Unite #5!

Hey hey hey. So our fifth Unite meeting is approaching fast and it looks like it's going to be a good one. This month, we have Libby Woodward with us who is a gifted speaker and all round nice person. She will be talking on the cost of discipleship and the price that Jesus paid for us. She will also be having a go round our 2nd Gear Track to see if she can work her way up to the top of our guest speaker leader board.

And if none of that was enough, we also have food, Dave Matthews leading worship and there'll be some interesting activities involving some chocolate eggs. You do not want to miss it.

New Office!

Hurrah and hooray! We moved to our new office last week and we are settling in nicely. We are now situated in the Cathedral Offices just opposite Chelmsford Cathedral. This means that we get to work amongst some lovely people, are right in the middle of the town (which gives me easy access to a McDonald's which would be brilliant were it not interfering with my new healthy "live longer" lifestyle) and we have a carpark that allows us to park cars (this may seem like a stupid thing to be impressed by unless you ever tried parking a car in our old office car park). So we are all happy (as you can see from the joy on our faces).

I will leave you with a clip of us posing for a photo that turned out to be a video. We all feel fairly stupid.

Glyn

Stones, Fast Cars and Stories about Gum.

So last Friday saw our 4th Unite meeting take place at Girls County High. It was great to see everyone there and was good being able to share, eat, laugh and cry together (perhaps not so much of the crying).

This month, we were joined by Phil Harverson and Ruth Leverett from Oasis church who spoke to us about seeing God in the ordinary, day by day routine of life and how we should stop more and find joy in what's happening today rather than rushing forward to the next thing. They spoke brilliantly and loads of people responded by taking a stone away to remind us to see God in the ordinary.

We were also incredibly blessed (as always) to have Pete and Nicki from Outcry back to lead worship with us.

Other highlights:

Discovering that leaving chewing gum under a church seat is worse than leaving it in someone's hair.

Giving announcements for the first time in Unite history and feeling like a proper little church.

The launch of the Guest Speaker 2nd Gear Challenge: We have decided to pit our guest speakers against each other in a battle of speed and cunning by giving them a remote controlled car and getting them to go round our track. We watched Matt White first who spoke to us last summer and was videoed going round our track last week:

We then had the pleasure (nay the privilege) of watching Phil's shocking display live as he smashed his way round the course:

I think he should have had a number of time penalties added on for missing certain aspects of the track completely but we figured that he'd humiliated himself enough.

So that leaves Matt White at the top of our leader board with 1 minute and 39.03 seconds and Phil Harverson with little chance of beating anyone at 2 minutes 11.41 seconds.

We'll see how well the rest of our guest speakers do in the future.

Glyn

Welcome!

Hello Ladies and Gentlemen. Welcome to the brand-spanking new emerge blog. This site aims to provide an online forum for Christian Unions and emerge groups within Essex to come together and share what they're doing, to comment on certain issues and to encourage one another. We don't really know right now what this blog will consist of but we do know that we want all of you to be involved. So please leave comments below for two main reasons:

a) To share any ideas on how we can best use this site to serve you and

b) Just to let us know that you're there and that this blog is worth doing at all.

Alternatively you can send me an email at glynjh@symchelmsford.org and let me know what you think.

God bless

Glyn