Another amazing London Churches Football Tournament at Hyde Park. COTC host this every year, along with Ambassadors in Sport to raise money for local football ministry and 60 odd churches from across London and beyond compete. A Titanic effort from everyone at church to make it happen, and from the four teams we put out (perhaps Titanic is an unfortunate adjective!)
Tom C took some fantastic pictures of the day (that boy has talent). You can find them here.
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We made this video in honour of James and Katherine’s wedding. G E N I U S!
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Easter Services
This Lent at COTC we are committing ourselves to reading the whole New Testament in 40 days.
Rebecca Mackenzie is our new Artist in Residence. She will be encouraging the many creative gifts at church, and her first project is called Home.
The project involves daily writing, reflecting on the theme of home, and everyone is welcome to participate. You can find out more here.
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We had both our Christmas Lunch and the first of our carol services this week. Both very lovely. Well done to Bee, Jon and Anna for their amazing work cooking christmas Dinner for 70 people, and to Sam and the corner voices, and thank you to everyone who pitched in for this mammoth sunday. You can find pictures here
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What’s on at COTC and in the Parish this Christmas. Download the full size version here.
UPDATE The Christmas tree is here!
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This is a great piece of work. I spotted it on the BBC website, it is an oil painting by Andrew Gad for the Church Advertising network who were responsible for The revolution begins. Instead of the traditional nativity scene it imagines Jesus born in a London bus shelter. Not only provocative, it is beautiful too.
I have used it for our carol service invitation, so if you want to send it to friends or workmates you can download it here.
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Lovely to see so many of you at our Advent prayer meeting.
I particularly appreciated some of the responses to our ‘Advent Hope’ section, where we imagined we were writing a card telling the story of someone we had met, someone who was in need in one way or another and who needed to see the kingdom of God come in their life, even if they couldn’t articulate it. We used them as a basis for our prayers, but so many of them were so good that I want to put them up in Church. This was a good one.
“My hope this Christmas is that my children don’t end up like me. I pray that they will escape from the life that I live, that the lessons they learn at school will be their passport out of this. I pray that they will never have to experience the feeling of not being able to pay the rent or buy food for their famly. This is what I hope.”
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We had an amazing opening to advent last night, with the London Vocal Project. We talked about the fact that Advent often gets lost in the preparations for christmas, and that we wanted it to stand for itself. So today we start our series of advent reflections. You can find them here.
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Ruth D has been leading a discussion at Church and in Church Council about how we deepen our prayer, and we have been inspired with a few initiatives. One of them is setting apart one of the rooms upstairs as a chapel space, and developing a rhythm of prayer and meditation.
We intend to have a menu of different types of prayer running at different times through the week – you can find out what is happening and when on the chapel page.
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Our new term starts this sunday at COTC. It has always seemed strange that we still work on academic years, yet september always feels like a new beginning, we are hopefully a little rested and refreshed and ready to get stuck into a new year.
This term we are looking at the book of acts, and entering into this story to be shaped by the lives and events which brought the Kingdom of God from the ends of the earth to the heart of the Empire. It is more than just history, it is a political and theological vindication of the church in the face of the overwhelming power of empire and it raises the issues of what it means to live as part of Gods kingdom in the heart of the city.
You can find podcasts of all the talks on the Resources Page
Welcome to all of you who are visiting after seeing us at greenbelt. Thanks so much for coming to our session, and all the positive feedback. We worked really hard on our set, and it was particularly gratifying to feel the passion with which you all engaged with the liturgy for the city at the end.
There is a really positive review of the session by Lev Eakins on the Christian Aid website.
Lots of you said that you wanted to use the service in your own churches. We plan to have the whole service available. Feel free to adapt it and send us feedback on how it went for you.
Urban Wilderness – Running Order (40 mins)
Audio: City noise rising to crescendo. Actors create urban hassle. If you want to make your own you can find recordings at Freesound and Soundtransit.
Freeze. We got the idea from ImprovAnywhere. See here
Reading: Opening pages of ‘If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things’, by Jon McGregor.
Monologue ‘Confessions of an ordinary girl’ Camille Cetina (available shortly)
Secrets We asked people to reveal a secret that reveals something of who they really are. These were collected in buckets
Film: ‘People’, directed by Richard Fenwick.
Reflection Urban Wilderness (available shortly)
Prayers Liturgy of the City
Conclusion. Whispered Secrets over the noise of the city – Download MP3
Depart. As people leave they receive a random secret from the buckets to take with them.
As Jeremy says – we seem to have neglected to take photos of the event. If you were there and were responsible for some of the flashes I definitely saw, could you send something!
Other greenbelt stuff
The 2008 Portraiture project
My COTC flickr photos can be found here
We have big plans for our morning service. As of September we are going to be planting into St Andrews – the Parish church down the road (map here), with the hope of helping them to grow the sort of vibrant, diverse, family friendly church community that will effectively reach out to our Parish and beyond.
It will start with a small crowd of us joining in with what is going on already, getting stuck into the community and helping out where we can, and hopefully we can involve more people from COTC in different ways as time goes on.
It seems like our story has gone full circle – from All Saints, to COTC and now into St Andrews, but it is an exciting new stage for us, and particularly with all the changes and development going on in our local area this seems like just the right thing at just the right time.
Please be praying for us – it will be quite a change from our simple little morning service at COTC to being in a huge, ancient church building but our intention is to give generously and pray that God will bless that generosity for the sake of his Kingdom
You can read the whole story below:
Things are changing quickly in our local area. The arrival of Eurostar and the redevelopment of the old railway sidings at Kings Cross is apparently the biggest brownfields redevelopment in Europe. It will mean something like 3000 new homes, shops and offices on the edge of the Parish, and is sure to have an enormous impact on Barnsbury. You can keep up to date with what is going on with this excellent Blog
News confirmed today that as well as The Guardian, and Sainsburys head office, Central St Martins School of Art are relocating to Kings Cross. Students are already imagining how the space will look.
Church on the Corner are at Greenbelt this year, very exciting. We are doing a session in the new forms cafe called ‘Urban Wilderness – the spirituality of the city‘. This is our blurb -
Christian spirituality has often focussed on escaping the noise and pressure of the city, so how can those who live in its midst find sacred space? An act of worship reflecting on finding wilderness in the heart of the City.
It will be a combination of Audio/visual meditation and reflection, and I hope the process of preparing it will help us to think more about our own faith in the midst of this city. Greenbelt is a fantastic Christian arts festival that takes place over the August Bank holiday. Last year was four days of unbroken sunshine, and amazing sets by Billy Bragg, Duke Special and Beth Rowley, so no pressure this year! Hope you can come along.
Posted in General | Tags: city, greenbelt, spirituality, urban
This Thursday at COTC we are pleased to be hosting one of Rob Peppers excellent ‘Drawing Room’ workships (as seen in Time Out). It is more than a drawing class, using drawing as a meditation. It is open to all – no experience necessary, and is a lovely non-threatening environment to kick start your creativity, or develop existing skills.
Rob is a major artist with exhibitions around the world, and is currently showing in Liberty’s on Regent Street.
The Drawing Room. COTC 17th April 8pm-10pm. Suggested donation £5.
Posted in General | Tags: art, community, rob pepper
If felt to me that Easter brought together all the themes we have been exploring over the last few months, themes like Kingdom, justice, restoration & creation. On Sunday morning we reflected on the ressurection account in Luke, and also this wonderful image by Stanley Spencer (click for a very large version). He imagines the resurrection in his own village church yard at Cookham in Berkshire, a new easter morning with creation and humanity restored together.
Easter is our declaration of hope in the midst of a bleak and suffering world. This is what we proclaim.
Posted in General | Tags: art, easter, resources, stanley spencer
We talked yesterday about preparing to enter into the wilderness at Lent to create some space and to seek repentance and humility. You can find the talk on the resources page. And whether you are planning to give something up, or take up some practical discipline our hope is that this is restorative for us as individuals and community.
The book that I recommended is by Henri Nouwen, called reaching out. Amazon are suddenly out of stock (it must be a Lent favourite) but you can get it from their new and used section for as little as £2.77
So Lent starts on Wednesday, we are going to begin with and Ash Wednesday Service at 7.45pm at Church.
A few people are talking about blogging their Lent experiences.
Matt Wall for one:
“I was struck by how Lent should be a positive time; a time of ‘realignment’ if you like; a time of choosing freedom over slavery. I’m not quite clear on what that means yet but I feel invigorated by the idea of leaving my self behind and focusing on God…The whole idea is to cease trying to be God and start deferring to the real one, so honesty not false holiness is the name of the game – so this may not amount to a hill of beans. We’ll see.
How are you planning to mark these 40 days?
Posted in General | Tags: community, lent, resources, spirituality
Posted in General | Tags: eschatology, resources, tom wright
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