Kick Off - 5th March 2010

After many meetings, many discussions and plenty of planning we finally put our words into action on March the 5th, 2010.

Tucked away in the side hall of Hillsborough Baptist, about 35-40 of us gathered together and waited to see how the evening would unfold.

After mixing and mingling for the better part of 30 minutes we kicked off with this video:

Al Coats then opened the night with a small introduction on what it is these "Friday Nights" are all about. Here is a video with some sections of what he had to share:

In summary:

• We all have to choose how we live our lives
• We all have to answer for the choices we make
• There are a lot of us who are unsatisfied with the way we do life, with the way we do church.
• We’ve decided that we’re going to try and get to the bottom of why we are feeling like this.
  
• We need to approach this with an open mind. We can’t move forward if we approach this with a closed mind.
• We need to avoid skepticism, negativity and destructive criticism.
• Let’s approach this with a fresh and engaged mind.
• This is just the beginning! There are no rules, structures, agendas with these Friday nights.
  
• We need your input and feedback and questions to shape what we it is we do.
• We’re all in this together, this group has to be collaborative. Not just another ‘speaker at the front, sit and listen’ type event.

After Al Coats had spoken Matt Browning took us through a group exercise.

Each of us a given a pad of post-it notes and asked to share our thoughts, questions, frustrations on four different areas-

- Church Stuff:
- Extending Community
- Personal Faith
- Misc

All in all we got through over 200 post-it notes with some strong themes and trends coming through in the thoughts being expressed.