I started to write a post about the beginnings of Bridgepointe but I thought would rather begin by telling you where we are now. Maybe that will help you decide if you want to keep reading… and also the beginnings piece wasn’t flowing.
Anywhooo, Bridgepointe Church is a community of roughly forty people in downtown Edmonton. Since January we’ve been meeting in the basement of One Accord Bible Fellowship Baptist Church (that’s the real name) on Sunday mornings for our main gathering. Were you to join us on a Sunday morning you might be surprised by how little you would be surprised. We gather, we snack, we sing a couple of songs. We pray and read the Bible and I preach. We sing more songs. We drink more coffee and we go home. Bridgepointe has in no way shape or form reinvented the Sunday wheel, nor are we trying to.
Continuing with our old-schoolness there is a Mom’s group that meets Wednesday mornings. We periodically have a Men’s breakfast where we eat bacon and talk about the Oilers. We’re doing a marriage retreat in the fall and do marriage mentoring. We’re doing a family camp this summer. Pretty simple and standard stuff.
If you measure us by the numbers (which I don’t think are irrelevant) we’re pretty insignificant. We’re in many ways still a baby church that is striving to find a consistent way to give to the community around us. If you asked the dreaded “would the neighbourhood miss you if you were gone” question the honest answer would be probably not. While we’ve never stopped growing, we might add a family or couple or person every six months.Our resources are extremely limited. We’re still way to homogeneous for my liking. Our oldest person is 36. we’re mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly educated, mostly churched, we’re not cool in most of the ways I hoped we would be or in ways that get you invited to church planting conferences.
But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Almost no one was part of a church community in Edmonton before they came to Bridgepointe. If Bridgepointe didn’t exist, most of them wouldn’t go anywhere else. We have only lost one family since we started. This summer we put roofs on each others houses. (not me, I’m afraid of heights) Everyone has been to my house and I’ve been to theirs. We babysit each others kids. We shovel each others snow. We pray for the sick. We rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. Despite our immaturity and our lack of organization and our inconsistency, we have a real community founded on the idea that we have received good news and that we have good news to share with the world. I’ve been around churches long enough to know that that is not automatic and it’s not easy.
So, church planters, impressed yet? You shouldn’t be.
or maybe I should be…
I love you Dan.