A Salmon AGM

To the Salmon Youth Centre for the Annual General Meeting and Commissioning service. The formal business was interspersed with prayers and songs and concluded with a commissioning of staff, trustees, volunteers and supporters for the coming year.

The whole event was presided over by our very own Adrian Greenwood (currently chair of the trustees) who came to Cambridge University Mission  (as it then was) as a 'resi' exactly forty years ago, fell in love with Bermondsey, fell in love with Marian and has stayed ever since.

During the year Salmon received 20,000 visits from young people, ran over 32 club sessions per week, developed 60 new mentoring relationships with young people, organised 60 day trips and ten residentials.

The largest club (6-9 year olds) has 80 members and a waiting list of 50.

Over 1,000 young people participated in sports in the pass year and over 200 gained sports accreditations, but finance was tight and expenditure of £923K exceeded income, meaning that the centre had to draw upon its reserves.

This year I had been asked to the commissioning and to give the talk. I chose for the reading (and the passage I would speak on): Genesis 3.1-9 (the story of the fall).

If that sounds like a weird choice of reading, I said, consider this: you need to know where you are, you need to know how things are in the area you live. You need to know the facts on the ground.

As a new vicar I have been eagerly gathering facts about Bermondsey, finding all I can know about the place, greatly helped by the census returns for our parish which yield all sorts of exciting facts and figures. They help us know how things are where we are.

And that's where Genesis 3 comes in. Not so much a history lesson of what happened centuries ago, but a description of how things are in the world we live in. The spiritual facts on the ground.

In instanced three:

1. The Lord God walking in the garden. We do not worship a distant, up-in-the-clouds-god, but the born as a man, walking the face of the earth, dwelling in his people, down to earth God. God is not far away. He is walking the streets of Bermondsey.

2.The man hid from God. By and large people are not seeking God, they are hiding from him, and they do all kinds of things to keep him at a distance. This is a real and serious, spiritual reality in Bermondsey and everywhere, but it is not the whole story, because

3. The Lord God called to the man 'where are you?' Man may be hiding from God, but God is in  the business of seeking and saving the lost. He is the God who calls out 'where are you,' even when we are in hiding, and calls us to himself. From its inception Salmon has believed in and proclaimed this searching, saving God.

May God bless it in that work, I concluded.