Joshua Bell make enough money to get his cab back to the hotel?  Just a handful of over 1,000 passers-by stopped to listen; the virtuoso made $32.17.

The Old Testament prophet Jonah is not known to have played the violin, but something he said while in the (joshua) belly of a fish came to mind as I read the Joshua Bell story: 

those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. (Jonah 2:8) 

A secular version of Jonah’s words might be, ‘those who get their priorities utterly wrong miss out on the life they were born to live.’ A preacher’s version of this would be ‘worship the wrong god and you’ll live the wrong life’ - try it in a Deep South accent. Joshua Bell’s version would probably be ‘if you haven’t got time to stop and listen to the music that JS Bach wrote you’ve probably lost touch with the God he worshipped.’

So this is advance notice. March 5th, Lent is coming. No doubt there will be intense chocolate avoidance, and I am currently conflicted over whether I could actually function without fresh coffee (answer, no.) But Lent is actually an audit, a hearing, we stop and listen to our lives, and ask if there is any time in there for us to stop and listen to God. Think about this; from March 5th the violin case is open.