Two pictures of East End Islam

The best way to get to know a community is to spend time experiencing it.  Living it.  Breathing it.  Enjoying it.  Dreaming the best for it.  At City to City last year in New York they called these experiences “cultural moments”.  A cultural moment is any time you spend getting to know and understand the community you are hoping to church plant in.  They told us to try to have thousands of those moments, by meeting people, going to shows, walking the streets, before you try plant a church that you hope will be relevant for the area.  I would just like to share two of my moments this past week in Newham, London. Both specifically about Islam.

Open but very closed!

The building right next to where our church plant meets is a community centre called the Flanders Centre.  Every Friday lunchtime as I am nipping out for a bite, the Flanders centre is flooded with hundreds of Muslim men for prayers.  It’s always a  fun experience walking past, having the occasional brief chat with them as they go in or are handing out leaflets.  This week though was a little different.

In London at the moment we are experiencing fantastically hot weather.  So as I left last Friday to go home the fire escape doors were open to the Flanders Centre to let fresh air in.  So I could see what was going on in the hall.  More than just see, I could hear.  I could hear a man singing.  Well I soon realised he wasn't just  singing.  He was actually preaching.  His singing was interspersed with talking, in what I assume was Arabic.  You see, the singing was him actually quoting the Quran.  I stood there and watched for a few minutes not understand a word of what was spoken but at the same time learning plenty about this culture on my doorstep.

I was amazed by the level of Quran knowledge the preacher had (he could probably recite the whole book).  I was impressed by the number of men in the congregation.  Yes, I know women are not allowed but still how many churches do I know in Newham with more than 50 men? The Islam this guy was preaching was obviously attractive to them.  However, I think the overwhelming feeling I came away with was how closed this meeting was, even with open doors. 

I couldn't understand what was being taught.  I have never been invited in.  Never even greeted with a smile I walk by.  For a faith that is supposed to reach outsiders it didn't seem that interested in anyone who isn’t like them.

As I started to walk away I thought, “They may not be interested in stepping closer to me to share Islam  but I need to take steps closer to them in order to share Jesus.”

"To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews. To those under the law I became as one under the law (though not being myself under the law) that I might win those under the law." 1Corinthians 9:20 

Closed but very open!

Yesterday we dedicated a little boy into our church family and afterwards we went to the park for a picnic.  I had to take my son home for a quick nap before we went to the park.  When he and I finally got there, none of the people were where we said we would meet.  I knew they would still be around but because it was so hot I decided to take a break in the shade before I started looking for them.  So I sat down with Gabriel.

About 20 meters away was a group of young Muslim girls aged around twentyish.  All but one of them ran off to look at the fountain.  To my surprise the last one walked right up to me dressed in a full hijab.  Covering everything but her face.  She had a very warm smile. The first thing she said to me was, “Hello, you have a really cute son.  Do you mind if I sit with you both for a while?” 

You have to pause and understand the enormity of this question.  Muslim women usually are not allowed to talk to men, especially one their own, even in a public park.  What was I going to say? “No at all, please do” I replied.

She sat down and glowing with smiles at my son, who was looking grumpy but cute as ever.  It didn’t take long for her to break him down and eventually her smile caused him to beam back.  She openly talked about her new found interest in babies.  She is getting married in a month and was fascinated by marriage and children.  We talked about the joys of marriage, parenthood and in laws.  Waiting to have children or having them straight away. 

I congratulated her on the coming marriage and said “Marriage and children are a wonderful blessing from God!”  So that started her asking about my faith.  We must have talked for about 10 minutes before her friends and mine both turned up around the same time.  So we said goodbye. 

As I was walking away she shouted back.  “Don’t forget you sons football!”  As I turned around she had pulled up her hijab to even cover her smile.  But I could still see that she was smiling.

A very different experience from the first.  The face of Islam we often see in the west is closed and distant but that doesn't mean all Muslims are cold and distant.  This girl was born and grew up in the Newham.  She is a second generation British Muslim.  She grew up without fear of British people or Christians.  If the first experience left me feeling pushed away this one was the exact opposite.  

It was a helpful reminder to me not to judge a person by their hijab.  In many ways we were exact opposites.  She a Muslim girl, me a western Christian man.  But behind that veil was a person who was interested in similar things to me, who was scared of the same things as me, we may be different... but maybe not as much as first appears. 

As I walked away I thought, “I can relate to Muslims for Jesus.  Because behind every hijab there is a person not too different to me.” 

Final thought

"Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility!" Ephesians 2:13-14  

Remember as Christians we do not need to be afraid of other cultures no matter how different they seem.  We have a perfect Saviour who stepped into our fallen human world.  No matter how far away any culture any appear from your own it is no comparison to how different Jesus was to this world.

Jesus didn't worry about being effected by us...


Jesus loved us and sacrificed the comforts of His home in Heaven to step into our shoes to bring us a Gospel of reconciliation... 


Reconciliation that not only bridges the gap between us and others but bridges the impossible gap between us and God! 

The Vision of our Church family!

Over the past few years Bonny Downs Church has grown into a small but passionate family of churches.  A few months ago we started a journey of re-discovering our vision by looking at what God is doing among us and through us.  Both Richard (the lead pastor) and I have been working towards preaching through our core vision.  Below is a brief summary of that vision.

We want to see Jesus changing lives, transforming our communities and our world!

1) We want to see JESUS

“Eternal life is to know you, the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ, the one you sent.” John 17:3  

As a church our primary aim is to see Jesus.  To see who Jesus is, to recognise him as our Saviour, to learn from Him, be inspired, challenged and encouraged by Him.  Together we want our church to be shaped by Jesus as He has revealed Himself in the pages of the Bible.
 
Who He Is
We want to gaze at Jesus who –although He is God- became man for us.  We want to be moved by Jesus love for us, as proved as He poured out His life on the  cross.  We want to marvel and worship our risen and alive Lord Jesus!

What He’s Doing
We want to see Jesus working now to draw all kinds of people to Himself by His grace.  We want to experience a real relationship with Jesus.  We want to witness the restoration that only Jesus can bring.

Seeing Jesus is the aim of all our meetings and messages.  Because knowing and enjoying Jesus is what we were made for. 

2) changing LIVES

“Let the Spirit change your way of thinking and make you into a new person. You were created to be like God, and so you must please him and be truly holy.” Ephesians 4:23-24

Changing Us 
Jesus didn’t live, die and rise again so we could remain the same.  He did it so we can be changed into the people that He made us to be!  Through repenting to God and each other and resting in what Jesus has done for us, we will start to live lives filled with real purpose.

Changing Others 
We believe that the change Jesus brings should be contagious both to people inside and outside the church!  As we serve, welcome and offer the hope Jesus brings we want to see people around us changed too!


3) transforming our COMMUNITIES

“All the Lord's followers often met together, and they shared everything they had…  Everyone liked them, and each day the Lord added to their group others who were being saved.” Act 2:44-47

Loving the Church
One vital gift that Jesus gave us to keep our faith alive is our church family.  We experience our church family through corporate worship on Sundays, smaller home groups during the week and one to one every day.  We love our church because it enables us to know Jesus better, know each other better and be more in number.

Loving our streets 
We believe in being local.  We want to always see the best in our communities and be contagiously positive about the places where we live.  We want to build strong friendships with our neighbors and always be looking for opportunities to meet any local needs to improve local living conditions.

4) and our WORLD

“But the Holy Spirit will come upon you and give you power. Then you will tell everyone about me in Jerusalem, in all Judea, in Samaria, and everywhere in the world."” Acts 1:8

Responsibility

When Jesus made humankind he gave us responsibility to care for our world and the people in it.  Therefore we need to be active in caring for Jesus creation and seeking to stop human injustices in all its forms.  Especially when it involves our wider church family suffering persecution.

Workplace
We want to do all things as if we are serving Jesus.  We have great opportunities to serve Jesus and help renew our world by being salt and light in our workplaces.  Not by preaching at our colleagues but by living out Jesus values.

Planting
We want to continue to establish many community focused congregations all committed to knowing and sharing Jesus and loving their own communities.  Although we will have very different mission focuses we want to keep our family connections!

Chatting with the "ends of the earth"

You might already know but this year is our Year of Breakthrough at Bonny Downs Church.  We are praying into six areas that are specific challenges for our church at the moment to seek God's action and guidance.  One f those areas is building relationships for sharing Jesus across Newham's diverse cultures.

Bonny Downs has a good history of sharing Jesus and seeing lives changed from people within the white East End community.  They can be tough, direct and are generally suspicious of religion (unless they are devout Catholics). None the less Jesus as been drawing them to our church.  However, if we truly want to represent Jesus and His kingdom we need to be reaching out and winning more that just those who are like us! We need to be sharing Jesus with people from every nation, tribe and tongue! And we are in the ideal place for it!

(The Lord) says: "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth." Isaiah 49:6

Newham is the most ethnically diverse borough in the UK. A massive 70% is made up of ethnic minorities from all over the world. India, Pakistan, Lebanon, Bangladesh, Poland, Lithuania, Nigeria, Guiana, Iran, Egypt and the Congo to name a few. All of these nations and more can be found within a few hundred metres or so from my front door! Regardless of what the government might say about the Multicultural Experiment these different cultures do not easily mix. Although we are not split into ghettos (whole communities of just one ethnic group), building real friendships across cultural boundaries is very difficult. And if you can't build real relationships you can't share Jesus in a personal and relevant way.

So we are praying and God is answering!

Let's Get Chatting

At the start of the year some of the women in our church had the idea of a group to help local people practice conversational English. We don't have the skills to teach ESOL but we do love to chat with people.

As the women we're meeting other mums from different backgrounds small talk would begin. It wouldn't last for long because even if they could speak English their confidence wasn't very high. Especially in general conversation. There is a difference between formal English that you need to know to get by and the type of English you need to actually talk about the weather, or your family or your feelings.

So we started a 6 week course called "Let's Get Chatting". It's a simple format. Come eat lunch together (Halal of course) and chat about a simple set topic with someone who is comfortable with their English. The topics would vary from week to week vary from holidays, family, food to weddings.  The first week we were packed out with 27 people and it has been well attended right thought the course!

One of the highlight was on the topic of "food". Every one brought a dish from their home country and shared traditions and recipes. Not only have we been able to get to know more people from our community, but we've also been able to help them build up their confidence.

"It's was so wonderful to hear them laugh and tell stories about their weddings and families! We are really starting to become friends." A volunteer from our church

Please pray!

Tomorrow is the last of the 6 sessions of Let's Get Chatting. We are hoping to run it again in the future but more than that we are hoping to build on the relationships already made for Jesus sake!

Please pray with us!

Breaking through!

Wow, it's been a crazy couple of months since my last post.  Sorry about that...

In our church this year has been named "the year of Breakthrough!"  There have been a number of things seeming to hold us back for a long time now and we decided that this year as a church we are going to pray like we've never prayed before to seek God to change our situation.  We realize that only Jesus makes the difference, not how clever we are or how experienced we are!  Only by trusting in Jesus will any of our mountains move.

Our verse for the year is:

"Show me your paths, Lord, and teach me to follow" Psalm 25:4

So we have been praying and God has already been moving...  This may sound a bit odd but one result of our praying is more prayer.  As we have turned to pray under the inspiration of Breakthrough people are really starting a hunger for prayer.

People are meeting to pray and fast together (before we've even preached on fasting, that is this week!!)...

"Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working." James 5:16  

People are confessing their sins together and praying for healing.  I used to think James 5:16 meant find a righteous guy and get him to pray for you because his prayers will be effective.  Now I realize that when you confess your sins to each other you are made righteous (1John 1:9) and then YOUR prayers are effective.  Our hunger for prayer, created a hunger for righteousness and confession and this has created a dynamic powerful prayer life among us already!

And a bunch of us are meeting every Sunday evening after church to pray together for the community around Cafe Church.  Those prayer meetings have been passionate and powerful!  I feel like as a church we are learning to pray all over again!

These are exciting days for our church plant and wider church family... Even if nothing else starts to happen (and I believe it will) this year is already amazing!  Breakthrough has already happened in the most important place it can... Our prayer lives!

And the secret... being desperate for Jesus!

Here is the run down of the Five-A-Side tournament I took some guys to the other day.  It's early days hoping to take twice as many next time!

City Gate Church Retain the Newham 5s Title

In a competitive Newham Community 5s on Monday December 13^th, City Gate Church won the last match of the tournament to clinch the Cup for a second time. A close 2-1 victory over early favourites Cliff Walk Church brought the trophy home.

The 5-a-side games were very high scoring at the Academy in Loughton with some tremendous goals being scored. The football followed a talk given by local footballer and West Ham Physio Seyi Oni. Seyi shared how his love of football is entwined with his Christian faith and how he had walked away from Church during his teenage years, but is so much happier now he is back with God first and then football in his life.

The Newham Community Sports Team is a branch of World Sport Ministries and stage regular sporting events in Newham, usually played with Christian Spirit and values! For more details please contact newham@worldsportministries.com . Sports quizzes and golf days are other events regularly staged.

Results

1^st. City Gate Church 12 points (scored 19, against 12)

2^nd. Cliff Walk Baptist Church 10 points (scored 19, against 9)

3^rd. Bonny Downs Green 10 points (scored 20, against 16)

4^th. Bonny Downs Orange 3 points (scored 13, against 34)

Why go all the way to New York to learn about church planting?

It’s a good question and I have been asked it a few times.  City to City is a church planting training centre set up by Redeemer Church in New York City.

Redeemer has a 5000 strong congregation of mainly young professionals and is led by Tim Keller.  One of the unique things about this church is its view on world wide mission.  It believes –as we do- that Jesus has given the church the job of sharing Jesus throughout the entire world.  But they don’t send out missionaries even though they easily could afford to.  They believe that the best way to share the good news of Jesus with everyone is by planting new churches, which reflect local people, in all the major cities throughout the world.
Over the 20 years Redeemer (itself a church plant) has been around, it has planted dozens of churches and helped to plant many hundreds more!  So they have a vast vision, depth of experience and amount of knowledge on the subject of international, culturally relevant church planting.

While we were in New York we had to go and visit many church plants.  Some actual plants of Redeemer and others supported by them.  Of course, none of them would have worked in East Ham, but then they shouldn’t!  But each one was mainly made up of local people, who had come to faith through the birth and life of the new church.  We went to a jazz church in the art district of Brooklyn, a youth & students congregation in the East Village, a posh church in the Upper West Side, to just mention a few.  We also got to have lunch with and hear the stories and experiences of the lead planters in each of these churches.

My favourite was the church that reminded me most of Bonny Downs.  It was a church of about 150 people and in a multi cultural district made up of Greeks, Jews and a variety of other people groups.  It was a poor community and had bags of life.! The church itself met in a Jewish Synagogue.    One of the coolest things about the church was that it was only 5 years old and had already planted another sister church and was in the process of planting another one, both in neighbouring communities.  Even with their limited recourses they had a vision for and were expanding and seeing the Kingdom of God grow!

It wasn’t just the churches we visited that helped to inspire me.  On the course were 15 other church planters from all over the world.  From Japan, South Africa, Mexico, Malaysia, Greece, Northern Ireland, Ireland, Czech Republic, Canada, Argentina, France, Romania and oh yes East London!  They were an amazing and encouraging bunch of people and full of inspiring stories.  We were able to share our troubles, questions, doubts and passions together.  It was a good reminder that even though we were all from completely different cultural backgrounds we were all part of the same family.

The teaching was amazing and Emelie and I are full of vision and ideas for how we can help grow a congregation that will transform the Flanders area and beyond!
So why did I go to New York?  The quality teaching, the great examples of diverse churches, the international church planters…and it was a beautiful city to explore.

I was excited to go to New York but I am ten times more excited to be back and I can’t wait to see what God is going to grow out of our little but mighty church!

BenAboutLondon

Vision Part 1: "We want to see Jesus..."

Hi guys, sorry it's been a while.  I had a loooot of thinking to do after New York and didn't want to let anything slip about any changes without speaking to key people first.  I've done that now but still have a lot to think about.  One of the first things I am thinking through is our church vision.  

Our awesome vision is this "We want to see JESUS transforming LIVES, changing our COMMUNITY and the WORLD!"  Great isn't it!?  But how does this work out?  What does it mean for us?  Those are a couple of the questions I'm bashing out at the moment.  Over the next couple of weeks I'll be putting up on my blog thoughts as to how this vision fleshes out in my mind.  I'm not wanting to change our vision just want to understand it better in order to share it better.

So here we go...

Vision Part 1: "We want to see JESUS..." 
Colossians 1:15-18, Philippians 2:5-11, 1John 5:20

Everything we do is about Jesus!

Jesus is fully God revealed in person.  Through Jesus everything was created.  Everything was created to shine with Jesus beauty.  Not only is Jesus our amazing creator but He wants us to be in relationship with Him. 

"Christ is exactly like God, who cannot be seen.  He is the first-born Son, superior to all creation.  Everything was created by him, everything in heaven and on earth, everything seen and unseen,  including all forces and powers, and all rulers and authorities.  All things were created by God's Son, and everything was made for him.  God's Son was before all else, and by him everything is held together.  He is the head of his body, which is the church. He is the very beginning, the first to be raised from death, so that he would be above all others." Colossians 1:15-18

That’s why Jesus came to earth 2000 years ago as a person like you and me, so we could really see and understand what He is like.

 

That’s why Jesus grew up and taught us about His Heavenly Father, so we could understand that God wants us to be part of His forever family. 

That’s why Jesus loved, helped and healed all sorts of people that others looked down on, so we could understand that it doesn’t matter what other people think of us, He loves us!

"Christ was truly God. But he did not try to remain equal with God.  Instead he gave up everything and became a slave, when he became like one of us. Christ was humble. He obeyed God and even died on a cross. Then God gave Christ the highest place and honoured his name above all others." Philppians 2:6-9

That’s why Jesus was treated like a criminal and died on a Cross.   Jesus saved us from our selfishness and sin by taking the punishment we deserve. 

That’s why Jesus defeated death when He came back to life, so that death wouldn’t be our end either and we can know Him forever.

"We know that Jesus Christ the Son of God has come and has shown us the true God. And because of Jesus, we now belong to the true God who gives eternal life." 1John 5:20

That is why Jesus now lives in Heaven ruling as King, so we can live to know Him and share His forever love with the world.

As a church we want to know Jesus more and more and share Him with others.

This is a working progress so please let me know what you think.  What is missing?  What you like?

BenAboutLondon