new church: mark two

I love my church. We're called 'the journey', we meet in a freezing cold Methodist hall in Englefield Green. Not even the church bit, but the sort of youth room on the back of it. The building's so old and dank looking that I actually thought it was abandoned the first time I went there. It certainly doesn't look used anyway.

We go in the side door, and turn right to get in the back room. It's cold. Very cold. There's several heaters dotted around the place, including a huge luminous red one that gives everyone a kind of creepy, uplit glow. Pretty hellish looking actually. We start off each meeting, each 'gathering', with hot drinks and doughnuts: the drinks to keep our fingers warm; the doughnuts just for fun.

There's no chairs, or at least, we don't use any. We sit on the floor, nursing mugs of tea, trying not to look directly into the leering red of the heater. Instead, I like to look at the hangings on the walls, old bedsheets draped over a table-football game and stuck by string to the pipes. "Impact on the 'Green" "we were made to love and be loved" "because he loved us first".

My favourite is engraved in the wall itself. There's a big pointed arch of grey stone in the red bricks, and along it is written "suffer, little children, to come unto me". I like it because it scared me shiteless the first time I read it, and I only realised the truth of it when I stopped to read it again.

There's an acoustic guitar, because there always is in my kind of church, a mic and a couple of speakers, another sheet draped over a stack of chairs to shine the OHP onto. No multimedia worship software here, no six piece band, no airy string pads on the keyboard, no plastic walls around a £500 drumkit, just guitars and acetates, a little bit of soul.

I find that I'm part of this church quite accidentally. I don't like to think that I found them, or that they found me, because what actually happened is that, like most great relationships, this was one that started entirely by coincidence, half tight and in the pub. What surprises me is not that I threw myself into this new adventure, but how readily they've received me.

Showing up at a church where half the people mysteriously know your story, and half of them have apparently been praying for you since September is an odd experience on the best of days. It's also the best experience for the oddest of days, and it worked for me. Some girl that was found at the pub asking to join in, to be a part, to have responsibility, to serve, even though she's so unreliable that it's vaguely distressing - it's kind of odd. But it's worked.

And I've said it now, that I'll be a helper at Alpha, that I'll help with the tea and doughnuts. I'll help with the chairs and the acetates, I'll try and learn everyone's names, I'll do what I've wanted to do this whole time, but I was too drunk and frightened to do before. I'll enter in, I'll do church with these guys, because they're exactly what I need a church to be right now. Honest and relaxed, passionate and genuine, quirky and small. Yeah. This is something I want to be a part of; they work for me and I want to work for them.

I ask Alan if I'm still invited to his cell group on Tuesday. My attendance, (with the exception of the Thursday night prayer walks, which I have attended, as it were, religiously) hasn't been great since I met this church. I've never actually been to the cell group that Alan and Katherine run, and it seems only polite to check that I'm still wanted.

"Our cell group?" Alan replies, "It's your cell group."

You take a risk sometimes, you do something that scares you - suddenly your picture's on the newsletter and people are even pleased to see you. It's as simple as that.

Why didn't I realise it's as simple as that?