Cable Street Community Church developed from a team of 8 people who formed the first Urban Expression church planting team in 1997. 

Urban Expression is an urban mission agency that recruits, equips, deploys and networks self-financing teams pioneering creative and relevant expressions of the Christian church in under-churched areas of the inner city.  The team looked for under-churched areas of East London and identified Shadwell in Tower Hamlets as such a place.

The team all committed themselves to move into the neighbourhood and to find creative ways of financing themselves.  Some worked in their chosen careers and used their spare time to get to know their community and others were supported either by friends from other churches or by others in the team.

To begin with the team chose to take time to listen to the community and understand it.  They didn’t want to be guilty of imposing an irrelevant form of church.  It was difficult sometimes trying to persuade interested parties that sitting in a café or joining a football team was a worthwhile part of ‘church planting’, but the team found it invaluable to their future church development.

It was exciting to have people from all different Christian backgrounds on the team and this diversity helped as the team discerned appropriate ways of worshipping God.  For some years musicians were an obvious gap in the team make-up but this encouraged the team to find other ways of worshipping God than through music and singing alone.

The team began by meeting mid-week for prayer and planning and on Sunday evenings for worship and Bible study.  As people began to enquire about faith and became followers of Jesus they joined in on Sundays mostly.  All gatherings seemed to have a common theme – food!  Someone observing the church said if there was no eating there was no meeting!  Eating together formed a great basis for relationship building and is still an important aspect of church life.

When numbers grew on a Sunday there were two ‘home’ churches meeting.  But numbers fluctuated and this wasn’t always the case.  The team observed that some people found meeting in a home a bit too daunting and so they tried several different places to meet for church mid-week too.  Some people only came mid-week, others came mostly Sundays to the home gatherings.  An unexpectedly deep relationship grew with the local Anglo-Catholic church in Cable Street and they generously allowed Cable Street Community Church to meet in the church hall mid-week.  This was a useful place as it was directly under the local Community Drugs Team venue and seeing as many of the people we were meeting had drug-related problems they all knew where to find us!

The relationship with St Mary’s has developed over the years and several services have been creatively shared together – Holy Week and Carol services in particular.  The Geoff Ashcroft Community, a project initiated by another Urban Expression team nearby to support those with mental health difficulties is now based there too.

The small church community has had quite an influence on the immediate locality.  When the team arrived there was a derelcit adventure playground.  The team felt that it would be such a sign of God’s Kingdom if this playground was to be restored, but nothing was to happen for a few years.  Some time later the opportunity came up to help develop a local steering group made up of parents and community members.  A couple of the church members were happy to take on some of the administration and responsibility for the group (tasks which seemed daunting to many local people), and eventually the group obtained funding for some play-workers.  The task of the first workers was simply to get the playground up and running again by clearing up and building new structures.  In recent years, with the help of further funding, the Glamis Adventure Playground has evolved into a thriving, creative and safe place for inner city children with no gardens to play.  In June 2007 the playground won an award for being the best adventure playground in London!

Another community event which Cable Street Community Church  initiated is the Church Holiday.  It began as an idea to take local people away for a week-end  - to enable mostly poor families who never went on holiday a chance to get out of London (which some families had never done!).  As numbers increased we knew we needed a bigger venue, but not a stuffy conference centre.  One local lady, Sally, suggested going to Butlins…not for Spring Harvest but for a regular week-end.  So we went ahead and over the last five years have taken 50-100 people each year.  It is a great week-end with plenty of laughing, dancing and drinking in which members of the community build shared memories with one another.  Butlins usually give us a place to meet for church (the one time each year when we meet at 11am – late enough for people to recover from the night before but early enough that they haven’t started drinking again!) and this is always a very special time when many people who don’t normally come to church experience something of God’s love for them.

It has taken ten years to build church to this point and it still remains a fragile and vulnerable entity.  Many followers struggle with all sorts of crises in their lives and everyone copes with the joys and stresses of inner city living.  People have passed through the life of church as often happens in urban places, which often leaves the church feeling like it is having to start over again and again.  Church planting in this context really does feel like being a missionary abroad sometimes, not only because of the cultural diversity but because of how different it is to suburbia, and Urban Expression wants to think through how it can support teams in these situations more.

In 2007 my husband Jim and I have moved out of Shadwell after ten years.  It has been a heart-breaking move in many ways as we love the community deeply and the story of Cable Street Community Church has been our story for this decade.  But the experience has been draining and we are not sure we are the best people to take the church on to its next stage of life (however that will look).  The church works very closely with Wapping Community Church and Open Door, two church communities which have also developed from Urban Expression teams, and this partnership looks set to develop and deepen further.  This highlights the importance of placing teams close to one another which is what Urban Expression recommends but hasn’t always managed over the years.  As Urban Expression develops, with teams now in Manchester and Glasgow, this is something it hopes to take more seriously as it recognises its role more as a mission agency.

There is much more to the story.  For more information visit www.urbanexpression.org.uk or read Church Planting in the Inner-City: The Urban Expression Story published by Grove Books.