The Story of Presence
On Wednesday, March 30, 2005, two friends (Tim Bailey and James Shelley) started meeting weekly for breakfast at Richie's Family Restaurant. At the time Tim Bailey was in the process of transitioning out of a youth leader training program called Emergen and James was the high school youth worker at North Park Community Church. Over a copious number of coffees and several pounds of bacon grease, their conversations continued to orbit around questions of faith, culture and this thing known as church.
In a nutshell, the two friends grew increasingly intrigued by the radical-compassion, counter-consumerist message of Jesus. How could the church take on an increasingly proactive role in the midst of so many pressing local and global social issues? What could a church look like if it reorientated its focal point on imitating this kind of lifestyle? Tim and James began contemplating and dreaming about what this kind of community might look like.
In May 2005, Tim accepted the role of teaching pastor at Hillside Church. At the end of the year (around December 2005) he invited his friend Henry Berg to join the conversation with James. Henry is a business lawyer with Siskinds, a professional student of theology, and an inexhaustible visionary at heart. Henry brought both keen cultural analysis and practical experience to the brainstorming, and small group continued to meet weekly and continue to dream. (The group started meeting at Archies for breakfast, because Tim decided he didn't like the Richies home fry potatoes anymore.)
Between September and November of 2006 the group hosted some living room conversations and four public gatherings at The Covent Garden Market. The exact "form" of what Presence would look like was still quite foggy, but it was obvious that the next step was to get more people together, talking, and sharing ideas. Encouraged by these conversations and the shared interest in pushing the conceptual boundaries of church, James resigned from North Park in early 2007 with their blessing to begin a new church in the downtown core. Presence was incorporated as a non-profit organization, and Kristibeth Kelly (an ESL teacher) and Maria Boldt (a palliative care doctor) came together to form the initial board with Tim and Henry. (The breakfast location was changed from Archies to Tim Hortons, since James sold his car and couldn't drive to Archies anymore.)
On March 4, 2007, Presence had its first weekly Sunday gathering at The Arts Project in downtown London. The community has been meeting weekly there ever since. (Later in 2007 Tim wrote a book. Finding his life increasingly busy with his work at Hillside, Tim left the Presence board in early 2008, but still has breakfast with James.)