Last night I was back in a hotel for church for the first time since I moved south.  It made me surprisingly happy to be back in a place where the congregation had to set up and clear up week by week, where hotel dodgy coffee was as good as it got, and where a really tiny congregation meet together week by week (I know how much hotel room hire costs, and this was one very tiny congregation who somehow or other, in faith, pay for it).

The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is an opportunity to cross our denominational and theological boundaries and celebrate what we have in common... last night we may only have been 15 people (that made me sad) but we represented Baptist, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Quaker, Independent Evangelical, and Pentecostal expressions of Christianity (that made me very happy).

The tiny little church (apparently they regularly get around seven people... yes, seven, including the pastor and spouse) were so welcoming, inclusive and friendly, and at the same time so utterly true to their own understanding of following Jesus, that it made me proud to part of this strange thing called the 'Big C' Church.  

PS, it makes me chuckle that this hotel is called the 'Belvilla City Centre Railway Town' when it's right on the edge of a comparatively small town, so there are at least two inaccuracies in the name.