Jon Hallewell

After a four year journey of prayer, processing by immigration, we have finally received permission to move to Canada. We move to Quispamsis (nr Saint John) in New Brunswick 2 weeks today. I will be coming out of paid pastoral ministry and seeing what happens through graphic and web design. We hope to be beginning to explore missional life with more intention as we will not be putting our energies into running a church. We will be blogging about it here and also at Hallewells in Canada. We’re not sure what our prospect are, we’re not taking a lot of money, but we know that God has called us to go. For those in Canada, we hope for a little more connection with you.

It seems a little strange to be involved in the birth of a church plant when I expected our family would have left the UK months ago - but this is something I am excited to have been involved in.

The (very attractional) church I work for, along with other churches in our town helped set up an addiction recovery center at the turn of the new millennium. It is not an explicitly christian project, but it is predominantly run by Christians. It is open to people of all faiths and non. They see about 80% of their clients set free from their addictions to drugs, alcohol, sex, love, food etc. I have spent quite a lot of time in group as part of my support of the project, and often thought I would love church to be a lot more about the kind of thing I see happening in the center, than what I’m involved with most weeks.

Two weeks ago we had our first ‘church’ gathering as part of the center. It was not at all like church on a sunday. The gathering was made up of clients, friends and family, trustees and staff. It was an evening of people sharing openly about what God was doing in their lives. It was a celebration of recovery. We sang a few songs that reflected the spiritual journeys that we are all on.

Instead of reading through the twelve steps text in group, we read the bible: we paraphrased the Message (a double paraphrase) reading bit of Romans 6 and 7 in ‘addict language’. People interjected, asked questions, were answered, gave examples - it was a fantastic teaching moment. People gave thanks for elements of their recovery and these were offered up a a collective thanksgiving prayer. Together we silently offered up the things we are sorry for and the areas of our lives we need God to help with.

Because the center is an ongoing community - the discussions carried on into the week, and with the others involved inthe community. There has always been a large proportion of recovering addicts who become part of our church community - I hope that this dynamic will change as their own church grows - whilst still keeping strong relational links.

I can’t see that which my theology tells me I should be able to see. I believe that as someone who is on the lookout, I should be able to see signs of the Kingdom all around me, all of the time. Yet most of the time I feel blind. I usually discover I’ve been onto a God thing after the fact, only rarely seeing something clearly as I walk forward, or at least what I hope is forward. Yet, I know that this journey was something I could not refuse, even though I am as though blind. I’m grateful for this meeting place that has the potential for those of us feeling our way through missional to share the journey.