Enterprise Club

Ros Southern writes:

'Thanks so much to Francesca Fenn for taking our session last week on how she set up her family business. I have started a blog and put a very small article - what do you think?! http://sophiahubs7k.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/francesca-fenn-sets-up-business-without-a-business-plan/.  

This Tuesday Geoff Hill is leading the Enterprise Club session on business planning.  He is Chair of the Redbridge Chamber of Commerce.  He is being joined by Beverly Stratton who is the Town Centres Manager in Redbridge and BIDs Manager (Business Improvement Districts) and is highly experienced in helping local businesses find local solutions to local problems. They will be with us between 2 and 3pm.

Programme for Tuesday 19th March:

Arrivals any time from 1

1.45 - update from start-ups on any progression made this week or any issues they faced

2-3 business planning with Geoff and small group discussions

3 - 3.30 - support to start-ups from local business people that come along

3.30 - plenary and feedback on goals start ups can set for the next week.

4 - 5  further networking.

Please do pass this opportunity on to others you may know who want to start a business or would like to be part of a local network. 

Thanks as always to those that are supporting the enterprise club by bringing their time and skills to share.'

See also https://twitter.com/SophiaHubs7K and https://www.facebook.com/SophiaHubs7K?ref=profile. 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Pete Seeger - We Shall Overcome.

Enterprise Club

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Neal Morse - Momentum.

If Statues Could Talk ... a London Adventure

Dr Samuel Johnson's cat Hodge is your guide in the new Step Outside Guide to be published on May 13th and entitled 'If Statues Could Talk... a London Adventure'.

Hodge will escort you on a trail around some of Westminster Abbey's most interesting and important statues, before leading you out and about as you help him complete his A-Z catalogue of London Statues. 

This, the fifth Step Outside Guide is particularly exciting because families using it are able to enter Westminster Abbey absolutely free of charge! The ticket is valid for 1 or 2 adults, plus accompanying child/ren. It is not valid for adults unaccompanied by children, or for tour groups. Normal entry fee is £18 per adult.

The Guide includes all of Step Outside's usual features; illustrated once again by Sam Fenn, there are bus rides, Rest-your-Legs pages, detailed maps and directions. And of course everything is absolutely free-to-see!

All orders received on line before the publication date of May 13th will be signed copies. To order your copy visit stepoutsideguides.com. 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Gerry Rafferty - Baker Street.

Step Outside Guides to London

Tembo the baby elephant will lead you on a day out to remember on a route from Holborn to Kensington in the Step Outside Guide, The London Treasure Trail.

Along the way you'll uncover all sorts of hidden treasures, from streets filled with jewels to a hidden city jungle. There are two bus rides, a house filled with special treasures, and at the end of the day, a garden in the sky. Best of all, you will find the real Baby Tembo and his special friend who lives just a few metres away.

Alternatively, wander through 2,000 years of London's history in the company of Octavius the Octopus, who lives by the river. Walk a spiral slope, diagonal steps and stunning bridges. See Octavius's Top Treasures all along the route, and find out where he lives.

As you make your way from from Tower Hill to Hungerford Bridge you will see all sorts of of beautiful and interesting buildings, learn fascinating facts and uncover hidden surprises. There are eye-spy photos on every page, and fun things to do on the Rest-your-legs pages. The virtually traffic-free route means that the Down by the Thames is particularly suitable for families with younger children.

These excellent family adventure guides have been produced by Seven Kings locals Francesca and Sam Fenn together with Margie Skinner.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Ralph McTell - Streets of London. 

1 cafe, 2 exhibitions & a coincidence

We've been into London today sampling the Visual Art exhibitions in the Pentecost Festival. We started with the Social Issues & Our Response photographic display at the Cafe Eterno in Covent Garden where the above photos were taken.

This is a modest but varied exhibition including scenes from SOULINTHECITY, a Compassion project, Hertford stns (my contribution) and a Miss Pole Dancing competition. Active response is contrasted with the enduring challenge of sin and the efficacy of our responses questioned.

While enjoying a healthy and appetising lunch at the Cafe, we opened up a leaflet about a performance at the Cafe from the previous night only to find a photo and write up of our good friend Mandy Stone. Mandy had given her testimony at the Cafe following a performance of Does The Shoe Fit? What a coincidence that we had both had a link with the Cafe over the same weekend!

From there I went to Westminster Central Hall for the Gifts exhibition that was a part of Pentecost People. Here I found a much more varied exhibition than I had anticipated including installations, ceramics, photographics and both abstract and representational paintings. The exhibition had been curated by Alison Lilley Berrett using artists linked to the Ark T Centre in Cowley, Oxford. The Art T Centre is a creative arts project opened in 1997 at the initiative of a church and a group of artists committed to creating space for the arts. It believes that creativity through the arts can allow people to discover new things about themselves and others and so unlock the potential for change. The Centre has six resident artists who, as well as developing their own work, provide workshops enabling others to discover their creativity sometimes for the first time.

Sue-Jane Mott's ceramic installations instantly attracted the eye. 130 ceramic bottle forms were shaped to form a pathway symbolising our life journeys while 24 Golden Bowls drew on the image from Revelation of 24 elders offering golden bowls symbolising prayers to God. From their exterior Mott's bowls looked like fragile papier-mache constructions composed of written prayers but, with their shining metallic interiors, were solid constructions, that gleamed in the light of the room.

Clay Sinclair paints backwards in acrylics onto perspex and the results are vibrant, primal images laced with humour and questioning what we see. Alison Lilley Berrett also works in an abstract expressionist style creating meditative images reflective of core Christian themes of love, life, breath. Tim Steward's work, while popular and ubiquitous at Christian festivals, is only pleasantly decorative in its weaving of enlongated charismatic figures into abstract backdrops. Finally, Kate Cunningham had created a photographic series of still lifes that used contrasts of light and dark to explore communion and crucifixion.

Gifts revealed a diversity and energy that I had not expected to find in an exhibition at what is at base an evangelical Christian festival. This is, therefore, an exhibition of encouragement for the future and a sign of the value of artists grouping together for mutual support, critique and development.

For posts on other aspects of the Pentecost Festival see Dave Walker's Church Times blog by clicking here and here.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

onehundredhours - King Of Every Heart.

Forgiveness and love

Reflecting on today's gospel (Luke 7. 36 - 8.3) for a sermon, I began thinking about contemporary parallels to the experience of the woman who poured perfume on Jesus' feet.

I've had Johnny Cash's Unchained album on this car recently and the song, 'Kneeling Drunkard's Plea', is one possible parallel. This is a song about an alcoholic prompted to cry, ‘Lord, have mercy on me’ through the death of his mother. Johnny Cash, of course, had his own experiences of addiction to overcome - I've also been reading the Steve Turner biography The Man Called Cash (Bloomsbury, 2006) - and, for Cash, returning to his Christian faith was one of the factors that eventually made that possible. The song comes from the series of albums called American Recordings that Cash made towards the end of his life in which he sings honestly and affectingly of sin and the salvation that comes through repentance.

Another parallel story would be that of my friend Mandy Fenn from St Margaret's Barking. By giving her life to Jesus, Mandy has moved from self harming to setting up groups that give support and help to others who self harm. The work she now does is an expression of her gratitude for all that Jesus has done for her.

The story that I eventually used in my sermon is about the artist Peter Howson and his painting, The Third Step. Howson became a very successful painter at a young age but for a number of reasons was not a happy person. An alcoholic and a drug user, he would drink and drug himself into a stupour. One night, when he had done just that, his 13 year old daughter Lucie packed a suitcase, let herself out of the house and for several hours wandered through a Glasgow park frequented by drug addicts and tramps. Howson said, “you have to reach your own personal gutter before you ask for help.” Realising how he had failed Lucie was that moment for Howson.

As part of his rehabilitation he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. In AA, Howson explains, the Third Step comes when alcoholics have “made a decision to turn our wills and our lives over to the care of God as we understand him.” The Third Step, then, is about his “conversion to Christianity and giving up the booze.” In the painting a man has been stripped and is crawling out of a grave towards a church and the light of Christ. The painting shows the moment when a person in torment realises that it doesn’t have to be that way. Like all of Howson’s work it is a dark picture but, while dark, it is a painting of hope, not despair. This is the way of Christ, the way of darkness endured in order to reach the light, the way of salvation.