Is it church?

Well it's the morning after the night before. I was just reflecting and thinking through last night. I still feel really hopeful and excited about the project or do I dare call it Church! What is church? I question that I have been trying to answer for the last 10 years. I've come to the conclusion that church is (or at least should be) a God-centred community. Well there was definitely a sense of community last night, partly due to the venue which is such a warm and welcoming place, with Landlords that are so friendly (they are really behind bare soul and pushing it at any opportunity even though they are not church -goers) they are definitely people of piece - to use some good evangelic jargon. Anyway, community, the other great feature was that most people already knew someone there, whether through my gospel choir or a neighbour or a regular at the bar and people were talking to one another.

The God-centred bit is a bit harder to quantify I don't know everyone's motives for being there, one guy was just there by accident. Though all the songs we sung were 'secular' (not that I believe there is such a thing, only creativity that honours God or creativity that does not) as a band we were worshiping through them. People's poetry also reflected a god-wards focus even if it was not explicit.
Some may argue that to be church there needs to be some teaching or discipleship, which I would agree with. Last night there were some fantastic conversations going on around the theme of hope. A friend of mine had the idea of putting questions on beer mats. This went down brilliantly. I had long discussions with one guy about 'does there need to be an external spiritual force for us to have hope'.
The element that was possibly missing was prayer. I had planned to have a minutes silence for the victims of the Haiti earthquake where people could pray/think about/send out positive vibes to the victims. But I forgot! Oh well.
So I think I can safely say we now have a church. I'm thinking of setting up a facebook group so people can interact between months hopefully that will become a bit of a online creative community.

Just had our second evening we're calling it Bare Soul. The theme was Hope. A number of people took part. There were a number of Christians there but also a number of non-christians. The night went really well. Two of the non-church people took part, one wrote a poem that was awesome, the other sang a Guns and Roses song. It was such a cool night. The quote of the evening was from one guy called Peter who said " I came in a confirmed atheist and I'll go out a confirmed atheist but you really blew my pre-conceptions out of the water, you've really uplifted me. It was fantastic to hear such good music." We sang R.E.M, Westlife, Eric Clapton, BeeGee's and Rembrants. As well as poems and songs one lady brought some art and another a cake. Hopefully we made a real impact.