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Norman Hart Visits a venue and a godsend
How can the Church get alongside young people? I suppose the big question was in my mind when I went along, sent by Reform, to the last Venue session before the summer break at Plume Avenue URC in Colchester and found youngsters clamouring for the doors to be opened so that they could spend an afternoon in church.
Once inside myself, and surrounded by excited folk of all ages, the question must have come back to me forcibly, so I sat on the floor (as dozens of children and adults were doing) to get alongside a ten-year-old who was red in the face and still panting from some previous exertion. ‘What do you like about all this?’ was my first (and only) question. ‘The games,’ he replied, and turned away to indicate that the interview was at an end. ‘And the food,’ volunteered a small girl next to him.
My experiment in getting alongside young people ended, I tried to get up and quickly realised the fault in my technique. The answer for an older churchgoer is not to sit on the floor but to offer the floor to the young and flexible; to give them, quite literally, a venue. In this case, Plume Avenue - a ‘fifties building in a residential suburb of Colchester whose members decided a few years ago that a newer, larger building alongside the old one could be a godsend to a neighbourhood with too few outlets for its energetic young families.
a vision expanding
The larger church was built, shaped to fit the plot and almost touching the road; a nicely furnished sanctuary, with the pulpit and the rostrum for the communion table diagonally across one corner, moveable seating, a carpeted floor and plenty of useful side rooms upstairs and down and a small gallery. An excellent place, though they didn’t know it at the time, for The Venue.
God having given Plume Avenue the vision to enlarge the church, the vision for The Venue followed a little later. And it was a vision; it came in a dream.
Jo Macpherson, a young Plume Avenue elder with her own young family, one night had a compelling dream which would not leave her. She saw the church with a circle of people sitting on the floor, young and old together, dads in T-shirts and jeans. As the vision refused to leave her she decided it was from God and started to share it with fellow members of the church. Some three years later this is The Venue.
all are welcome
It happens on the first Sunday afternoon of every month (except August), presented by an impressively large group of church members and neighbourhood parents after intensive preparation and under the leadership of Jo and the team, including assistant minister Mike McCullagh and youth pastor Kevin Woods, both paid by the giving of church members for their full-time church work. Every month prayerful preparation meetings decide on the format and theme of the next Venue, decide what activities will be offered and who will be in charge of each. They then put together a small coloured ‘pocket guide’, which is printed off in numbers and sent out through the church’s youth organisations (Rainbows, Brownies, Boys’ Brigade, Girls’ Brigade), put through every letterbox in the six roads surrounding the church and taken into the nearby schools. On the Saturday morning before the event, a small and at first nervous group from the congregation stand at the local shopping parade and offer the invitations to any receptive shopper.
This intense publicity, which the church feels is very important, increasingly continues to pay off. The congregation is very aware of The Venue and an impressive number of volunteers staff the arrival desk, the drinks hatch, the games and quieter activities on the day itself, while other parents simply bring their children and stay with them for the afternoon. The result, on the day I was there, was a total of 170 children, teenagers and adults, many of them eager for the doors to open at 3.30pm and still there finishing off the barbecue sausages at 6pm in the grassy church field, under the sunshine which finally blessed a previously doubtful day. In the hours between there had been loud and energetic football and basketball in the old church hall, with the scorers of goals and baskets immediately replaced by ‘reserves’ waiting along the wall, table tennis and snooker, colouring for the tinies (with dads admiring), jewellery making and shiny ’suncatchers’, biscuit decorating (and eating) and the making of a banner for the day’s theme: ‘Be still (!) and know that I am God’.
refreshing mind and spirit
Yes, right at the heart of the afternoon is set a few minutes for mind and spirit when all are called together and quietness reigns. When I was there Mike first asked us if we had holidays to come and reminded us of God’s gift of rest and refreshment in the midst of busy lives and the value of taking time to spend with God. On the rostrum a young couple lounging in deckchairs under a beach umbrella then discussed and commended the Marriage Course (information pack available) and its enriching effect on marriages - this particularly for the parents who had come, who when child-free had been able to sit quietly around the building reading newspapers (provided).
Then we streamed out of doors - for waterslides and a parachute game and ice creams and the barbecue, while we listened to a swing quartet. Then most of us went home and left the church to the final event of the day, the entry of the vacuum cleaners. And this brought home one of the most striking things about The Venue and the reason why I emphasised earlier the new church building around which it all takes place. Members of other churches may now be commenting, ‘We don’t have a place to do all this’. And we could miss the fact that ‘all this’ takes place in a modern and attractive church which an hour or so earlier had been neatly and reverently set out for worship, where a congregation had heard the gospel preached, prayed and sung hymns. Not all the worshippers take part in The Venue, but all of them are aware of what happens in their precious building after they leave it and most surely gladly accept it.
a community’s godsend
The Venue is a godsend - that should have a capital G. None of the people who are putting it together sees it as anything but a work in progress. Plume Avenue’s fulltime minister Mark Ambrose (you’’ll have noticed that he hasn’t been mentioned before this) is wholeheartedly behind The Venue and thankful that it is the vision and the creation of a group of volunteers within the church. With them, he hopes that those whose only connection with the church at present is on a monthly Sunday afternoon can be found a way into the life of faith as the months go on. He leads a neighbourhood church which really engages with its neighbourhood, not least through The Venue.
Norman Hart is a former editor of Reform |
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