UK #3: Outreach at Saint Mary's Longfleet

 SML is a traditional parish church surrounded by a cemetery

As you may remember from my previous post, I spent time with my friend J's church in Poole.  I would say a central part of this church's current DNA is reaching out to people without a church background or a very minimal church background (maybe their parents had them baptized, but they didn't attend church).  As you probably know, there are many people in n Great Britain that fall into those categories, and there is a negative pressure on Christianity and the church.  But SML has developed ways to make connections with people in a number of ways.  

One thing I noticed was that on Sunday, they talked about sharing faith in a number of ways.  They prayed for the seeds that were planted over Christmas, and the vicar shared a conversation he had last week with a bank teller after she had come to a Christmas service with a friend.  There was a real sense that this is just part of who we are. 

They also have a number of outreach programs.  They run an Alpha course, a course that introduces Christianity and builds relationships over a meal, one semester a year.  It has been steadily growing over the past four years and last year they had about 100 people.  They are starting again in a couple of weeks and are excited to see what God does this year.  They use Alpha as a way to follow-up with people that attend their Christmas services, and they follow Alpha with more traditional small groups that basically go through the Alpha material again. 

Another thing they do is called Healing on the Streets.  They work in teams of three and go out to a public place.  They put an empty chair on the sidewalk with sign that says "healing" on it and they have similar cards to pass out to those walking by.  Then they wait to see what happens.  If people sit down in they chair, they pray for them.  They have prayed for over 400 people in the last three years. I actually saw another church doing this when I was visiting the city of Winchester on Saturday.  This program reminded me of the prayer walking I did with the team at Madison Ave. CRC in Paterson, NJ when I did an internship there.

The neighborhood around SML

There are some other things they do, but these seemed the most interesting to me.  I wonder if that's because they tend to be more overtly Christian than many of the things we do at COS.  I wouldn't give those up, but I wonder how we could build some more explicitly Christian pieces in?  Or have them available?  And how could we be more intentional about talking about what we do in the congregation, so it is something that is the part of all of our discipleship, not just the core outreach volunteers? 

I am especially wondering about some kind of prayer ministry.  I wonder what would happen if we took some chairs out into the neighborhood and offered to pray for people?  Or even if we just started prayer walking in the neighborhoods around us(including Calvin's campus), praying for the people whether we interacted with them or not?