Story Room

I met a 60-year-old divorcee called J who lives a few doors down from us. She is very lonely and so says hello to anyone who walks past her in the street. My natural reaction to this would tend to be just to say hello and walk on, or even to ignore her.  But because of praying lots as a church that we would meet the broken, lonely, and lost, I stopped and chatted to her.

I wrote before about some ways we were trying to share 'normal family life' in our gospel community (GC) and with people who don't yet know Jesus.  Here are some recent examples of what it looks like.

I lead the 'Family' gospel community (GC).  TCH Sharrowvale tries to make sure its GCs are made up of different kinds of people, so we haven't stuck all the families together.  '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.

We first got to know some local homeless people when some of our students stopped to chat to a guy called P in the street one time. They gave him a scarf and, as they were on their way to a meal, they invited him along. He didn't want to go but said he'd like some food as a takeaway. So they took some back to him.

Our Bangladeshi friend, M, invited us for dinner. This was the first we had been invited into their home, and we were particularly excited about meeting M's wife, S, and getting to know their five kids a bit too.
 

Our relationship with A and B has led to meeting other people. One day, we invited A and B for kebabs and we wanted to get some halal chicken. We bought it from a local shop owned by  M, a Bangladeshi man.

We got chatting to M and explained why we were buying halal meat. After we had cooked the kebabs, we brought a couple back to the shop to give to M. He was surprised and delighted at this gesture and we ended up going upstairs above the shop to eat them with him. The shop is on my way into work and since then, I have stopped off in the shop to say hello probably two or three times a week.
 

We met a Kurdish guy, A, and his Hungarian wife, B, a couple of years back. They opened a Kurdish restaurant in Loughborough and so we committed as a community (as many of us as possible) to trying to get along there for lunch once a week (the food was cheap enough for this to be possible).

A team of us live on a housing estate called 'the Manor'.  We're always looking for ways to meet other residents and to share our lives.

One thing that's helped us to do that is a quiz held at a local pub. A few members of the church write and host the quiz, while the rest come to take part in teams and build relationships with those in the pub.