This afternoon I’ve had a chance to connect up with the wider blogging community. The rest of the family are at work (daughter), at play (son) and at a Tupperware party (wife & daughter).
Darren Rowse, at Living Room in Melbourne, talks about the BYO worship night held this last week, on the theme of ‘home’. Living Room look as though they’re very similar to the approach we take at Pacific Parks.
“We are a small group of people seeking to live life to the full and to join Jesus in his life giving process in the inner north of Melbourne. We call ourselves Living Room because we want to be a life giving space where people connect with the teachings of Jesus in natural and culturally relevant ways.
We have no building or formal Sunday service but we’re working at growing in our relationship with Jesus, building community and living out our faith in practical ways in our local area.
We try to keep things pretty simple when it comes to life, faith and how we work as a group and we hope that this is reflected in this site which we hope gives you a quick glimpse of who we are and how we run.”
I like it. The idea of meeting in a natural environment where conversation flows. It’s the kind of environment in which Matthew would have hosted his party for Jesus. It’s the kind of environment in which Jesus met with Simon the Pharisee and had his feet ‘annointed’ by one of the local women.
When I was working at Robina Surfers Paradise Uniting I tried to introduce the living room feel into the Sunday night worship experience. We put a leather couch up the front each night, and had our interviews on that couch. A bit like the feel provided by chat shows on television.
I learnt from that setting however that people who go to churches generally expect an up-front ‘behind the lecturn’ experience. People go to cafes and living rooms for a ‘sitting on the couch informal conversation’ experience.
Just a couple of weeks ago I was talking to Yvonne McRostie, a Uniting Church minister in Ashgrove, Brisbane, whose new Christian community has taken the same name “Living Room”. Yep – she’s using the same name as the Melbourne group and working on the same concept. Isn’t it great when Baptist and Uniting networks can borrow from one another!
Darren Rowse, of the Living Room, is also a professional blogger. By that I mean he develops blogs and makes them pay for his time by contracting space to advertisers. The Living Room has a few of Darren’s blogs connected to it: Digital Photography Blog (updated daily), Athens Olympics Blog (finished September 2004), Printers Blog (last posts were December 28, 2004), Camera Phones (updated daily) and ProBlogger (daily tips for people engaging with professional blogging). Also in the family is the unofficial Australian Idol fan blog. Darren Wright, fellow youth worker, is the prolific writer on this site though I notice that he’s not promising any commentary on the X Factor this year.