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.