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.

We made this video in honour of James and Katherine’s wedding. G E N I U S!

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.

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

What’s on at COTC and in the Parish this Christmas. Download the full size version here.
UPDATE The Christmas tree is here!

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.

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.”

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.