'Family' was chosen as a name to reflect the Biblical image of a church, but it also refers to the particular make-up and mission field of our GC.  We're composed of one older family (teenage son, teenage daughter with learning disabilities), three families with young kids (with two and three children), two young married couples, one young engaged couple, and one older single.

For those of us with children, time and money are less flexible and available than they were before we had kids.  When it comes to mission, this can lead to some of us seeing young children as liabilities rather than assets.  I think this is because we've moved on from the childless lifestage, but our ideas of how to do mission-in-community haven't evolved.  So childless 20-somethings will often do mission-in-community by going out to the cinema, theatre, pub, or a gig, or by having people over for big meals and late nights.  These things are harder to do with young children.  The challenge for us is to work out how we can share the normal things we do as families, but with an intentional mission focus.

Big, one-off, high-stakes, lots-of-effort events aren't wrong (we're going to help do a big Easter party for the toddler group), but it would be awful if that was all we did.  Going for walks together, trips to the park, dropping in for a cup of tea, sharing normal family meals, and pub lunches after church or toddler group are more reflective of who we are, and these are what we want to share. 

As the wet, grey Sheffield Winter turns into the wet, grey Sheffield Spring and Summer, we're going to start doing some day trips out to the beach, national parks and the like.  We're going away for a weekend soon and are inviting some of our non-church friends to come and hang out with us.  In recent conversations with the 20-something singles in our group, I've realised that many of their friends want to hang out with families and do the normal family things that we so often take for granted.  I'll give some concrete examples of what we've been doing in a future post.

Here are some recent examples of what it looks like.

A couple in our GC have three small children and the wife had a birthday this week.  Another couple in our GC, who don't have children, offered to go and babysit to allow these parents to go out for a birthday meal.  We were also due to have a prayer meeting that evening, so we swapped the venue to the house where the babysitters were, so that they could join in, too.  We prayed for various things, including the toddler group we run and other friends who don't know Jesus.  After the meeting, some went home, some hung out chatting and one person did their preparation for work the next day.

We have another family in our GC with young kids, and they're really connected with their neighbours, many of whom also have young kids.  The mum has started periodically hosting a crafts evening for her friends who are also mums.  Some of our GC ladies have started going along as well, to knit, crochet, make and create craft items, and to build relationships.  This isn't a peripheral activity or just something one person in one GC happens to like doing, but is a GC mission activity.  We're all committed to it in prayer and people are investing time in building the relationships.  It also helps that this particular family are great at having a open and welcoming home, so often GC members and neighbours meet each other there.

We ended up talking for 15 minutes or so about nothing in particular. After that my wife and I made a point of chatting to her each time we saw her in the street. It wasn't long before we were invited to her 'surprise' 60th birthday party. We began to invite her round to watch The X Factor with us.

She has been very grateful for the time we have invested in the relationship (although we need to better at initiating contact with her) and we have been able to start to tell her about Jesus.