Try Walton on the Naze for some of the best fish and chips anywhere, especially Tollgate Fisheries. They change the oil every day, use local potatoes, the best fish they can get from a variety of suppliers, and cook fresh to order. The batter is thin and crispy, not greasy, and the chips are golden and not soggy.  Delicious!

But the chips always lack one thing there; the one thing they need to make them zing on the tastebuds, to do justice to all the care taken in cooking them, to make them complete, perfect.

Salt.

They lie there in the bag, longing for salt.  But they don’t have the ability to get up out of the bag and go to the front of the counter and get in the salt pot themselves. And besides the holes are too small. They just wouldn’t fit in there.

So there they stay. Good looking chips, but tasteless.

A bit like Walton people. Smashing people; down to earth, do ‘anything for you’ people, knowing something is missing from their bag and they cant get it themselves.

Chips like people need someone to sprinkle the salt on them.

People wont go to church, can’t go to church, think they won’t fit in; those holes, those doors, are just impossible for most people to go through.

Especially for children and young people. That’s why we don’t find them inside our churches any longer. We’ve got to start sprinkling the salt outside the saltpots onto the chips where they are. Which is what our founding mover and shaker, Jesus, meant to happen in the first place. He started an ‘outreach’ movement , not the ‘indrag’ movement we’ve become today. We really do need church leaders with an ability to think outside the salt shaker.

The chips are plenteous but the sprinklers are few.