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We turned up at Pastor Jim’s church a few weeks before he retired, so we had to start our own church.
Jim’s church was Baptist. That didn’t mean it was like what you’ve seen in the news about Southern Baptist churches in America. It did mean things were decided by voting. The elders voted. The deacons voted. Sometimes the whole membership voted. This was new to me. In my dad’s church, decisions were made by leadership consensus but the pastor was ultimately in charge.
Not long after after Jim retired, I was asked to become a deacon. If it was British politics and not church, I would have been junior minister. I quickly learned that church politics are every bit as vicious as politics politics.
One of the elders and his wife put themselves forward as candidates to be the new pastors of the church. Christine and I were all for that. We liked them. We liked the way they wanted to make church accessible to everyone, not just people who spoke Christianese and knew when to drink the wine and how properly greet their neighbour in the next chair. A group of people in the church, some of them deacons, didn’t like these crazy progressive ideas. They started a not-very-secret campaign to make sure our couple didn’t win.
Also there was a musical Christmas production that involved me wearing a long scarf like Dr Who and a 1970s polyester safari jacket and singing the arrangement of Joy to the World from The Preacher’s Wife. I didn’t sing the Whitney Houston part obvs.
The campaign worked. In the vote, our couple didn’t get the supermajority they felt they needed to have a mandate to lead. Luckily our couple owned a caravan park in which there was a pub, and they thought, we could do church there. Their son and daughter-in-law took charge of the music. Christine and I signed up to the be the children’s pastors. A few weeks later, on Easter Sunday 2006, i61 Church was born.
It was called i61 because everything was iSomething back in the 2000s and chapter 61 of the biblical book Isaiah was our mission statement.
Within a year Christine and I went from being volunteers to working for i61 full time. I was (mostly) out of the design business and back in the God business.
Muntjac deer live in the woods near us. This is what they don’t look like.
I’m changing the TREE format a little. The FFOREST family have said that the writing is by far the most important part of this little email. Over the last year, I’ve been putting more and more time into the stuff surrounding the writing, the drawing, choosing music, putting the email together. To keep this project sustainable and fun, I’m going to refocus on the writing. This means drawings and music will become optional extras. I’ll include them if I have something I really want to share, but I won’t pressure myself to put them in just for the sake of the format.
Grow slowly
Jeff