No Fixed Abode

Our house is a weird place to live… oh, where to start?!

Really I should talk about the living community that fluxes throughout this place but we’ll get to that. The house is part of a building we share with some year outer’s who essentially live next door, but there is a secret passage which means they flow in and out of our house more freely than the millions that visit each day. We get a good deal on the rent from the church and get to live in a nice part of southern manchester… woohoo. There’s a 24hr focussed on the war which we get told off about because it is invading sunday school space. That’s a good one: sunday school in my house every week. As i recover from the saturday night at work i usually get woken by the voices of little angels running and bouncing around with the occasional proclamation suggesting that one need not stay as they love their mummy too much and don’t want to leave her. This leaves me questioning where on earth am I, what on earth is going on?? A question I probably ask too much.

We have the boiler room office where I sit now and is usually a hub of activity until Anna loses concentration and tells us all off (Anna works as a journalist for the boiler and loves eddie izzard). Theres’s a scary basement that I suspect is the hiding place of many international terrorists and an unkept garden that offers a peaceful resting place for the passing ragamuffin. Then there’s the living room/kitchen, another hub of activity and communal space used for whatever… including the infamous egg and batter mix fight of March 4th.

All sorts filter in and out of the house; the boiler room folk and accessories (my word that covers a lot of people), the prayer girlies, the skate kids doing cell, the post-sunday service posse, the occasional pilgrims (we are a site of holy pilgrimage don’t you know), and of course the randoms. And some how this all works together and is growing into an organic community. A church based on relationships rather than buildings and doctrine. Due to the nature, openness and accessability of our home it has become a pad for the community, in part, to use and abuse. We love our house.