End of week one

I've finished my first week of CPx. (The church planting experience) Today, Monday, is my day off so I thought this would be a good time for a brief update. We had class from Tuesday to Saturday with each session starting at 8:00 am. That's been a bit tricky to get used to. Usually we finish at 4 or 4:30 in the afternoon.

The class hasn't exactly looked like what I expected, although I didn't really know what to expect in the first place. We meet in a small house in a residential district of Grandview, which could be considered either a suburb of Kansas City or a neighbouring town. I normally get a lift to class in the morning from one of the others on the course, although I'm hoping to get a bike soon. One odd aspect of Kansas City is that a lot of the roads don't have pavements to walk on beside them. (sidewalks to you N. Americans) Even in residential neighbourhoods, I need to walk on the road or on the grass. It's a strange omission.

Each morning we start with an hour of prayer and worship. So far this has been a very quiet routine which I've found difficult to engage in. I think the point is to strip everything back to the absolute basics of what we might encounter when planting a church. Combined with the early start, I tend to find it hard to stay awake.

As for accommodation, I'm staying with an elderly couple who feed me and look after me. They have their own eccentricities but they are good to me. They have matching rocking chairs and a clock that sounds every half hour. On the hour it chimes the appropriate number of times and on the half hour it chimes once. (I noted this could lead to ambiguity around 1 o'clock.) Although this clock is in the living room, it has woken me up a few times in my room.

We've had a fairly interactive teaching curriculum so far. On the first day (Tuesday) we learned about prayer walking and then went out in pairs to walk through the neighbourhood and pray. The next day we learned more about contacting new people in the street. We went out again in pairs, this time to talk to people in the area and start to make connections. On Thursday and Friday we had testimonies. We each had to prepare a 20 minute talk about our testimony.

On Saturday we had a seminar on "What is church?" We looked at the different ways the word "church" is used in modern day English compared to what it actually meant in scripture. We looked at the Western model of church and noted some of the things that aren't actually essential but are still part of our image of church. When planting a church, you tend to reproduce what you are familiar with and care must be taken to avoid placing a Western worldview on a new church in a different culture.

On Sunday we had a small house church meeting before going out for lunch. It was fairly simple and community-based but it was still church nonetheless!