I have just finished being involved in the PORVOO consultation on mission, and have enough material going around in my head to last a life time. It was a great privilege to represent the Church of England in these discussions and experiences, and have come away challenged.

I think many of us in the emerging church feel some what misunderstood and excluded, but I have realised that we are just as snotty as everyone else. In the discussions, groups of us went off for site visits with fresh expression projects. My group were sent off to Margate to go and see a charismatic evangelical church using post-alpha to build community in Margate. I really didn’t want to go. I had bad associations with Margate and church weekends away, and to be frank, an arrogant attitude to Alpha of the superior type – very middle class. So stropey me was taken to the church with my Nordic friends, and I entered the church that felt very familiar in its layout and style. I didn’t want to be there – and I was being a stropey teenager.

What I met in Margate, was the most horrific dumping ground of asylum seekers, heroin addicts, homeless people, people with all sorts of mental health problems trying to make the best of it. It was one of those places where loads are people are dumped on the edge of society. A Community Care ghetto.

I encountered the stories of desperate people, where the church was the only moment of hope in their lives amongst the struggle and dreariness. Whether I liked it or not, this place was one of the most palpable places of God I have ever been in the sense of a group of people seeking to make God present with a whole community of excluded people. I heard their stories, and realise, that in the music, as if music itself was a sacrament of making God present, people found hope, inclusion, a place of expression and acceptance. Who was I to judge that this was not authentic!

I felt humbled and I have to confess shedding a few tears afterwards. They showed me the video of a baptism service, where a number of addicts came to the church with their families to be baptised. All the more remarkable, because often these families were split up for their safety in the community – dreadful stories of familes being broken up – so people came with their social workers, carers etc as a moment of these families being together. In the baptism service, they shared stories of how these desperate people found acceptance in God which will remain with me for a long time. It was a wonderful time of celebration of life and God, before the heart-rendering reality of being split up again at the end of the service and re-enter the harshness of life. For a moment there was the Kingdom of God, before returning to the world. I have a tear in my eye as I write this, as I have not ever experienced a Church like that in my life. That the church – two GPs, volunteers and a vicar were working so hard to be transformative in that community. So that charismatic worship and alpha courses in this context were liberational, and that my attitude was the problem, which I needed to face. It was deeply moving.

I am now reflecting on how arrogant and intolerant I can be as a so-called Anglican Minister, and how hard I am on things that have been important in my life time justified by intellectually arrogant justifications. I met God in a place I did not want to go, and have been humbled. I now want to hold onto this being more accepting and loving, as I have seen a bit of the love of God for people who do not have much in their life. So I for one will try to be more accepting, and seek God which I sometimes think we are far too in our heads in Moot. We could be accused of sanistising God as some form of hypothesis that we do or do not accept, as our lives are very rich. I have had a real dose of reality – outside my nice comfortable life – and I have been caught wanting. These people had nothing, other than a loving God. In many ways they were far richer than I will ever be. Please God, may I be someone that does not continue the harshness of a church that always seeks to divide who is in and who is out – even if it is called the emerging church. Help me to follow a God who seeks me not to be so...