A moment to be grateful
This has been a weekend of celebrations for #Open10 – the celebration of ten years since Teddngton Baptist Church opened our newly developed buildings to the community. On Saturday we had an ‘open house’. celebrating all the partnerships we have built up with different groups within the community over the years. There were aid agencies, social care groups, musical theater sessions, a nursery rhymes session, stories and wonderful food cooked by local cafes.
This morning we started our service in the atrium – the heart of the redeveloped building. On March 2nd 2003, when we first started raising funds for this ambitious project, we sang ‘I believe in Jesus’ – declaring that the day would come when we would sing it in the new building. On November 21st 2004 we did exactly that – our voices curling up into the heights of the new two-storey atrium. This morning, we sang it again – ten years on. This is not the sound of a choir – but the sound of a diverse family, forged out of shared experience and held together by the love of Christ. It is, in every sense, music to my ears:
http://richardlittledale.me.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/I-believe2.mp3After that, we went back into the church and worshipped together. Two of our children’s groups had worked on separate sections of a large picture of the church. Individual children worked on small panels, and this morning it all came together. What is not to love about this spectacularly colourful picture of the church?
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In the evening a smaller number gathered to give thank for blessings past. As each shared their story, or insight, or verse, they added a brick to the sculpture below. With the lights out we looked at this quirky, precarious, glorious structure, and thanked God for…the church.