meeting God

Here's a question I haven't been asked before.

"Is this the local mosque?"

Yes, well there's a first time for everything, I suppose!

A couple of guys came up to the building late on in the afternoon, and then, when they saw it was shut, they walked away.

So, with a willingness always to serve, I went and asked if I could help maybe them.

I couldn't.

I didn't even know there was a local mosque. Let alone where it was.

Which shows how little I know.

Because there is a mosque now close at hand. In what was once an old UF Church.

A sign of the times.

The fact that these folk were looking for a mosque. The fact that they hadn't a clue that this was really a church. The fact that what once was a place of worship for Christians is now a place where Moslems join to pray.

It's a very different world from what it used to be in this secluded corner of God's earth.

And because it's so different we need to re-think just what being church will look like if we're true to all that following Jesus means.

One of the thing we recognise it means is what we're really on about each day in offering coffees, teas and lunches here on site.

It gives folk a sort of 'third place'. Neither work nor home. But 'space', where conversations can take place, where people can relax, where somehow in amongst it all the Lord can be experienced and felt.

The place was mobbed again today. Absolutely heaving.

Which is great.

We had a group of ladies in who used to meet along the road in one of the local pubs. They meet on at least a weekly sort of basis and they loved it so much they'll make this their permanent 'home'.

You made us wonderfully welcome! they said as they finally left the place.

They experienced something special. They maybe didn't know it quite as such. But they met with the Lord. God is in this place.

There was an Alzheimer's Group in as well. And the regular group of folk from the Stroke Unit at the Royal Victoria Hospital.

And all sorts of others as well.

That's just as much 'church', in many ways, as anything else that happens on a Sunday. There's a sense of encountering God in the warmth of his welcome and care.

It's not spelled out in as many words. But it's there, nonetheless, in a language folk understand.

On a morning like that I'm glad to be out and having time with all of the folk.

And from how I read the record of the life that Jesus lived, it seems to me that that's pretty much exactly what he did.

Hanging out with all-comers. Being around the ancient world's 'third places'. Meeting folk there. Chatting, and laughing, and helping, and healing.

Giving the people who came a sense of the presence of God.

Which is back to the question the two guys I mentioned had asked. "Is this the local mosque?"

Or, put another way, Is this where it happens? Is this where I may meet with God?

Because I guess that's what in the end of the day people are really after.

Encountering God. Finding those places where God can be met and known.

Our life as a people here can be that sort of place.