jonnybaker

grace - a slideshow and a revamped ethos

at grace's 30th birthday steve collins had compiled a slideshow of photos from most of those years. we don't have any photos of a few of the early years but they scroll through in chronological order. the link to a pdf is here. it's 67mb. it's a wonderful reminder. there is also a section in the archive now for slides from various things

we have also spent a bit of time reflecting on what has been our ethos for a long time now and that has had a bit of a revamp. what has surfaced in those discussions is the value of a hospitable and welcoming community (which you might expect if you call yourselves grace!). risk has been demoted to a sub section which i hope doesn't mean we are losing our edge! here is the ethos

 

grace - the BIG 30!

the next grace marks our 30th birthday. i wasn't there when it started - jenny and i joined in when we moved to london a couple of years after that. but it's been home for us, a wonderful creative christian community in which to work out what it means to follow christ in today's world. i think the creativity joel and harry flow in was really nurtured in the air breathed at grace, alternative worship and greenbelt over those years. during that time we have created and curated some really wonderful worship, music, liturgy, movies. all the while there has never been anyone employed to lead it - it's a collaborative venture. i'd love it if you wanted to come even if you haven't ever been but especially if you have been part of that journey at any point. thanks to st mary's ealing for giving the permission and space for grace to be a congregation over those years and trusting us to get on with it. it would be hlepful to know rough numbers so if you plan to come let me know in a comment or something.

here's the blurb on the web site - 

11th November is Grace's 30th birthday service - to mark the occasion we will be meeting around a table for a service of Communion by Numbers. Meeting around a table has been a large part of the Grace experience and sitting at a table with food and conversation we meet our companions, ourselves and sometimes God.

We'd love to see old friends and new around the table on 11th November - there will be food, drinks and music. It would be great to know if you plan to join us.

we are ready for grace

it's a new season of grace. in november grace will be 30 years old. put nov 11 in your diary if you'd like to join us for that celebration. but the next two we are looking at the theme of grace itself. sept you are invited to bring something - a poem, song, prayer, photo or whatever. see you there.

grace easter vigil

grace conveniently falls on holy saturday this year so we will be hosting an easter vigil. we’ll be beginning with the cafe open at 9:30pm and then grace will begin at 10pm mixing the traditional fire lighting, candle procession and readings with grace’s own take and flavour on proceedings. hope to see you there.

grace saturday - praying with a lump in our throat

continuing our grace lent we have a prayer focused evening on saturday with a series of stations praying with and for those at the edges. do join us. the title is inspired by claudio carvalhaes book that we are reading through lent.

grace open table

the next grace is on saturday - an open table. the blurb is as follows:

Join us for Grace where there will as ever be an open table.

We have always been inspired by Christ’s welcome of all around the table, especially those at the fringes. We will be gathering to continue that practice, and remember him.

You are of course welcome!

this tees up our lent. lent has always been a season which we enjoy as a space to dig deeper into something related to following in the way of christ. this year's reflections are inspired by claudio carvalhaes book praying with every heart which is possibly the best book on prayer i have read (it's not cheap though reasonable on kindle and is on perlego if you use that). we will focus on praying from the edges and there will be conversations around those at the edges due to sexuality, empire or race who we will endeavour to pray with and for with a lump in our throat as claudio would put it. i am really looking forward to all of that. maybe see you saturday...

labyrinth - grace next saturday

it seems to have become something of a tradition to walk a labyrinth for the first grace of the year. do join us. it will be simple, meditative, with a soundscape of ambient tunes followed by a cafe - saturday 14 jan 8pm st mary's ealing

advent grace saturday night

grace saturday night (yes i know it clashes with football so we'll catch up in the cafe afterwards!). here's the blurb

If it's hard to see where God is in current events, and hard to feel hope for the future, imagine what it was like to hear nothing from God for four centuries. Centuries full of empires and atrocities, with only the long-unfulfilled words from the past to feed faith.

And then something happened (so small that hardly anyone noticed at the time).

Join us for a quiet reflective service on how that long Advent sheds light for today. Café afterwards as usual - mulled wine and mince pies of course.

alice in wonderland eucharist - grace this saturday

the next grace will be led by tina hodgett and kathryn marson. they have crafted a rather delightful and playful liturgy fusing holy communion and alice In wonderland. it was created for the holy rumpus in the south west of england for a gathering of pioneers. intrigued? come along and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. it will be relaxed, gathered around the table followed by a cafe. everyone is welcome. and of course do feel free to dress accordingly if you would like to!

walk a labyrinth this saturday

i have always loved labyrinths since i was first introduced to them by kev and ana draper back in the nineties! this year should see a new one land at wolf fields as we (grace) are creating an outdoor one there for friends in southall. it should be ready by easter i imagine - you can see progress above.

but meantime as seems to be our wonderful habit there will be a labyrinth at grace this saturday - it's a pretty easy thing to remain socially distanced on as we are small in number. do join us. 

nine - grace this saturday

we've had a lot of fun at grace with nine over the years - respinning the traditional readings and carols with nine readings and tunes. it will be live in ealing at st mary's but it will also be online - hybrid and all that. if you want to join online let me know and i can send the link.

liturgies for the earth 3

in response to the challenge i issued of needing more liturgies for the earth,  grace saturday night was a really lovely thoughtful evening. as we met, world leaders finalised the statement from cop26. steve has added pretty much everything from the service to the grace site including prayers and links to photos of stations. i really love the photos of leaves with things written on that we lament as loss. feel free to use anything - lots of it was borrowed or recycled from elsewhere!

my improvised watermelon station - last minute sub for pumpkin worked well. 

the prayers and so on were really good. I think the one that has lingered with me the most is this liturgy against ecocide by sam donaldson from amost trust's download

I love you earth, you are beautiful
I love you earth, you are beautiful
I love you earth, you are beautiful

I love you rivers, you are beautiful
I love you rivers, you are beautiful
I love you rivers, you are beautiful

I love you trees, you are beautiful
I love you trees, you are beautiful
I love you trees, you are beautiful

I love you birds, you are beautiful
I love you birds, you are beautiful
I love you birds, you are beautiful

I love you body, you are beautiful
I love you body, you are beautiful
I love you body, you are beautiful

it feels so important to be lovers of the earth our home.

i am adding this to the worship trick series

embers and gracelet

the next grace is called embers and is on saturday 9 october - really liking the theme... here's the blurb:

A reflective service inspired by Jon Hopkins' track 'Sit around the fire'.

It feels like the past two years have left many things burned out and reduced to ashes, but among the ashes may be embers that can be nursed into flame again.

What for you feels like it has turned to ashes? Is there an ember at the core of you that you would like to fan into flame? What are the embers of Grace that we would like to fan into flame? What would you like to leave as ashes?

Join us at 8pm in real life at St Mary's Ealing.

Café afterwards, possibly with burnt offerings.

i think grace have been pretty creative online for the last eighteen months but it is good to be able to meet on site as it were. but we are wanting to carry our learning forward and have a mix of online and on site so gracelet will be a monthly online gathering. it's been lovely connecting with the grace diaspora and others - see flyer above for info

it will be solved by walking - next grace

next saturday's grace is a walk and talk - it starts at 2:30pm and will end up with a drink in richmond outside. do join us - there will be some reflections en route but having met online for so long it will be nice to see people in person. i assume there isn't a breakdown in relations between ealing and richmond - i.e. the flyer is meant to say meditation! anyway details on the grace website

grace low sat night

grace sat night

The Sunday after Easter is known as Low Sunday. Maybe it’s the lull after Easter? This is the season of the stories of resurrection, but Low Sunday is often associated with Thomas and his doubt. He is a reassuring disciple. We don’t meet on Sunday but we thought we’d go with the fLOW anyway.

So do come along to Grace this Saturday to reflect on stories of doubt and absence, and stories of hope and presence. We will be on Zoom - do get in touch if you would like the link.

grace space this saturday

a quiet reflective grace this saturday. it will be on zoom but no breakout groups or anything for those not so keen on that! get in touch if you want to join so we can send you the zoom link.

re:lentless

grace this saturday getting ready for lent. here's the blurb 

It feels like we have been in Lent for a year, and we haven't even got to Lent yet!

February is the depths of winter, but it is also a time when the first signs of spring begin to show - signs easily missed, hope that is still a long way from fulfilment. What have we learned from the journey? How have we been changed? Nothing will be the same, but how do we want to be different?

The service itself will be in Zoom. Look out for the link if you are in the Whatsapp group or on the email list, or email freshinfo@freshworship.org and we will send you the link nearer the time.

Things you will need for the service:

• Images or words that represent things you want to leave behind in this desert time.
• a candle
• some salt

The cafe will take place in the Grace space in Gather that we used for last month's service - now we have it, we can hang out there! Many of you will have the link already from last month, but we will send it out again at the time. (NB Gather works best in the Chrome browser. It doesn’t work on a phone - you need to be on a computer.)

gathertown labyrinth

gathertown is minecraft or habbohotel meets zoom (take your pick depending on your age). chances are you'll hear about it at some point. i like it - it's fun and whilst i think zoom is great a change is also good especially if you have been on zoom for work. and it especially suits some things - a more dynamic social space for example or an event where you want different things in different spaces. it's also dead easy to use or get started in. you simply login and choose a space - a lounge, bar, conference room or whatever and can then invite some people and hang out. it's easy enough to create some interactivity through the objects. i confess to finding the videos a bit exasperating in the tutorials - i'd rather just have a plain old manual than have to go through loads of videos - that makes me sound old i know! but over christmas i set up a space for family and we met and hung out in it with interactive pictionary and the like. i also worked out how to create a room that was a snakes and ladders board so you  can roll the dice and move your avatar round the board. the grandkids love it (and the rest of us to be fair).

because rooms are designed on a grid it made me think that the labyrinth we created for st pauls back in 2000 would work because that was designed on a square grid. anyway a day of messing around over christmas and i figured out how to create a labyrinth room with interactive stations. so grace on saturday was our first on gathertown. of course it takes a bit of getting used to but it went really well. we had a bar/lounge area and a portal through to the labyrinth so you could do that when you liked. the timing felt good because the online interactive labyrinth version that has been running for twenty years is no more as of this month i think due to flash no longer being supported so it was good to give it a new lease of life. the labyrinth tracks are still magical twenty years on. we invited people in their homes to have various objects that they needed to make it work for the reflections - stone, pen, paper - that sort of thing. 

it's free to create things so you can just try it out and remains free for up to 25 people. we just stayed below that number.

this of course has to go down as a worship trick - no 83 series 4!

prune back dream forward - first grace of 2021

we spent time over christmas connecting online as family using gathertown which was fun. particularly exciting for the granddaughters was a room i made of a snakes and ladders board where your avatar walked the steps on the board. it was good fun. zoom is great but it was a nice to have a change. 

it got me playing around and i ended up designing a space for the next grace which will be in gathertown rather than zoom. there will be a cafe space and an online labyrinth which you can visit when you like. if you have never used gathertown no problem - it's easy enough.  here is the blurb about it below. a link and more info will be sent nearer the time. please do email the address below if you are not a regular and want to come along as we need to get a rough idea of numbers ahead of time.

Join us for the first Grace of 2021. There will be an online labyrinth and a café space. Rather than Zoom we will be using Gathertown this month. We’ll send a link on the day so email [email protected] and we will send you the link.

There are two things you need to know or do:

a) Gathertown works best with Chrome browser so download that to your computer in advance - it’s free. It won’t work from a phone so you'll need to be at a computer. It may well work with Firefox too.

b) The web site is https://gather.town/ - do go and have a look and sign up with a user id so you are ready to go. It’s fairly straightforward but we will talk through how it works on the day.

For the labyrinth itself there will be a series of stations, several drawn from the labyrinth we have used before and some new ones. You will need to gather a few items in your home to use as follows:

• a stone and ideally a bucket of water but a stone on its own is fine too
• a pen and paper
• bread and wine
• a seed
• a candle (or a few candles)

no idea how this is going to work but risk is part of grace's ethos!

grace 9

several times at grace we have done our own take on nine lessons and carols - only it's unikely to be carols! nine people select a tune related to the traditional readings following the christmas story. come and join us from wherever you are in the world - sit back and relax. here's the blurb

The next Grace will be a Zoom gathering at 8pm on Saturday December 12.

9 lesson, 9 tunes - it’s a Christmas tradition! Even King’s College are going virtual this year.

There will be a cafe afterwards. We would have mulled wine and mince pies in normal circumstances - maybe get yourself some seasonal snacks and be the envy of your breakout group.

If you would like to join us please email fres[email protected] and we will email you an invitation link.