We’ve been trying to get on the map for First Friday’s for over a year now.  Since we’ve been downtown Sarnia, we’ve been wanting to participate and help out with everything that is going on.  The First Friday art walkabouts are one of the bigger things that happen down here.  So every month, stores stay open late and display art, installations and music.  We are now on the map and will be participating with the even every month.  Needless to say, we are excited!  Below is the map for the June First Friday.  We are having Shari come down from Kingston to display her art for our first night!

theStory is starting to get involved in the First Friday cultural walkabouts.  It’s basically a night once a month that all the downtown storefronts stay open late and have art exhibits, concerts and other fun things to do.  For March we built something that we call a Values Experiment.  You can read the write-up on theStory website here and see the results here.  The basic idea is we hung questions out for people to answer that would cause them to think about money a little bit differently.  Typically our culture reduces almost everything down to money.  So what happens when we take it one step further and start putting dollar values on our values, religion and beliefs?  It makes things a bit awkward but it certainly gets you thinking.  There was a number of people who came through the installation and we got pretty good feedback all around.  People would write their answers on a sticky note and put them into the money bags.  The results were excellent and pretty funny, I’ll post them below.  Thanks to Ryan for the photos.

One of the things I’ve been wanting to do for a long time with our space here downtown is use it as a venue.  This past weekend was our first show that we hosted.  I got Kevin to open up and he did a swell job along side of Nic Swales.  Now the next two bands I had never heard of, but I must say I was blown away.  Both of them were amazing.  It was an honour to have them play for our first show here.  Troy has a bunch of pictures that he took from the night here, they are great!  Too bad he left early and only got the opening acts.  His loss.

The first was Miss Emily Brown.  All of her songs seemed to have come from real places in her life.  As she played through her set she explained where her songs came from and why she wrote them.  Of course for me this helps make the music for me.  She isn’t just singing about the night before but issues of culture and history.  Her music was soft and lovely and she had a wide range of instruments that she played.  Then she finished her set with her singing only accompanied by a music box.  It was a really powerful show.  Plus, she was just super nice and kind to be around.  Check out her stuff on My Space.

Next up was the O’darling.  This was a show that also was super impressive.  They had three ladies leading the pack and they sang together great.  What really brought them together was their band of musicians who knew how to accentuate the girls as opposed to drown them out.  One was on a trumpet, one on guitar, one on stand-up bass and the other on drums.  Their music was soothing, beautiful and always had me intrigued.  They even sang one song in French.  Props to these guys for having fun while they were playing too.  These guys are definitely worth checking out.

Bishop Keith Elford came to Sarnia this past Sunday to ordain Barb Peterson and also joined us for our Sunday morning gathering at theStory.  He wrote about us in his latest bishop notes which was kinda cool.  What is very different about planting a church with a denomination is that you are usually partaking on something very new and different than what the denomination has previously been doing for a long time.  So you have this nagging at the back of your head that you might not fit (which drives a lot of new church planters away from planting with a denomination at all).  We have never felt this with the Free Methodists, they have always been extremely encouraging and excited about new opportunities to try something different.  Here is his letter that gets sent out to all the pastors in the denomination.

Yesterday morning, Donna and I worshipped in the healthy community atmosphere of theStory, a Free Methodist church plant in downtown Sarnia, ON.  Now in its third year, this church plant led by Joe Manafo and Nathan Colquhoun, meets in a storefront location where it has high visibility in the arts and film section of the city.  They regularly open their doors to community groups and provide space for bands to practice and work space for local artists. During the week, there is a lot of drop-in traffic (and conversations with) not only curious people passing by but also with neighboring storeowners.   As they told stories about relationships that they have been developing, it was clear to me that this community of believers is being salt and light in their neighborhood.

Yesterday morning’s worship experience was beautiful in its creativity and simplicity.  While Pastor Joe spoke about the tables where Jesus sat and met all kinds of different people, a communion table made out of a door creatively drew us into the reality that the bread and wine is a doorway into intimacy with Christ. He reminded us with stories from the New Testament about how regularly Jesus went out and often met with undesirable people bringing the good news of grace and forgiveness to them.  You’ll see a picture of this table in the Photo Gallery along with pictures of the group as they eat together – something that happens weekly.

Next door, there was a healthy group of lively children meeting in an attractive space that has been developed for them on Sunday mornings, but is used, like the meeting area, in many other ways by the community during the week.  With deep appreciation, Pastor Joe talked about the ways that the New Horizons FMC just a few blocks away has been a source of encouragement and financial and practical help.  They are already beginning to dream about planting another church in another neighborhood in Sarnia.

We have a new website for theStory. This one is a lot more functional and user friendly. The website will now manage our library that we are trying to start that will host everyone’s books and not just books in a central spot. The site will also manage all the ATIC things we are trying. We also have started to incorporate forums for our lead team. I’m pretty excited about this one and hopefully will help us do what we are trying to do down here.

Nov 1 we signed the papers and got a new space for theStory. We got it right downtown where we wanted to be. It’s been completely renovated from floors to ceilings to fire code and we couldn’t be happier. It’s two storefronts side by side. You can see the picture below. We have a sign on order and should be up before Christmas and that will go on the big grey wall there.

The space on the left is where we hold our main Sunday gatherings. It’s 3200 square feet. Right now it’s full of freshly gathered thrift store couches and a small sound system for our gatherings. I also do all my office work out of the front of this space for Storyboard Solutions too. This way it guarentees that someone is always around and gives us a face with the building downtown. We have a lot of ideas for this space, they are currently being developed. The back area is going to be turned into a massive kitchen for our potlucks and parties. We’re hoping to set up a wall to block off the office space and make it a little more secure. Our hope for this side is to give it as much of a living room feel as possible. Making people feel like at home, so they can use it like their home is a big priority for us.

The left side is where the children meet on Sunday mornings. It’s 2200 square feet with a nice long strip of carpet down the middle. We are holding our first local concert here on December 14th so we are excited to get into that scene also. We are still debating what to do with this side. Part of us wants to make it the more commercial side of theStory where it would stay a profit venture so we could sublet/rent it out to bands, yoga instructors, artists, recording studios and whoever else to use at any times.

We pay $1375 a month for both space plus GST, tax and utilities which equals about $2000 a month. It’s a great space to have and will really serve us well in this community to connect with this side of Sarnia. Joe and I are already loving being able to be here during the day as people walk by and we get to just strike up conversations with people we never would have met if we weren’t here. So here is our space, and we are excited and feel blessed beyond anything to be here.