Gracious God,
We pray for peace in our communities this day.
We commit to you all who work for peace and an end to tensions,
And those who work to uphold law and justice.
We pray for an end to fear,
For comfort and support to those who suffer.
For calm in our streets and cities,
That people may go about their lives in safety and peace.
In your mercy, hear our prayers,
now and always.

Amen

This weekend we are taking some time out with God as church. We will be praying for 48 hours, and you are invited to participate.  The chapel will be filled with a mix of solo and group prayer, in all sorts of different styles and forms. You will be able to follow the event here.
Update: The weekend was amazing, and the Chapel looked beautiful. Toms pictures can be found here

As of September 2009, we ended our morning service and planted into St Andrew’s – 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 would effectively reach out to our parish and beyond.

It has started with a small crowd of us joining in with what was going on already, getting stuck into the community and helping out where we can. 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:

COTC Morning Service

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.

Some images:

The stunning concert hall at Kings Place

The hub

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.

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?

We had a fine time on Sunday night, with the Archdeacon and the trustees of the Cloudsley trust visiting, loads of people and Sam going all Justin on us (I wanna try somethin’ right now. See they don’t do this anymore…).

Love this picture. The waving thing was intended as a homage to the classic COTC picture, but it came out the best by far. I particularly like Sarah Perrin’s messianic pose at the centre of the picture. Actually she does look a bit like Jesus…

Anyway – some of the bits from the service below:

Lyles Sermon is on the resources page, and you can also download worship from the evening.

‘O the deep deep love of Jesus’

The video “Until the Spirit is poured out…”

And that prayer.

Disturb us, Lord, when
We are too pleased with ourselves,
When our dreams have come true
Because we dreamed too little,
When we arrived safely
Because we sailed too close to the shore.
Disturb us, Lord, when
with the abundance of things we possess
We have lost our thirst
For the waters of life;
Having fallen in love with life,
We have ceased to dream of eternity
And in our efforts to build a new earth,
We have allowed our vision
Of the new Heaven to dim.

Sir Francis Drake