Gingerbread family trees

I spent a good part of this morning making small gingerbread replicas of myself and my family. My skill with an icing tube is not so great that I would expect anyone to recognise my efforts. Though you may have been able to spot me by the small spikes of red icing for hair and, if you'd known I was wearing a green stripy jumper you might have had a head start.

There was a serious point to making the gingerbread people. They were illustrations of the people who have influenced us. We honoured them in sugar and then prayed for them. Here are the people I made:

Bricks and Mortar

I've had two meetings this week spent poring over a plan of a proposed new building. It's an odd feeling to be looking at a piece of paper with some random lines on it and to try and imagine what that will look like when it comes to being a solid 3D, lifesized structure. It's even stranger to think that your scribbles on a piece of paper might mean walls being moved around or lost completely.

The reason I've been in a position to think about new buildings is because my church happens to meet in a hall on a sunday morning. The hall belongs to Stockport Sunday School. SSS (as they shall henceforth be known) was once the largest sunday school in the world. The following is an extract about them from the website http://www.oldtowns.co.uk/Cheshire/stockport.htm

"One of the Sunday-schools ‘the Stockport Sunday-school,’ was not exclusively connected with any denomination. The Bible was used as the school book, and the children were taken alternately to church and to dissenting places of worship. This school, with four branches, had, in 1833, 5,244 scholars, about half of each sex. It was supported by subscription, and was under the management of a committee elected from among the subscribers of a guinea and upwards, and of visitors chosen from among the persons actively engaged in the school. There were two libraries, a teachers’ library of 850 volumes, and a scholars’ library of 1,700. There were connected with the school a religious tract society which circulated yearly 30,000 tracts, and a Bible association which distributed yearly about 400 copies of the Scriptures. There were no paid officers connected with the institution."

They're not quite in the same position now but the organisation still exists and still has a passion for mission in Stockport. They've asked my church http://www.c3stockport.net to partner with them, bringing some youth and enthusiasm, and some fresh ideas. They've just sold their building and have a plot of land on which to build a new one. In order to help them, we've been praying about the plans they've had drawn up and suggesting some ideas; a cafe area, a digital creativity space (otherwise known as a computer room!) etc. It's very exciting to be part of that kind of planning.

The only slightly worrying thing is that C3 is a dispersed community of people and groups across the whole town. Whereas, having a building anchors us firmly in a particular place. We will have to make sure that anchor doesn't drag us away from our town-wide mission.