Dear saints,

One of my favorite elements of our years-long discernment process over the future God calls us to on this block has been all of the learning I've been able to do. Recently, I have been reading some wonderful case studies of churches who have inspiring, God-shaped visions for their own places in the world. 

I want to share one here from Norwich, England, a city which has more medieval churches than any other city in western Europe. One such church is St. Stephen's which twelve years ago relaunched a small church cafe into a community space with a payment policy based on grace. 

For years, the cafe had existed in a "tiny, warm corner in a very dark church" and served homemade cakes to mostly older people from the community and congregation. Following a renovation of the church building, the cafe was expanded with a vision to care for the community through food via a new cafe policy of "eat, drink and share, pay what is fair." The policy encouraged customers who could pay full price to pay more to support those who could not. The new cafe manager noted at the time that she "wanted to see what grace could look like in a cafe."

Some of the established cafe volunteers were worried that the new policy would bankrupt the cafe within weeks. If there was an invitation to free food, why would anyone pay at all? What they soon found was that those who could pay more for their meal more than covered the shortfall of those who could not. Soon enough new customers from all sorts of backgrounds were drawn to the cafe precisely because it had a culture that valued everyone. 

When people who lived without shelter started to frequent the cafe more, the church hired a community worker to help guide people to services they needed. Several became volunteers in the cafe, now able to give to others the gift of grace and hospitality they had once received themselves. 

St. Stephen's Cafe is a place whose aim is "to hold different people together." It is a community that chooses to put its faith in the power of grace, to live out an audacious claim for gospel values and then "see what God does."

What might God do in our midst on this city block? What audacious claim for the gospel will we choose to make for the people of this city?

I encourage you to read St. Stephen's story here / watch the video linked below then pray for our ongoing discernment for a God-shaped vision to become a reality on this block.