It’s summer time! As I write this we’ve been experiencing a
heat wave, making us all throw open the windows, and dive for ice creams and
cold drinks!
In biblical times you couldn’t turn on a tap to get water – most
people had to go out to the local well to collect water for the day in stone
jars – as still happens in many African countries today. Because of this, each
village’s well became a natural meeting point – a place where people would come
and be refreshed from the water there, but also socialise and chat with others
from their village. It was a place that travellers would naturally come to on
their way to different places, and so it was a place where news and ideas could
be passed on by them, and news received, to be taken on to other villages.
We often read about characters from the Old Testament going
to wells, meeting people there – usually the people God wanted them to meet.
Some even found their future wives or husbands there! Jesus too met people at
wells, notably the Samaritan woman from John Chapter 4, whose story of finding
‘life-giving’ water through her encounter with Jesus is part of the inspiration
for our Church Vision of ‘Offering living water’.
I’ve recently been reading a book by Mark Batterson called
‘The Circle Maker’. It’s the story of a
Church in the USA, which, through many years of faithful prayer, built a
thriving ministry in a busy part of the city. Mark argues that the modern
equivalent of the well of Biblical times is the coffee shop! It’s a place where
people will naturally gather to be refreshed, and to socialise – to meet with
others and hear and pass on news and ideas. So as well as finding space to meet
on Sunday, their Church built a coffee bar which became a cornerstone of the
Church’s ministry in that city.
This is the hope for our coffee lounge in the new ‘Gateway’,
that it will become a place where local people can gather, be refreshed and
socialise. A place where we may meet the people that God wants us to meet. A
place where good news can be passed on. It’s
only a part of the Gateway proposal, which we are hoping will be ready for
Trustees to approve in September for the whole Church to see at the Autumn
meeting. But our hope is that, like the Church in America, the coffee bar could
be a big help to us in connecting with our local community and in ‘Offering
Living Water’ to local people, as our vision says.
