Heading for England We left right on time for London Heathrow, on Monday, June 1.

Arrived at 6:30 a.m. A couple of hours wait, then 30 minutes to Manchester.

We spent our first night in a somewhat dodgy, but very cheap hotel near the train station. What can I say, it was a bed, which is all we were looking for.

Tuesday night we met with Ben Edson who is one of the two staff people at something called Nexus, a joint venture of the Anglican and Methodist Churches. By day it's a neighborhood coffee shop and art gallery, offering a place to go for younger adults who live in the city centre of Manchester. But it's also an attempt to create indigenous community in the name of Jesus for those who have (and likely won't have) any connection to the traditional insitutional church. Wednesday evenings, they have worship gatherings called Sanctus. We'll be joining them this evening. What we need to get used to, I suppose, is that the dividing lines between church/society, sacred/secular, or any of those other dichotomies, have to become a lot more permeable. Nexus is really trying to avoid setting up barriers that will mark off insiders from outsiders. It's a place where food and coffee are used to create connections and to bless the neighborhood. A lot of people have trouble identifying it as "church" but for those involved, it's the way of the future.

Check out this ministry at www.sanctus1.co.uk.

Here's Diane and Ben Edson at a popular watering hole in downtown Manchester.