We opened our community café at The New Place, for the first time on Wednesday. It was fantastic. Some people popped in as they were walking by, some folk from parent and toddler came, some folk from groups at The New Place came along.
As well as offering something to our local community both in The New Place and in the neighbourhood; hopefully the café will also offer something to those involved in running it. Our volunteers are brilliant and worked their socks off, some of them never believing they would be able to do anything like this, some of them never being given the opportunity to do anything like this. They rocked, as only New Place folk can do.
J co-ordinated the whole thing with enthusiasm and precision, and she did that rarely found thing of taking the time to encourage and nurture the people she was working with so that they felt confident, valued and of worth. Her sense of enthusiastic engagement with the project became infectious.
The food was fantastic; toasties, jacket potatoes, sandwiches etc. It was all presented with real care. It didn’t need to be said, but was obvious that we cared about physical nurture and putting good stuff into our bodies.
I love these times when we do stuff together, its always stuff which on the surface seems simple and everyday but which touches at a far deeper level. It brings up to the surface feelings about community, team work, mutual care and inter-dependency; it reminds and re-establishes the underlying ethos of the New Place, an ethos which demands love for one another – the known and the stranger, for in such people we meet with God.
I have these moments at The New Place when things just ‘click’ and I have to go and lock my office door for five minutes while I take a deep breath and grasp the reality of a radical gospel being lived in the most unlikely place; in this case some funny little building on the corner of a red light district. I can’t fathom how anyone else can be enjoying their jobs out there, because I have the best job in the whole wide world.
