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Live For Others speaks to Hélène Garagnon, the managing director of Alpha France…

Bless: Introduce yourself…

Hélène: I’m 50 years old and have been married to Benoit for 22 years, we have 4 children and we’ve lived in Normandy for 18 years. We’re part of ‘Chemin Neuf’, a community of catholic congregations, with a heart for working ecumenically. With the support of this community and the churches involved, Benoit and I have been able to launch the Alpha course in Normandy. Benoit was regional co-ordinator and a member of the Alpha board and when he told me they were looking for a managing director, I felt called to apply. Having been managing director for a couple of large organisations, I wanted to invest my talents into serving a worthwhile mission. That’s how I arrived at Alpha in 2009. It’s such a pleasure to do God’s work alongside such a fantastic team.

Bless: What are you up to at the moment?

Hélène: I’m currently running Alpha in France, which has two primary missions: to proclaim the Good News through a 10 week course which is open to anyone and to transform society through courses for couples and parents. We work to promote these courses, as well as to train up the church teams to be able to run them.

Bless: What might a time2bless placement look like with Alpha Paris?

Hélène: A student who came to work for Alpha Paris would participate fully in the life of the organisation through meetings, eating together (every lunchtime) and prayer times. They would help out with training (we have already trained up 3,000 people in 20 different locations in France), events like Worship Central and presenting the courses to the churches.

Bless: What are your dreams for the next 12 months (or so)?

Hélène: My dreams are to see young disciples emerging who will inspire and train up other young people to enable 14-25 year olds to meet with Christ and to build lively and growing churches.

Bless: What can we pray for?

Hélène: We’d be grateful if you could pray for the development of our Youth Alpha course and our youth festivals in Hautecombe this August, as well as for the training weekend in Lisieux on the 10th and 11th of November this year.

If you’d like to read the original FRENCH transcript of this interveiw please email vikki@blessnet.eu

Blessmail Interviews Alpha Course Paris France

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Bless: Introduce yourself…

Ella: My name is Ella. I’m 19, I come from Bristol and I like elephants and Ella Fitzgerald.

Bless: What are you up to at the moment?

Ella: I am spending a week in Bethanie, where I am training to go to Freiburg, Germany. Each day I get to join in with the morning prayer meeting and then I usually do some Bible study. I have also had a chance to look around the nearby city, Caen and drink chocolat chaud (with marshmallows!)

Bless: Why are you moving to Germany?

Ella: I am going to work with a church there for three months. I am hoping to get
closer to God through my experience and also to bless the church in Freiburg.

Bless: How does Bless fit into your story?

Ella: I found out about Bless through someone at my church and I was very excited to find that Bless did placements in Germany. I did German for A level and so I had been looking to do some sort of short term mission work in Germany. The placement in Freiburg seemed like an answer to prayer.

Bless: What are your dreams for the next 12 months (or so)?

Ella: I would love to be changed by my experience in Germany and to learn to trust completely in God. I would also like to improve my German and get to know the community in the church and in Freiburg.

Bless: What can we pray for?

Ella: I’d really appreciate prayer that I’d settle in quickly and that I’d be brave enough to try and speak German, as often as possible, even if it means embarrassing myself! I’d also like prayer that I would be able to use my gifts to serve the church and that through my time there I would learn more about God and get to know Him better

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Bless: Introduce yourself…
Jon: I’m Jon, I’m 22, I’m engaged and I like to draw.

Bless: What are you up to at the moment?
Jon: I have just moved to Bethanie till the summer as a Bless intern. I like to draw and paint and bless are giving me the space to develop those gifts which is great. I’m also wanting to fit into the rhythm of life here with the Bless team, working on the land and joining the community in their daily rhythm of prayer and shared meals.

Bless: Why have you moved to France?
Jon: I’ve moved to France because it’s great and I felt like I needed to get away and have some space from the somewhat noisy and chaotic life I was living in England and to try and get some perspective and vision for what is next. I also have been to bethanie a few times for go2bless mission training and loved the place and the people.

Bless: How does Bless fit into your story?
Jon: Like a glove.

Bless: What are your dreams for the next 12 months (or so)?
Jon: To create a lot. To learn French. To get married and to travel and perhaps go to art college.

Bless: What can we pray for?
Jon: Pray that my time at Bethanie would be inspired, fruitful and freeing. Pray that I’d get some kind of understanding about what the next step is after these few months.

check out Jon’s drawings at jonwhitedraws.com

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TIM & VIKKI: We live and work at Bethanie, and have recently become parents to the lovely Ethan. We’ve been here since last September and before that we spent 6 months in Brazil working with in a favela near Rio de Janeiro. Up until then, Tim had worked as a youth leader in a church in Loughton, Essex and Vikki was a French and RE teacher.

BLESS: What are you up to at the moment?

TIM & VIKKI: We are loving settling into life at Bethanie, as we’ve just joined the Bless team out in France. Tim tries to fix some of the broken things around the place and Vikki is trying to get the team speaking more French. We are also both working hard at getting our son to giggle.

BLESS: Why have you moved to Bethanie, France?

TIM & VIKKI: We moved to France because we visited Bethanie and immediately felt a connection to the place, the people and what Bless is doing with young people around Europe.

BLESS: How does Bless fit into your story?

BLESS: What are your dreams for the next 12 months (or so)?

TIM & VIKKI: We’d love to get to know people in our little rural community out in France and get involved with local stuff. We’re really keen to get fully stuck in at Bethanie - developing the buildings, learning to cook more recipes slow-style, speaking more French among ourselves and filling up our programmes with a whole bunch of diverse young people. Vikki dreams of delving deeper in her relationship with God and being the best mum she can be. Tim is dreaming of pursuing God and being awesome.

BLESS: What can we pray for? 

TIM & VIKKI:

Pray for us to develop better relationships, rhythm and rule at Bethanie.

Pray for Ethan to continue to be healthy and lovely.

Blessmail Interviews

Six Words that are Defining the 21st Century Church

The Museum on Modern Art in New York - Moma - recently ran a campaign to persuade visitors to become members. Called ‘Belong’, the campaign suggested the kind of movement or organisation art-lovers might want to be part of: using words like ‘breathtaking’, ‘poignant’, ‘engaging’, ‘nourishing’ and ‘unruly’. You can see images from the campaign here.

So what words might we use to encourage the young adults of our century to join the movement known as Christianity? What kind of church might the new generation want to be part of? Here are six words that are emerging for us as the parameters of any such belonging:

Sustainable

Time was we thought of sustainability as an environmental issue. It is now emerging as something much more than this. So central is the environmental crisis to the current generation that ‘sustainability’ has become a core paradigm of life itself. Expect to be asked for sustainable models of church and mission; of lifestyle and faith. Expect to be questioned on the the sustainability of your spiritual practices. What does a sustainable Christian commitment look like?

Social

Relationships matter in our age. Connection define us, and friendship is more valuable to us than fragmentation. We connect not on the basis of shared beliefs but of common humanity. Expect to be asked to respect the friendships of believers with non-believers. Expect to be judged where you refuse to engage with fellow human beings. Expect to see ‘evangelism’ re-defined not as a public event but as a socially networked, relational process.

Choral

A choir needs two assets to sound truly great. The first is harmony. Discordant voices stand out a mile. But the second is diversity: the very difference that makes harmony miraculous. 200 people singing the same part is not a choir, it’s just volume. 200 people with different voices singing the same song is beautiful. Homogeneity is bad for choirs, and is bad for churches. Expect to be asked to respect diversity in your community of faith; honouring a range of views; recognising that God sometimes shouts and sometimes whispers and that different ones of us relate differently to him. Expect to engage in a Gospel that brings unity not through uniformity but through the joyful celebration of difference.

Conversational

Truth, in the Christian version of the world, is revealed. But it is also mediated, and its mediation comes through human agency. It is to people and through people that God reveals himself, in creation as in salvation. Humans bear collectively the image of God, and individually some fragment of it. Thus every human story matters, and human interaction, guided by the creator’s Spirit, moves us towards truth. Expect to find truth hiding in the threads of a thousand stories. Expect to be asked to listen as much as speak, and to find in every story some fragment pointing towards God. Expect collaboration and conversation to play a greater part than you thought possible in your own journey into truth. Expect to discover that the fragmentation and distribution of experience across the human family is the friend, not the enemy, of revealed truth.

Aesthetic

A generation brought up with endless screens and beautifully-designed products and knowing more than any generation before them what a font is, has a sensibility to the aesthetic that is changing their perception of faith. We have been used to speaking of God as true or holy; powerful and loving. But we have had less to say about God’s beauty. And yet our own creation narrative tells us that beauty is one of the primary dimensions in which God’s being is expressed. Expect to have ugly projects that move in ugly ways towards an ugly God rejected. Expect to be asked to respect and give time to the need for fine design. Expect to be asked to express your faith as deeply in image as in word, and to recover the richness of architectural and artful expression that the Christian faith once revelled in.

Entrepreneurial

Young adults schooled in the innovative ways of the post-industrial revolution are drawn to those who take action. Do something. Make something. Start something that matters. Our heroes in a diversity of fields are linked by a single-term: start-up. They are the innovators and the change makers; those motivated to make a dent in the universe. Expect to see direct action valued over pontification. Expect long and drawn-out processes to be questioned. Expect to see a desire in the young of your congregation to do; make; start. Expect to be ask to be a permission-giver, allowing those you lead to try and, where necessary, to fail gloriously. Expect to see, in the coming years, some of your most-loved and seemingly unchangeable institutions implode, while new institutions and movements grow up around you at lightning speed.

What, then, does a sustainable, social, choral, conversational, aesthetic, entrepreneurial church look like - and is it one that you might want to join?

[written by Gerard Kelly]

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Bless: Introduce yourself…

We are Iris and Justin. Last October we moved from Amsterdam to Rotterdam; Holland’s second largest city and known for the huge seaport. Iris works as a teacher, training young people in the area of physiology and anatomy. Justin works as a logistics coordinator for a fruit and vegetables trading company. We both really enjoy our work, we like to hang out, to organize, we do sports, Iris plays guitar and Justin loves to make bonfires. 

Bless: How does Bless fit into your story?

Iris was the first to get involved first with Bless. She was part of a mission trip to Croatia. After that experience Justin was introduced to the Bless family. We led a short term mission trip to Bosnia in 2010 and have helped on PRAYERhouse teams during Spring Harvest and attended lots of Heart to Bless prayer weekends.

Bless is important to us because it feels like family and we feel really connected in the beliefs we share. We love the fact that Bless doesn’t want to be exclusive, instead their drive is to include as many people as possible by offering them space to learn more about themselves and God in a missional context.

Bless: What are you up to at the moment?

At the moment we are running our first Bless event in Holland. We have been given the opportunity to run a few prayer stations at a Navigators (Dutch student) festival called Focus. Check out focusweekend.nl for more info.

Bless: What are your dreams for the next 12 months (or so)?

Our dream is that we find opportunities in Holland where Bless can fit in. We are dreaming of finding churches to connect with the Bless ethos of creative prayer and training young leaders through mission. We also hope to connect to those people in Holland who are searching for what Bless has to offer.

Bless: What can we pray for?

Pray for us as we lead people in prayer at the Focus conference.

Pray for loads of energy and time; as a lot of our work for Bless we do in our own time.

Pray for connections with people, organisations and churches in Rotterdam.

Blessings to all of you who support Bless and believe what God is doing through Bless! 

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Bless: Introduce yourself…

Gem: I’m Gemma. I’m just 23 and originally from Surrey. I recently graduated as a Human Geographer from Exeter University, but studied in Falmouth, Cornwall. This generally confuses people, I still don’t know why. Aside from sporadic bouts of colouring-in and the odd lecture my days were largely spent either on the beach, at Cornish cider festivals or serving coffee to locals. There’s so much to love about Falmouth but the one thing I really miss is its coastline. Whatever the time and whatever the weather, the sea offers a perspective on life that I think should be experienced daily.    

Bless: What are you up to at the moment?

Gem: After a hectic 8 months of dissertation, essays and exams I spent the summer with my family, reconnecting with old friends and my home church. It was really good to take some time out and re-learn what normal life is all about! In September I moved to Stourbridge, a large town just south of Birmingham, and started work for Bless in their UK office. The wonderful Knight family have let me make their house my home and i’m slowly settling in to life in the Black Country. I’ve been attending Chawn Hill church where i’ve met some great people and I seem to spend most weekends up on Clent Hills either running, walking the dogs, dancing with sparklers or drinking mulled wine. Life is good!

Bless: Why have you moved to Stourbridge?

Gem: Bless is an organisation that places huge emphasis on community and relationship, infact, I think it would cease to exist without them. The team I work alongside are so active and creative that to not be working, and in many ways living, alongside eachother (even within the chaos) would defeat the values that lie at the heart of Bless! Although my official role is in administration, I have found myself doing any number of things, with many experiences and opportunities given to me to learn and grow. In the four months that I have worked for Bless I have seen and experienced a different way of living. Priorities and values held by society are turned on their head and whilst the learning curve is steep and initially frustrating I have been totally drawn to the Bless way of doing…’life’. 

Bless: How does Bless fit into your story?

Gem: In 2008 I spent 3 months in Brazil and Peru on a short-term mission trip with Latin Link. My time there really anchored my faith and established solid foundations based upon active and overseas evangelism. Since then, whether volunteering for Bless in Europe, providing Tea and Toast outside clubs at 2am, prayer walking around Stourbridge or serving Shepherds Pie to the homeless I have found that I connect with and experience God when I’m actively serving Him. I just flipping love it! Nothing gets me more passionate and excited. Working for Bless has allowed me to not only do these things myself but to facilitate others as they learn, through Bless, to serve and connect with God in a way that I don’t feel is readily available and accessible within many churches today. After reading The Irresistable Revolution and Jesus for President, both by a guy called Shane Claiborne, I have wanted to experience a different way of life that experiences community, relationship, mission and prayer as an everyday necessity. Bless and its ‘community base’ in the form of Bethanie is a tangible connection and for me, it just makes sense. Sure, it isn’t perfect and i’m still settling in but whether I continue working with Bless for many years or move on to new things, it has given me a solid base and a platfom to dream big and see God in every single aspect of life.

Bless: What are your dreams for the next 12 months (or so)?

Gem: I have a feeling that the next 12 months are going to be exciting. I think there’ll be all sorts happening and never a dull moment to be had! One big dream I have is that an ‘expression of Bless’ will be established in the UK. Similar to Bethanie, I’d absolutely love to be in a position to live sustainably in community and to serve the local area both practically and spiritually, wherever that may be. 

I’m also super excited for our summer mission trips and i’m really praying that the amazing ideas and plans we have for our other porgrammes become fully established and that they are fruitful. 

Personally, i’d like to be in a position where I can support myself financially whilst working for Bless, whatever that may entail. And I just want a bigger heart and bigger vision for what God has got planned.

Bless: What can we pray for?

Me: A slight barrier that i’m facing at the moment is with transport. Without a car i’m finding that the process of getting stuff done can be quite slow and there’s some things that I just can’t do without mechanical wheels! I volunteer for Bless and have quite limited financial resources so I’m really asking for a bit of a miracle if this is to be sorted out. 

Them: Pray also that we connect with more students and young people and that they have the opportunities and resources to join us on one of our many programmes and that they have a deep and impactful experience of God.

Us: It would be great if people could pray for the development of Bless and Bethanie as I believe 2012 is going to be quite a crucial year. Inparticular, part of my job is to fundraise £300,000 by this time next year so that we can own Bethanie and secure it as a place of missional training. This undertaking seems huge and really quite daunting so any prayer would be much appreciated!

Blessmail Interviews