"I Don't Do Church!"

I can hardly believe it, but Kev and I have been at Poplar on placement for nearly a month now. We've been made to feel so welcome, that it feels as if we've been there much longer. One of the things I've loved has been the variety each day. For someone like me who's a bit obsessive about plans and lists, I'm rapidly realising that it's almost impossible to plan my day too carefully because something is bound to change it!

I'm already beginning to collect together a bank of memories and experiences from this placement, but I think one of my favourite moments has to be the quote "I don't do Church" from one of the regulars in the cafe.

Each day, with his mug of tea and egg and bacon sandwich this person sits and discusses the rights and wrongs of the world with fellow tea drinkers. This all happens against the backdrop of children playing in the "Parents and Toddlers" group, bacon sandwiches being ordered by the volunteers in the Charity Shop and the sounds of Martha and Robert preparing the food for the luncheon club. Some of his fellow tea drinkers were on the Poplar Jolly to Clacton-on-Sea or part of the congregation in the previous Sunday's meeting. And in the middle of all this, there is my friend announcing that he doesn't do Church!

It's been a long time since I believed a Church was a merely a building - I thought I understood that a Church is made of people. What I am beginning to understand more fully is just how diverse these people might be, and the range of ways in which these people are brought together.

Thank goodness that "doing Church" is about community and that God wants us to be the people we were created to be within that community. The more I think about it, the more I want any Church I am part of to be a community where people feel they can belong as themselves, so that "doing" Church becomes "being" Church.