This evening a few of the members of the Magnification Action Group travelled over to the Maranatha Centre in Motherwell to hear from Neil MacLennan about Sanctuary First. It was not intentional in my timing, but what we talked about at this Practitioner's Seminar fit well with one of the themes I mentioned in the sermon on Sunday.

On Sunday I mentioned the need we have as a community church to stretch ourselves more and provide opportunities for community and worship beyond a Sunday morning at 11 a.m. It is something that has been happening over the years naturally, but I believe we need to be more intentional about it today.

The raison d'être of Sanctuary First is to provide a different opportunity for the web-connected generation to build an online community of disciples that meet together to worship once a month. If you have never heard of Twitter, Facebook or Web 2.0 this might not apply to you... but if you are reading this I guess you do! [There's more...]

The challenge for a church like ours at St Andrew's is to find the balance of different ministries in a mixed economy of ministries that best meets the needs of both current church members and others who may be faith seeking in our parish but for whom traditional church just doesn't hit the mark. Where in the past a one-size-fits-all approach worked, today it is a different story. We can bemoan this as it undoubtedly creates more work, and sucks up more creativity, but I suppose when you look at the bigger picture those of us in the reformed wing of the Church only have ourselves to blame for demanding more choice back at the Reformation and opening the barn door to options and personal choice!

The integration of the community-building aspects of Web 2.0 (utilising forums, facebook, etc) into worship is inevitable to some degree. Over the past couple of years facebook has in many ways supplanted, for our family, older mechanisms of communication like letters, phonecalls, and even email.

I liked the thoughts behind Sanctuary First, and I am sure that if we can get a group of folks together to plan and coordinate the local worship services it could be an exciting way to see a new worshipping community develop. It would be great to do this together with our local sister churches, as our previous joint Magnify services have been on sabbatical for the past year or so.

In the meantime, if you are interested, there will be a sampler service of the kind of worship experience that Sanctuary First can provide at Claremont Parish Church in East Kilbride on Sunday 29 August 2010 at 7 p.m.

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