After delivering our Labour newsletters today, we all went off to church as a family (all except Frankie who was at work).

Now we are not a religious family. Personally I am not even a bit spiritual, but I suspect that is my loss, and I feel a bit jealous of those who do have faith.

The reason us heathens were in church today is that we were invited to a service to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the church in Broadfield. It really is a remarkable place. The building itself is not at all traditional: there is no spire or tower, no nave or transepts or anything. The main part of the church is a square, with a small raised area on one corner. The seats are arranged in an arc around this, and the walls on the two opposite sides can be folded back to expand the main room. At other times these spaces at the side can be used as meeting rooms or quiet spaces.

Like the building, the congregation is not traditional either. For a start, there is not one congregation but three – the Roman Catholics, the Church of England and the Broadfield Christian Fellowship – and they all share the space at different times, but have a long history of coming together for events like this.

The service itself was informal and led by members of the churches rather than by vicars or priests. The songs were all up-beat modern hymns instead of the dreary dirges which usually feature in services we can’t avoid, and the accompaniment was piano, guitars, floor toms, trumpet and clarinet instead of the normal organ.

The other week I watched a programme on TV about the tradition of Sufi music in Islam and thought that it was much more lively than C of E offerings. I had thought that if Christian services featured music halfway as lively and performed with anything like the enthusiasm of Sufi music instead of being stuck in Victorian austerity it would only be a good thing. Well the Broadfield C of E services are getting there.

Whenever I have been to the Broadfield church, or dealt with the people there, I have been impressed by their obvious faith and commitment, which they achieve without all turning into Ned Flanders. During the service representatives from all three churches spoke about the building and their memories and stories about it.

When Broadfield was first built there was no church, but when more houses were built there were some clergy installed who held services in their homes. When the church and community centre were built it was not for any specific denomination, but a shared facility for all of them. During those years of home-worship and the early days of sharing a church it appears they all maintained a good relationship with each each other.

It is easy to imagine how easily it could have been otherwise. All that talk of gathering in the vicar’s house did remind me a bit of the how the town’s Sri Lankan Hindus, Ahmadiyya Muslims and a few others currently get by. Lets hope they find themselves homes like this some day.

A few familiar old faces put in an appearance, like Father Rory who was the RC priest until about 3 years ago, or sent messages, and all the three church representatives talked about their place in the community, which is a big deal with all of them. You only have to glance at the noticeboards in the foyer to see how active all the churches are in all sorts of areas, including overseas missions. And all this without ever forcing their views on the rest of us in Broadfield.

After the service a dinner was provided, and those of us expecting some sort of buffet and sandwiches were gobsmacked to find a sit-down, three-course meal for 170 people.

The whole thing was an ecumenical success story – not just the day itself but the whole 25-year history of the church. The next step must be to try and get the Broadfield mosque to work with them more, but that is going to be a challenge.

I took dozens of photos of everything, obviously, which are now burned to CD for the community centre Manager and the church administrator to use as they see fit. I will upload a few of the better ones to the community centre website too. I am very pleased with that photo of one of the tables at dinner, and I admit I played with it a bit in PhotoFiltre to add a radial blur, as it captures the spirit of the day perfectly with its mixture of ages and races.

I am also quite chuffed with this one, which was taken without flash and using the zoom from a fair distance. I did have to play with it a bit, brighten it up and rescue it, but I like the end result.