Bill Meischke

It is now just over two years since Mary and I moved to the UK. I am now in the third year of a two year work assignment and right now, I don’t believe we will return until the end of 2007 at the earliest. Leaving our family and our church (and our dog) was hard for us and many things crossed our minds.

Significant among the issues was: is God leading us somewhere new or are we escaping from an overactive church life.

Despite qualms about what we were leaving behind, we left for London in July 2004 and in addition to finding somewhere to live, we also had to find a new place to worship. We made this decision knowing that God will use us wherever we are and with this in mind, we graciously accepted God’s grace and moved.

What follows is a description of where we worship now and what I believe are relevant observations for the CRCA. I’ll also address the thought processes I went through and still go through as we joined a church which is quite different to our historical experience.

I can say that the experience has been an eye-opener, God has brought us into contact with many Christians and many different ways of worshipping. I’m sure that this is a bit like a program for showing us that God’s church extends across many boundaries and has many different names and traditions but that we also have a common bond.

When we first arrived, we lived in a serviced apartment in the ‘square mile’ (financial district) provided by my employer. During that time, we looked for somewhere to live and also tasted the variety of churches in our immediate area. But we knew that we would not end up as ‘members’ of any of these churches because we did not intend to live in a city apartment.

The pews of churches in the Anglican High Church, Anglo-catholic, Anglican evangelical, Lutheran, Methodist, Baptist etc were evaluated by our backsides and the worship services were examined by our hearts and minds. Of the City churches, the only one that I could even come close to finding comfortable was St Helen’s of Bishopgate, a solid evangelical Anglican church which is also the base for the Christian group in the company that I work for. I still attend the midweek lunchtime services whenever I can.

Living and travelling in the UK and also travelling through Europe has left one lasting impression on me, more tourists go to church than worshippers and the Anglican church tradition and the catholic church traditions in Europe venerate buildings at a level where I question the stewardship of this approach.

The other thing that stands out is that there are no ‘Reformed Churches’ however there are ‘reformed churches’ but these are mostly evangelical Anglican congregations or members of the FIEC (Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches). The United Reformed Church is liberal and while the liturgy was comfortable and familiar, the message was not.

The other observation that I want to make here is that evangelical Anglican churches are reacting strongly against the trends in the Anglican communion. They are objecting to the ordination of women, the ordination of homosexuals, deviation from biblical teaching, deviation from confessions, dilution of the message of salvation, removing God from theology and more.

The intensity of feeling reminds me of the intensity of feeling that Marin Luther must have had against the Roman Catholic church. It also leads to stress for evangelical pastors that serve under liberal bishops. In the liturgies and rites of the evangelical churches, I see glimpses of an over-reaction as evangelicals strive to bring local churches back to the Bible by differentiating themselves from mainstream Anglicanism. I can add that observing this has strengthened my belief that the CRCA is blessed by being a confessional denomination where elders have direct oversight over the teaching of ministers. We can only pray that the confessions of the CRCA are not diluted and that it’s elders have the courage to defend the confessions.

We moved to Wimbledon and before we moved we surfed the web to find a church. In this is the first lesson –churches need excellent websites if they want to capture itinerant believers and seekers looking for a spiritual home. Churches with poor websites or no website didn’t make it in the first screening. Most of the time we turned up at churches without contacting anyone first, this allowed us to see how they handled newcomers.

I noticed a significant difference between ‘suburban’ churches and ‘city’ churches. The city churches are so used to itinerants and visitors that they don’t really pursue anyone unless the visitor makes an effort to make themselves known. In the churches that I have visited, it seems that the larger the church the easier it is to remain un-noticed. This is especially true of the ‘tourist’ churches. However, at a large number of ‘suburban’ churches we visited people came and sat next to us and introduced themselves, they made an effort to draw us in as soon as we walked in the door. That’s probably the second lesson; personal conversations must come second to welcoming visitors and drawing in strangers – otherwise they won’t come back.

The process of meeting people is assisted if you like by a ‘greeting and conversation’ break during the service. This provides some opportunity to arrange follow up conversations after the service. This meet and greet time during a worship service is not really something that I am completely comfortable with but having experienced it I can see that used properly it allows church members to focus on visitors and arrange after service contact - no-one escapes.

The group of churches which Mary and I attend are called the Co-Mission churches and are based in Wimbledon where we live. The church has two morning services, one in a school hall, the other in a gymnasium (because we were thrown out of the wine bar after it was renovated). The evening service is held in the local parish church building, because the local Anglican parish congregation there is so small that it doesn’t use the church in the evening and anywhere else that we can get space. Included in the Co-Mission initiative, is an initiative with students at Kingston University run by Peter Woodcock (who I’m sure needs no introduction to you).

The Dundonald congregation to which we belong is the core group and is where the senior pastor, Richard Coekin, is based. Last year the Dundonald congregations had a financial shortfall and £140,000 was raised in gifts and pledges within two months. I think the combined congregation is around 250.

Recently we had a lunch after the morning service, this included a choice of red or white wine and finished with the Lord’s supper being celebrated.

No collections are held during services, all the funds used to support activities and staff are raised through pledges. The thinking here is that in mission churches, you shouldn’t scare away prospective believers by asking for money. There are no creeds, no confessions, no catechism – there is a statement of faith and beliefs and a statement that the church adheres to the 39 articles but they are not taught. The salutation and benediction are prayers rather than proclamations but, the preaching is biblically sound and the leaders are true sincere believers and the congregation is made up of earnest and enthusiastic Christians that want to be there. They do not attend because it’s expected of them (by parents or neighbours etc), they do not attend because it’s a social club (45 minutes of preaching). I was filled with joy the first time I attended the evening ‘youth’ service because there were more than 200 young people there seriously listening and taking notes.

The two morning churches and the evening congregation have some 600 members between them. This doesn’t include the outreach to South Africans or the initiative to students in Kingston. The seven congregations are probably the size of a large classis in the CRCA. They support about five missionary teams, a number of diaconal initiatives and about 10 apprentices. The young people in the evening congregation are the youth leaders and kids activity leaders for the morning congregations.

We had never before worshipped regularly in a church where most of the members were relatively new converts, a church were the influx through witnessing and evangelism was significantly greater than growth through family expansion. Although I must say that the birth rate in the two morning congregations is very high and this has resulted in excellent programmes for young mothers, children and youth. This attracts people.

You may wonder why I have bothered with the long preamble. It is primarily to highlight three things:

What I’m leading up to is that a true outreach activity needs a core group that can be funded for three years. It needs people that can run Christianity Explored courses and the vision to think big. The Dundonald initiative was set up in an area where the local bishop supported homosexuality and ordination and marriage of homosexuals - the official parish churches were emptying and there was also a large influx of South Africans into the area. There were natural groups to target. Services commenced in a school and the church ran after school activities at the school - over an extended period of time, families at the school have been brought to Christ and are now part of the congregation.