Church in a Bar? Mallet’s mallet is a word association game where you mustn’t pause and mustn’t hesitate or you’ll get a smack on the head So went the famous opening lines of the most influential late 80s game on television. Okay, lets give this a go. Start off with the common noun ‘church’. How would the game proceed? Pews Sunday Pulpit Christianity Boring Irrelevant er... crap SMACK!!! (I’m quite sure Timmy wouldn’t have accepted ‘crap’ as appropriate for a Saturday morning) This is how church has come to be seen, and to be honest, it ain’t far from the truth. Churches are becoming irrelevant to twenty-first century Britain. Who in their right mind wants to give up their Sunday mornings to listen to some bloke ramble on for half an hour, telling everyone what to think, without providing any opportunity for argument or questions? Do people honestly enjoy singing three-hundred year old songs in a form of English that is barely understandable? Either that, or at the other end of the scale there are the cheesy, Cliff Richard-esque, sandal-wearing guys who stand at the front with a guitar, complete with rainbow strap. Dear oh dear. Thing is, it wasn’t always like this. Two thousand years ago, the church was just a bunch of people, bound together by a common experience of the God-man, Jesus Christ, who wanted to make sense of this experience. They wanted to! There were no preconceptions, no accepted norms, no engrained doctrines. They invited anyone who wanted to come and thrash out these issues of God, life the universe and everything to join them. There were no buildings, no pews, no stained glass, no hymn books. They met whenever and wherever they could. Oh, and did I mention they wanted to do this? Solace is a church of this type. It endeavours to get back to the core of what church is really all about. We want to invite people to come along and join us in tackling some of the really big issues, in trying to get our heads round them. Lets be fair, life isn’t that straight forward. None of us, if we’re being honest, have got it all figured out. The Bible claims that Jesus Christ - God incarnate - is alive today and that he wants to give us life to the max. Is this complete crap (there’s that word again)? What’s the evidence? Surely this is just the propaganda of a power-hungry, Medieval institution that wants control over our minds? These are all legitimate questions, but surely, even if there is only a sand-grain sized possibility that there may be truth in this claim, isn’t it worth considering? And I can think of nowhere better to chat about this stuff than at a bar over a few pints. Contact us for more info