A brief introduction to Visions

It's hard to describe Visions in one sentence!

• A church for people who don't like church.
• A place that feels like home where we can talk about and experience the love of Jesus Christ.
• A place where you can be yourself, with all your doubts, fears and messiness and people will accept you anyway.
• But we're also a bunch of Christians interested in deepening our faith journey through discovering and using our talents in the visual arts, dance music, and technology.

We're part of the Church of England,
with access to a very atmospheric old building,
St Cuthbert's Church, bits of which date back to 687AD.

"Lots of people are suspicious of organised religions: we'd be perfect for them since we're developing a model of disorganised religion!"

We are part of a movement rather loosely termed Alternative Worship, but the name doesn't really say enough - we mean that our reponse to the Divine Presence has to be born from our own experience together, as individuals and as a community, and not simply accepting whatever forms of worship are given to us. However, that is not to say we reject the past, rather that we see Christian traditions as a rich field of possible resource to draw on. But we also draw on contemporary culture in finding expression for our spirituality.

The writer Len Sweet describes this sort of worship as being EPIC, and that certainly suits us:

Experiential	We aim to be a place where people can experience God rather than just talk about Him.
Participative	You're not an audience, you're part of the worship and always get a chance to interact if you wish.
Image Based	We use all available media (and lots of pictures) to enhance our worship.
Connected	We don't wish to bury our heads in the sand. We want to connect with each other, God, and the hurting people around us. To support each other in a world where we can all feel a bit isolated sometimes.

Under the name Paradox Visuals we have provided projected images, cine loops, and video for various dance nights in the York/Leeds/Bradford area.

Our past portfolio includes East Orange, Club Survival (a charity event), a long stint with Family DB's regular Pure Sheng, the occasional Less Stress, Mash It Up, Sphere, Bless This House, K.M.Q and Funkfish nights in York, Dub2House at the Cockpit in Leeds, Xpose at St George's, Leeds, Buzz at the LeisureDrome, Howden, and Electronic Republic at the Maestro, Bradford. Going back a little further, we ran both visuals and music for our very own night, Stretch, both in York and at the Greenbelt festival in 1993. At Greenbelt 1994 we did workshops on video editing in the fine-art tent. At Greenbelt 1996 and 1997 we provided live video mixing and other visuals for the club tent, including an underwater theme for the band "Blue Amazon", whilst at Greenbelt 2000-2005, we did several multimedia services, visuals for a Catholic mass, and seminars on visuals and small group prayer ideas. In York Minster in 2003-2006, we provided services and visuals for XL and XS youth events.