I sat down with a famous worship leader and asked him a question. "I want to understand worship, I'm reading a lot of books about it, meeting with different worshiping communities in the church and making sure I make space to worship God myself a lot, but what else can I do? Is there anything I'm missing?" He looked at me, thought for a moment then said it. Thee words that changed my life. "Serve the poor". Years later this came back to me when I was looking at where to do my curacy and offered a chance to work in a church with a developing evening congregation. It wasn't the sort of evening service you'd expect from a leafy suburban parish. Every Saturday and Sunday for the past 19 years St Johns church has worked with other churches to provide a large soup kitchen. Eventually someone felt it would be good to offer an optional church service. It was set up in a different part of the building with no pressure on people to go, and run by a small team from our morning congregation. To begin with it was a bit chaotic. For the first year it was a good week if we didn't have to call the police or an ambulance or both! There were fights and drug problems, heckling and everyone seemed drunk. The format was simple: it was set out like a cafe, chairs tables, doughnuts and nice coffee. Everything was free. We had a welcome, notices, prayers, worship songs, a bible reading and a short talk on something about God making a practical difference in our lives, a discussion around the tables, then more singing and close. Not rocket science, but gradually something happened; people began developing friendships, more and more kindness emerged, it became a safer place to be and it seemed like the message was becoming something people owned. A more diverse spectrum of people started coming, we had a lady who was an English language teacher with a plummy accent who didn't get on with mainstream church but found something more honest in Cafe Church. She invited half a dozen of her students and they in tern invited their friends. Some disabled people started coming; a man who is blind, a woman with motor neurone disease who couldn't talk easily. Our laid back culture and focus on a few simple things seemed to make church accessible to a lot of different groups. A turn around moment happened one Sunday night in mid August. As often happens in church in August, we were short on team. It was just me, a teenage worship leader and one other person around that week. We were frantically trying to get everything set up while 50 people were waiting outside in the rain, then suddenly it came to me. I opened the doors handed people table cloths and packets of doughnuts and said they could come in early if they were willing to help set up. It's quite a shift for someone who lives their lives being described in their many other social services groups as a "Service User" to be handed a table cloth and asked to help out but they rose to the challenge. The message we kept pushing that we are trying to be the family of God together seemed to hit home. People remembered their gifts, or found new ones. An asylum seeker from Iran who had previously run a small business took charge of our cafe front, people with OCD tendencies took charge of clearing up, people who were part of a community alotment scheme brought fruit to share and everyone pitched in setting up and clearing away. Our services changed. Some people were part of a mental health poetry group in the week and we encouraged them to bring some of their poetry to use in our service. To begin with it was about ordinary things in life, but as their faith developed it began to be about God making a difference in the challenges they were facing. One memorable one was called "I'm an alien son-of-a-gun" and it was about where is God when he was being sectioned under the mental health act. We had a gifted musician on the team who led song writing evenings once every few months so that we wrote our own worship with phrases and focusses that meant something to them. Mary, the lady with motor neurone disease started painstakingly typing out prayers and thoughts at home on her machine that we would read out to give her a voice in our services. The homeless people who you saw busking on the streets of Ealing may well be also the people in our worship band on a Sunday night. People found they were forming into a family, the violence and drug use became mostly self regulated and alcoholics would often choose to stay sober all Sunday afternoon so
they could be fully present in Cafe Church. Our community worker worked to try to help people stay off the streets and we all worked as a family to try to help each other grow into health and grace. For a lot of people I think it might have been the first experience of family they've had. Most of the 100 or so people in Cafe Church have terrible stories to tell and a lot have had their own children taken into care. We kept growing. We developed stronger links with community mental health groups and homes where people with severe disabilities are cared for and we became the place that if residents or service users were religious or had family who were religious who wanted them to be taken to church, ours was the one they would be taken to. I remember quite a few carers being touched by the acceptance and grace of our little community and seeing the benefit of our little community for their clients. I recall one church going mother of a severely disabled man with tears in her eyes when I mentioned that of course I'd given her son the bread and wine at communion. "Why wouldn't anyone not?" After a couple of years we realised that it had moved from just being an accepting community to people owning Christianity personally. We'd run Alpha courses and set up two midweek growth groups for the keen beans but we realised that almost all the regulars would now call themselves Christians. So the question came up, what do we do now? Where do you start teaching a group of people are new to faith about how to live as Christians? The first step seemed to be to start with the concept of compassion for others. But how do you help a group of people who have suffered so much and so often been labelled as victims, as "service users", to stop just being users and to feel they have something to give to others? We decided the key was children. Christmas was coming so I found links to Opperation Christmas Child's Shoe Box appeal. We showed them a video of children who didn't have any other toys opening these shoe boxes and explained that we were going to do this together. I asked everyone to raise a pound, to go into the pound store and buy something for a little girl or a little boy. Some people bought wildly inappropriate presents - one person brought a giant toy cow that was about twice the size of the shoe boxes. But we packed 6 shoe boxes and sent them off. This worked so well that we decided to collectively sponsor a child. A little girl in Thailand joined a sponsorship program and started getting letters from our Cafe Church community. People who weren’t confident at writing would dictate their good wishes for her to people who were able to write. We had a day away with all the regulars to try to discern what God was calling us to do next. I spelled out the idea of what church was originally and set them in groups to decide how we could best do that within our settings. One thing that came from that is that they didn't like the worship music we used. The Matt Redman and Tim Hughes songs were ok but what they and their friends loved were the hymns that Jonny Cash and Elvis did covers of. So we started singing The Old Rugged Cross and How Great Thou Art sometimes with a bit of an Elvis flare, mixed in with our own songs and the occasional modern song where it was relevant. I’ve now moved on to being a high flying university chaplain but my life changed from worshiping with this community. Through being part of this church where I was sitting next to severely physically disabled people or people with disabling mental health problems, some who had been homeless, people who had experienced judgement and abuse and who had given up on social pretense, people who were finding that God loves them as they are and that God has a plan for their lives, through this I learned about the grace of God for me, and that God is more worth worshiping than I could have imagined.