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.