Harvest Renewal

Finally!! I manage to find 10 minutes to update this blog even though I'm sure all the millions of readers have given up ever seeing anything from me again (Ha!).

The reason? - To write about a great weekend doing an amazing harvest event with my church and the Tesco store next door which has reinvigorated my attitude towards ministry (specifically mine!), old, established churches (the one I go to) and human nature ( especially at Tescos).

Background - I managed to persuade Tesco's and St. Andrew's Church Hove, to collaborate on harvest this weekend. Rather than trying to persuade people to come to church for harvest (although we did do that) which is not a problem in Hove as it's one of our more popular services, I was able to create a leaflet for people to use as a devotional aid as they went round the supermarket doing their shopping. This was combined with some displays in the store and some reference to the same themes in our service in church yesterday morning. You can see some of the displays on the Eden blog http://eden.blogs.com/eden/ and if I can ever work out how to post attachments or pictures I'll put some of the leaflet on here.

So as people went through the fruit and veg section they were encouraged to think about the fruit of their lives accompanied by a few verses from Luke 6 and so on throughout the whole store.

We gave out 3,500 leaflets on Saturday and it was amazing to see people stopping in the aisles in front of the bread section, engrossed in the leaflet and clearly taking part in the whole idea. It was great to be able to take spirituality out into the real world, instead of expecting them to come to us on our terms in our buildings with our rituals and rules.

The whole experience has reinvigorated me, made me start thinking about fresh expressions of churches in strange places and other ways of doing our spiritual things in a real world context, not a church world context.

The great thing is the manager of the store asked me yesterday when we can do the next thing together. I feel a Christmas experience coming on!