Community Fun Day 2011

Yes, it’s that time of year again! Last weekend we took part in Ladywood Community Fun Day. In this photo you can see Philipa who ran the Grow Well stall.

This year we didn’t have a Prayer Tent but our church was still very much involved. A couple of years ago our church helped on the day as our worship that weekend. This year we were meeting on the Sunday but still a number of people put in a lot of work to serve the community. Members were stewards for the event, helped put up and take down the stalls and tents and were litterpicking throughout the day. It was noticable how no litter was there at the end of the day.

My friend Harry from Karis Neighbour Scheme did a sterling job of pulling a lot of the day together. I think he was exhausted by the end of the day. Many people from the local community took part.

Nettes and I did some surveys for WorkShop – the local job club that we are running. We were trying to find out what sort of help people would appreciate and also publicising WorkShop at the same time.

For the accounts of the fun day in previous years see:
2010
Community Fun Day
2009
Reflections on the Community Fun Day
Prayer Tent at Community Fun Day

For more of our photos on flickr see:
Dave and Nettes photos

WorkShop - our new initiative

My wife Nettes & I have recently launched an initiative that we are calling WorkShop.

What is WorkShop?

WorkShop is a Work Club serving our local community. Ladywood has significant levels of unemployment. There is clearly a need here for activities to engage people as well as enable them to look into paths into training and to take steps towards getting work. Our aim is to get people from Ladywood and the surrounding areas moving towards occupation in paid or voluntary work.

What happens at WorkShop?

WorkShop provides an environment in which to complete activities that get you to think about all your existing skills - even those you never knew you had. Some people may want to find out about training courses or volunteering opportunities. Others may want help writing a CV, or may just want somewhere to start job hunting from. When you come along we will spend some time getting to know you, assessing your needs and suggesting the best activities for you. We aim to be inclusive so wherever you are at please feel free to drop by to see if we can be of help.

We are currently looking at the possibility of a number of different activities including confidence building, keeping motivated, and coping with rejection, as well as interview and presentation skills. We will be having guest speakers from voluntary organisations, local employers and from our local money advice and credit union. We hope eventually that the people who come along will be able do presentations themselves on areas where they have skills or knowledge that may be of interest to others.

As well as helping people into training, volunteering or getting jobs, we hope to eventually help some people set up their own businesses. We’d also like to see an arm of WorkShop develop into a social enterprise, benenfitting the community, becoming self-funding and even providing employment for some of the members. We are continually exploring possibilities but developing such an enterprise would depend a lot on the skills of the group that develops.

What is the history of WorkShop?
We only launched WorkShop in November but already we have spoken to a number of people. We have helped people fill in job application forms and given others advice on how to improve their CVs. We have signposted some people to organisations who provide training and work experience opportunities. There are other people with whom we continue to work and we hope they will form the core of the group.

WorkShop grew out of our vision to see the local church serving the community and we are thrilled to see it taking its first steps. We feel that the time is right for such a venture. This was confirmed when we approached the Jobcentre with a leaflet and learnt that the government are now encouraging Work Clubs as part of the Big Society.

WorkShop has now been launched as a project of Karis Neighbour Scheme working alongside All Being Well. WorkShop is not only partnering with our own church – Church Alive – but also with Church of the Redeemer who have generously donated a room with a number of computers and are helping with our administration.

It’s early days yet but hope something will come of it.

Related posts:
looking into social enterprise
more thoughts on social enterprise
this is my church

Reservoir Mural

reservoir mural
Originally uploaded by dave & nettes.

As part of Ladywood Arts Trail along with local residents we painted a mural on the wall of the Tower Ballroom on Edgbaston Reservoir. It was really good to get involved with this initiative. Thanks to Phillipa Allenby from Springs To Life and the All Being Well team at Karis Neighbour Scheme.

Prayer and Awareness Day

In September I went to a day hearing about and praying for those working with the homeless and drug addicts in our city.



Reach Out Network

The day was run by Reach Out Network a small organisation of several volunteers who venture out into the city centre with food that they distribute to rough sleepers in Birmingham. They chat about Jesus and offer referrals to others who work with the homeless.

This was their third Prayer and Awareness Day – a chance to hear from related organisations and to pray for their work. This time it was hosted in the premises of Betel of Britain. We discussed and prayed for a number of projects. Here are just some of the highlights of the day.



life for the world

Patrick Prosser from Life For The World told us how - after setting up rehabilitation centres themselves - they responded to the call to “stop reaching the few and to equip the church to reach the many”. They set up training courses on the best way for churches to rise to the challenge of reaching out to those with addiction without suffering burn out or being taken to the cleaners. They now have a certificate course validated by the University of Gloucester that they are running nationwide and want to start a class here in Birmingham.



redeeming our communities

Patricia Hoskins – project co-ordinator for the Birmingham branch of Redeeming Our Communities, explained how they were linking together organisations such as the police, council groups, residence groups and churches and other faith groups to bring people together in unity to make a positive change in our city. Redeeming Our Communities is planning a launch event at the NIA on the evening of Tuesday 16th November with the aim to map the good things that are happening across Birmingham and inspire people to do more. 

Betel of Britain, Birmingham 

We also heard from Betel of Britain in whose premises the day was based. This is a Christian rehabilitation community that has bases in a number of UK cities and has links in Spain and the States. We heard the story of one of the members of the community including how community life had changed helped him to get free from his previous addictions. Kent Martin the director of Betel of Britain then spoke about some the difficulties that Betel had been through over the past few years and how he had learnt to develop a deeper tolerance of God's mysteries and learnt to trust God in trials rather than to put God on trial.

This was a really profitable time and Reach Out Network hope to run another Awareness Day in a few months time.

Reflections on the Community Fun Day

I have now added a set of photos on flickr for yesterday’s Community Fun Day.

Instead of meeting on Sunday our church threw itself into supporting this event and many of us came as volunteers. This was our worship. A few helped with the set up and stewarding, Heather & Roo did face painting, I was involved with a team from our church in organising a prayer tent and my wife Nettes ran the bric-a-brac stall. The day was initiated by Karis Neighbour Scheme and lots of local organisations got together to arrange it. Everyone worked very hard. Apologies to any I have missed.

In the prayer tent we offered prayer including prayer for healing and laying on of hands. A few completed prayer-cards and posted them in the box. We had a good time praying with these cards at the end of the day. And we prayed with a few in person, anointing at least a couple of people with oil. It was good being a listening ear. People also took away some of the free resources. There were some booklets, we had printed some of Stephanie's poems on card and printed these downloads on how to pray from an excellent website called rejesus.

It was a steep learning curve for me. I'd never really done anything like this before. But I knew that a few from our church had run a prayer tent last year. So I was very greatful to have people around me who knew what they were doing. It is a lot harder than I realised to put up signs on a tent. And one problem with being in a tent is that your papers tend to blow around. It was very quiet at first and I thought that we might have no vistors. But in the end we were encouraged and felt that all who came to the tent received a blessing.

Across the site some good relationships were built with people in the community. For example, both Nettes and I had a chat with the people from our local LETS. I also met Karis's Jude Greenwood, for the first time, who among other things is an associate of Spring To Life specialising in life coaching. And through this event I met Gwen the minister of the Church of the Redeemer who mentioned that her church was starting a Messy Church.

All in all it was a great day. A special thanks to Annabel from Karis for getting this off the ground!

Looking forward to seeing Larry Crabb

Next weekend (March 27-29) I am planning to go to see Larry Crabb at the annual conference with the British Association of Christians in Psychology.

Larry Crabb has been very influential in developing Christian counselling. But more recently he has changed tack to emphasise the importance of building relationships and he now appears to prefer the term spiritual direction. In his book Connecting he explains how he now sees connecting with others as the key to healing rather than just the specialist relationship with a therapist or counsellor. In the conference he will be speaking about his journey into this understanding.

This looks very interesting. I'll let you know how it goes.

Churches really are working together

Tomorrow and the following Friday I’m covering for Helen in our Drop-In while she and Steve go to Africa for a week. You may recall that I blogged about the Drop-In and our mission to the homeless just before Christmas. But what stuck me today was that fact that there will be other Christians there: Christians who are not part of our church or our network.

Christians from different churches working together is not new. But over the past few years we seem to have increasingly been involved in outworking this idea. For instance, just before Christmas we were involved in a massive food parcel programme with a couple of other churches in our neighbourhood through Hope 08.

It’s not just in one off projects that we are getting to work together. There are couple of people in our church that work for Karis Neighbour Scheme. This is a Christian based charity that works with a number of churches showing neighbourly acts of kindness. It was featured on Secret Millionaire last year. My wife also organises a crèche for the ESOL classes that Karis runs. Through this and Karis’s Welcome to Ladywood project we have had the privilege of meeting refugees and asylum seekers who have come to Birmingham.

We also know people through an organisation called Restore that encourages people in a number of churches to befriend asylum seekers.

And now we're involved in a Drop-In and ministry to the homeless that are also supported by Christians from other churches. Yes, we really are all working together to serve our community.


Update: I've now created a set for the Drop-In on flickr.

Down and Out in Birmingham

On Thursday afternoon, I went round the city centre with Paul Atkin giving out some presents to some homeless guys. Between us we must have given away about a dozen packages, each containing a hat, a scarf, a pair of gloves, and a pair of socks, toothbrush, toothpaste, soap and deodorant. Many of the guys shook our hands and one even gave us a big hug. He said that he had wanted some gloves for some time and that it was lovely to wear a new woollen hat. Many of us had donated the contents and Paul had already given out lots of these presents and has since packed some more. Paul knows these guys as he has been working with them for about ten years now.

Paul came to our church when he married Jackie this year. Our little daughter Callie was one of their bridesmaids. Since then our church has launched a ministry to the homeless headed up by Paul and Jackie. They spend their time talking to people and helping people in practical ways such as showing them the right forms to fill in to get a flat or distributing clothes, blankets and sleeping bags that have been donated.

On Fridays, we use our little church building as a Drop In Centre. People will come for a coffee & sandwiches, play pool or dominoes and to do some art. I have been dropping in myself for half an hour or so most weeks and mixing with the people. This Friday, Steve our church elder, made us all a glorious curry as a Christmas treat. There was about thirty of us there and we knew that several would be sleeping on the streets that night. We have seen a number of people from the Drop In join us in our Sunday church gatherings at the community centre. And not surprisingly last week there were many there for our church’s Christmas dinner. It is just great to be around these people.

There is a very good account of what we are doing ministering to the homeless in Birmingham, from the website for our network of churches – Lifelink International. It is worth watching the videos. They are not just people talking. There are some good shots of the Drop In and the work on the streets. It gives you the flavour of what we are doing.

Men's Breakfast with Hudson Luwi from Zambia

I’ve just got back from a men’s breakfast with Hudson Luwi from Lusaka in Zambia. Seven of us ate and chatted with Hudson at the Reservoir Café and then we adjourned to the Ledbury Centre. I was struck by how Hudson is so humble and unassuming. It was only as the morning progressed that I realised that he leads a church of about 300 and then later that he has responsibility for a few other churches of similar sizes and teaches at a Bible College. It is clear that he lives by his motto of leadership that it is relational, that we lead by influencing people and that we can best influence people by having relationship with them.

How had he managed so much with so little resources? In the West we have so much that our first port of call is to those resources. When we have no access to these things then our first call must be on God. Another insightful comment that he made about Britain is that Christians talk about their faith very quietly. He was saying that we should not be ashamed but be proud to be Christians and not divide our spiritual life from our ordinary life. He encouraged us to be talking about spiritual things at work say just as we do at church.

Hudson was talking about how his church was active in the community for example by giving away clean water. Rather than expecting people to come to their meetings they were actively going into the community not so much to knock doors or preach in the streets but to be available to serve people. He said that they had seen big evangelists breeze in and make many ‘converts’ whom they never saw again. He would rather see Christians building relationships, having one-to-one conversations and serving people.

But what is our ‘clean water’ with which we can serve our community? I wondered. Hudson was saying that rather than making great plans and budgeting lots of money they had followed Jesus’ call to come and follow him. When Jesus called the apostles they knew that the end result would be but not the exact steps to get there. Jesus led them one step at a time. In the same way he talked about how he had taken one step at a time to build their church building from which they are now giving away the clean water and how with God’s help they had even survived opposition from urban gangs.

I am looking forward to seeing more of Hudson and his family on Sunday.

Church Weekend Away

We’ve just got back from our church weekend away at Cloverley Hall. It was great to get see our old friend Detta - who now lives in Glastonbury. It was our pleasure to ferry her from and to Crewe station.

It was good to start Saturday off with a prayer time as I'd missed Friday's meeting putting Callie to bed. After breakfast we listened to Ian Rawley on a term that has been so overused in our circles as to become meaningless: being a prophetic people. Refreshingly he reinterpreted this as neither withdrawing from our culture or being so immersed in it that we become ineffective but instead being shapers of our culture.

In the second half Carole Rawley did an exposition of Ephesians based on Watchman Nee’s ‘Sit, Walk, Stand’. After lunch and after the Easter egg hunt - for which Callie got a runners’ up prize for her basket - we had a reflective workshop session. There were four stations with various questions and activities relating to what we had been looking at. I chose to identify three scriptures to stand in prayer with. I felt to pick Luke 10:2-3, Proverbs 6:6-5 and Ecclesiastes 11:6 on the theme of work and harvest. All this and a talent show in the evening with Nettes and Callie performing 'Eat Your Peas'. What a day.

Thankfully the Sunday morning prayer meeting was 8:30 rather than 8:00. After breakfast there was worship and reports from areas of the church. Then Steve, our elder, spoke on increasing our involvement in the community around where we meet and working in partnership with other organisations and churches. Over lunch I was thrilled to hear from the creche workers that Callie had been asking deep spiritual questions. And in the afternoon we broke bread and briefly prayed about some issued raised that morning - again using four prayer stations - before departing.

Phew! A great weekend!