The Ark-T Centre is a little kingdom of God story. My friend, James Grote, the Ark-T Centre director has nurtured (with others) an arts project that gathers people together. Taking some fairly ordinary church buildings there have been transformed into spaces that act as a gift to the community for a variety of activities. Nestled into amongst it all is the worshipping community of John Bunyan Baptist church in which the Ark-T sits. At the heart of everything is a desire to create relationships across the arts, across the community, across church. There is a hospitality at work that only requires that those who work or participate seek to see and engage with the whole in which they are a part. The church have just celebrated 75 years of witness. The Ark-T has been part of that witness for seventeen years.
Last October as part of their 75th celebrations, I returned to the church, where I spent two years as a student minister. Here is part of what I said to them:
I would say to you where sometimes what happens here in the week (as part of the Ark-T) can feel like it overwhelms what happens here on a Sunday, the relationship between the two must be and is interdependent. The worship of God makes possible the hospitality of this community and its buildings to the wider community, in the same way, at its best, the offering of the wider community through the Ark-T expressed through art, dance, music, food gives life and beauty to your worship of God. Worship of God does not come second best, instead it makes possible everything else. For it is through worship we can cultivate the kind of thankfulness and desire to be a blessing that says come and see, come and taste, come and enjoy the good news of Jesus. Worship never just gathers us, it always sends us back out to the world with good news.
And in this year of celebrating 75 years of John Bunyan Baptist Church, we are celebrating 75 years of a worshipping community of Baptists in Cowley, of people gathering this space to sing, to pray, to read scripture, to share bread and wine, to be blessed, to under go baptism, to be married, to celebrate new life, to commit those who have died to God, to weep and to laugh, to be stirred and be changed: to worship God. This little community is an outpost of the kingdom of God, nurtured by scripture and prayer, to witness to God’s grace and creation, to learn gratitude and generosity, creativity and blessing. And this is not you’re doing, you didn’t start it, you won’t finish it. It is a work of God, sometimes it may feel like a miracle you’re still here. It should, because it is God who is making you together into actors in his gospel story. And so I pray, that the good work God began here, God will continue and one day bring to completion.
As Baptist churches in the Southend area this week we are hearing a number of stories, of which the Ark-T is one. We are hoping to fund new imagination amongst us and within us about mission in the community that speaks of hospitality and 'venturesome love' (Ann Morisy, who is with us Wednesday and Thursday).
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