This blog is the last of a three part series that reflect on a memory I was reminded of whilst at one of the Sacred Space sessions Jo and Jane lead. It’s best to read the first two in the series before continuing to read this one.

I remember standing there in my mum’s back garden looking up at the roof of the house where the solar panels would lay. The house itself felt dated and tired, it felt odd imagining the shiny new panels lined up on the aged tiles. The row of duplicate semi-detached houses could be seen diminishing with distance down the road. Yes, they all had their differences, replacement windows and doors, some even had conservatories, but none had modern solar panels perched up high. This was a tight neighbourhood; many locals had moved in when the houses were built post-war, how would this go down with them? It wasn’t just the new technology on show, but for the solar to work properly the builders would need to take down the chimney stack – this I really struggled with for some reason.

I felt the house would look odd without the chimney, surely it would be fine without this additional expense of removal. All the other houses had chimneys, that’s how houses were built to accommodate the coal fires. The chimney breasts would rise through the house and became a feature inside and out. The engineers had told mum that with the chimney remaining in place the new panels wouldn’t work, inefficient at best due to the shadow that would be cast. ‘Surely the light is all around!’ I scoffed.

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The structure we’ve inherited to heat our families has served us well. Our church leadership, of which Jo and I have been part for years, has been a strong feature both to those inside the church and to onlookers who view it from the outside. Many will look at our church home with the lack of prominent chimney and consider it odd. As we find a new way to do church it will feel strange and uncomfortable. Many of us will look elsewhere craving familiarity, but I hope we resist and embrace the new season adapting to its call. What I’m stirred most about by this picture is that array of solar panels catching the sun across the roof top, it’s a system that wears its faith on the outside. My vision for the Sunday Stroll was not just something to keep you guys fit but was for something that would attract others and help with their wellbeing too. My hope is that we can create a system that furthers the Kingdom of God with minimum effort, just by being here altogether in plain sight.

Burning coal to heat the home has worked for generations. Taking something so old that it is petrified and releasing the energy through combustion sounds good on the face of it, but we’ve experienced the fragility of relying on this too heavily. Matt is awesome at mining the scriptures and converting them for us into something useful. It has given us a precious foundation of understanding, a belief system (orthodoxy) that we can build upon. Having a solar powered system enables us to focus on putting that belief into practice too (orthopraxy). As a church, my hope is that we can find a new energy to practice what we preach, efficiently harvesting the sun’s rays, finding joy in bringing the Kingdom, freely and lightly: effortlessly. It is this we need to champion and resource. My mum now has a little box of electrical tricks on the wall in the back place: a solar inverter. It’s nothing special to look at, but what it cleverly does is consolidates and organises all those different sinewaves and energy that the panels produce and turns it into something useful and good. We need a church system that achieves the same.

Replacing an outmoded heating system with a healthy renewable energy source sounds wonderful to me now, but at the time I honestly couldn’t see it. It was the expense more than anything – ‘this is something rich families did!’, I thought to myself. For mum, it was because she wasn’t rich that she would need to take the risk and make the investment. Without solar power she would struggle to pay the future rising fuel bills – she would certainly have nothing left to live with. It was a brave move that required a great deal of faith: she really had to go ‘all in’, but it paid off for her in the long run. Today, mum’s fuel bills are covered by the sun. In fact she gets £450/year for what she puts back into the national grid. She of course spends this on the grandchildren!

I don’t know what going ‘all in’ means for you, I’ll leave that for you to find out. For Jo and I, as a minimum, it means committing to supporting this little church family for the foreseeable future. Join us in praying for each other as we learn to gently let go of old ways and discover new. Whether it’s our leadership system or method of meeting, let us dare to imagine and deliberate how things could be in future. Let’s encourage each other and pray for boldness to take the next steps along the path investing together