Getting Under London's Skin

London is one of the world’s most popular tourist cities – just try walking across Westminster bridge without bumping into someone striking a pose in the middle of pavement in order to appear in the ubiquitous “and here’s me near Big Ben” photo! But my first month in London has been very different, in fact I’m probably in position to open up my own tour agency offering the alternative side of London, the side you’ll never see in the brochures. I think I’ve probably clocked up an average of visiting one estate a day, taking in the sights, sounds and smells of London - North, South, East and West.

The differences between Urban Manchester and Urban London include both the obvious and the subtle. Urban London estates are more obvious on the landscape – tall, concrete, fortress-like, and often very compact, unlike Manchester’s endless low-rise sprawls. Another curiosity to me is the way that the estates often sit side by side with rows of pricey gentrified terraces. The most striking symbol of this wealth–poverty divide has to be the East End communities along the DLR where overcrowded council flats are overshadowed by the glittering towers of Canary Wharf.

As well as trying to get under the skin of community life in Urban London I’ve been trying to discern the temperature in the church – what is God saying and doing amongst His people in London at this time? Without doubt there is a real energy around the whole idea of ‘Missional Community’, as well as plenty of fuzziness about what it actually means! This really excites me because Eden clearly has massive relevance in such a conversation. I still remember the sticker in the back window of Mark Smethurst’s (first ever Eden Team Leader) car ‘On a Mission’. It was cheesy but true – although we understand it more profoundly now than we did then. We’ve realized that we don’t have a mission – the mission has us! Back in 1997 God invited us to join Him in His mission to bring the transforming power of His love to forsaken communities. And we’re still living out that mission today, we just never expected it would take us to the nation, and the nations….?