Our little group started life with a bunch of people who wanted to be doing something rather than talking about it – in terms of our expression of the discipleship we take seriously.
We began life therefore with the express intent of cooking a meal twice a month for our local night shelter. The shelter is for asylum seekers and refugees, who come from all over the world. They are offered a meal and a bed for the night, and so the night shelter depends on regular donations of meals.
We felt that we could commit to this twice per month, and initially these were the only times that we met. Our meeting needed to be able to deliver a meal to the shelter at the right time, so we opted for meeting regularly on Monday evenings.
We began with using the Anabaptist liturgy alongside our chopping vegetables, cooking and eating (prior to delivering the meal, we partake of it ourselves).
However, after a year or so, we decided that we would like to meet in the intervening weeks, and so for the last few years we have met every week.
When we are not chopping and cooking, we still eat together, as this is an important reflection of how Jesus often seemed to meet with people.
Our meetings are relaxed, with the aim of saying a short liturgy together each time (we found the Anabaptist liturgies a bit long, so we use prayers from different traditions), and reading a short passage of Scripture, although sometimes we don’t manage this.
However, we usually do sing! We are unusual in that, although we are small in number (6 or 7), we usually have the possibility of singing in 4 parts. We use Taize or Iona chants. We have some children who come along and this seems to work for us, and gives us great joy.
We all have particular needs, and we try to support each other both in the ways in which we are trying to live out our committed discipleship in our daily lives, and also in coping with our personal difficulties.
For most of us, there is a strong commitment to work out what our discipleship means in the bigger issues of the world, and there are frequent discussions around the table as we grapple with the global and the personal, in the context of our reading of the gospel and the life of Jesus.
Thanks to Jo Rathbone for this story.
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