'We meet in a park, on the beach, even out on the water' - the story of Ocean Church

It began as a missional community hoping to bring together those looking to reconnect with nature, spirituality, and community. Now Ocean Church has joined the Southern Counties Baptist Association - minister John Good explains more

We have become a church.
 
In some senses, we have been calling ourselves church for a while now. Since heating hot choc on a gas stove in the park and asking our kids if they can hear God on the beach. But now, on Maundy Thursday 2024, Southern Counties Baptist Association (SCBA) welcomed Ocean Church into membership. Via text message. We are official.
 
Being official hadn't always been on our radar. We used the term missional community for a long time. We are all about people who love the outdoors. People who consider themselves to be “spiritual but not religious.” We started with those people and not an idea of how church could be.

But soon we ran into a simple challenge. The people we were talking to had no idea what the phrase missional community meant. It was alien language. So recently we circled back to using “Church.” While not perfect, it wasn't a Christian sub-language. Everyone can at least guess at what we are trying to do. Even if they guess it wrong, it's better than being too confused to join in.
 
SCBA has been for us all the way. They were keen that we started a charity and got more organised. We are an enthusiastic gang of merrymakers. We only have some idea of what's going on. The idea of formalising the thing seemed precarious. To get a bit cheesy, what if the trellis outweighs the vine? I can't do much to answer that at the minute.

Becoming a CIO is only the first step. Acting like one is the real challenge. Don't get me wrong, we are excited about the potential to own things together, take out leases, share the load and take responsibility. But our brand new bank account has only just moved off a cuddly zero.
 
I have always been passionate that Church isn't a building and it isn't a meeting. It's a shared way of life. While we do meet twice a month outdoors on a Saturday, the focus is on resourcing people to make connections between their everyday life and the Christian faith. In our case, using nature. One of the fundamentals for people at Ocean Church is adopting three habits that can shape our lives together.
 

1. We try and invite someone to have dinner with us once a week.
2. We try and connect with God outside once a week.
3. We try and worship him as a whole household once a week.

 
They aren't comprehensive or new. They also leak. but they are helpful. Habits give power away to individuals and families to take responsibility for their own faith. We aren't able to do that for them. I’d love to see more folk have their lives transformed by deep-rooted, Jesus centred, habits.


 
We’re also big on participation. We meet in a park, on the beach, even out on the water. We made a commitment to do everything together, kids and adults. We read out a “welcome” to explain this whenever we get together. Kids are as central to the running of Ocean Church as the adults. We use child-friendly language on our website, any resources we make and on our blogs. We are trying to figure out smoother ways in which our children can have more power in membership decisions and how to make a budget accessible to them to use.
 
We are growing more convicted that the wider church is liquid and we are pleased to play our part in the pond. We are growing in courage to do the things we can, with vigour. And leaving what we can't do, to others. We can’t do an expositional sermon on the beach. We can’t do sung worship in the middle of a park. So we don’t. It doesn't matter because 50 other churches do that near us.

What we can do is offer opportunities to encounter God outside. Storytelling, communion, rethought sacraments, contemplative worship, life habits, loads of fun and outdoor food. We want to be generous to the wider church community. We aren't doing anything new but we are proud to be a bit different.

Some of our members consider Ocean Church to be their sole spiritual home. Others split their time with us and another church or two. I think this liquid membership is becoming more normal. We don’t meet on Sunday to give people room to worship elsewhere if they wish. Sometimes all this feels very smooth. At other times, it doesn't.
 
Here’s some words from Simon who had previously helped to lead a church plant in another part of town before joining Ocean Church.

'Attending Ocean Church for the first time was refreshing. I don’t remember specifically what the content of the first reflection at Ocean Church was but I do recall more about how it made me feel. Whatever was said was able to be accessed by children but it gave me cause for reflection, speaking to me in a way that a litany of traditional church services in a building would not.

'Much of it took place in the water, it was tactile and the reflection was short. It was not like most of the hundreds of talks that I have heard or the few that I have given in church. On more than one level, it made me feel something. I remember leaving thinking that I wanted to go back.'

 
One of the things I have loved as a pioneer minister is seeing a passion of mine move from being a sideline in ministry to the main event. I am more passionate about church now than I ever have been before. It makes me sad to think that in ministry, people's hobbies and passions take second base to “the real thing” on a Sunday morning.

We should stop trying to funnel people through ministries into seats on a Sunday and take more care to discern a call to minister and raise cash for leaders in messy churches, forest churches, cooking churches, business churches and beyond. I’m convinced that the future of church lies in niching down and empowering specific leadership and ministry in different contexts.
 
And then making it official.
 

Anyway, to find out more about us, check out oceanchurch.uk. We are on Facebook too. 

John Good is a pioneer minister in Poole, Dorset