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10-15 years ago, when I was attending a fairly large Evangelical Church near Preston- more or less everything this church seems to stand for, I would have celebrated enthusiastically. I loved the Church I attended, and the wonderful people it contained (I still do) although I felt considerable frustration about how isolated we were from engagement with real need in our communities.

Although to be honest, I spent most of my time behind an instrument of one sort or another, so my rhetoric did not necessarily match my actions.

As time went on, these frustrations grew- it was ever more obvious to me how Church can suck you in then suck you dry, and how activists within church spend all their time serving the machinery of the church, with little room left for anything else.

These days, I suspect that there would be a lot about Frontline Church in Liverpool that  I would struggle with- in terms of theology, world view and underlying culture. Not to mention the politics.

But I am grateful that there are places like this still.

Grace factories.

And although grace can not really be manufactured, where people are motivated by their faith towards acts of love- then we should rejoice…

As John Harris puts it in the Guardian-

The next day I meet a former sex worker, now apparently off drugs, set on somehow starting college and a regular Frontline worshipper. “I was a prostitute and a drug addict for 11, 12 years – maybe more,” she tells me. “God is so forgiving – he wants me to win.” Wider society, she says, is “too judgmental … it’s: ‘That’s a prostitute, that’s a drug addict.’ They don’t want to know.” And how has the church helped her? “Oh, it saved my life,” she shoots back. “I would be dead if it wasn’t for this church.”

A question soon pops into my head. How does a militant secularist weigh up the choice between a cleaned-up believer and an ungodly crack adict?