Growing Enthusiasm

Grace and peace to you from God our father and the Lord Jesus Christ

As if summarising all their hopes for one another, these are the words that begin almost every letter of the earliest Christians and I love them.

Grace
and
peace

Exactly what we need every morning and every night, every moment of every day… grace… and peace…

As each year comes to an end I get reflective, look back and wonder what in my life needs adjusting and reshaping. And, as you might imagine, I have been thinking a lot about church too… about our direction, about some of the challenges we face together… And I thought I would write something down to set out the thinking behind some of the new things that will be happening this year.

Sundays

Church is not a building nor is it the services we organise. We know this, and rightly talk of ourselves as a community much more than just a gathering on Sunday… We don’t stop ‘being the church’ the moment we leave the building, nor do we become the church when we enter it. And yet, I think we all know just how important these times together are. Not only are they times for connecting with each other, building relationship, finding out news and offering care for one another, they are also times when, centred around broken bread and scripture reading, that we get our lives realigned and straightened out. Confession, praise, intercession, silence, singing, sharing, laying hands, are all part of this rich opportunity we are given to meet with God alongside each other.

And the truth is that our ‘St Michael’s’ services are special – unique I would say. I think we have a particular ‘way of being’ that is honest and rich and true. We don’t pretend and we are not very high and mighty. We are down to earth. As far as I am aware we are also the only church in Bath that employs a signer every week (Oh how we love Diane) and we work hard to be as inclusive as possible. This makes us all richer in so many ways.

On Sundays we are trying to do many things in the couple of hours we have together – catch up, share news, pray, worship, learn, laugh, care… and in the new year I want us to try out a slightly different way of ordering things.

At present (on a normal Sunday) the service starts at 10.15am (although many of us seem to be coming in well after that) and we try to have things wrapped up by 11.45am (although we haven’t always managed that more recently, I am afraid). Half way through we share the ‘peace’. People arrive throughout the service and there is often a lot of movement around the edges.

Richer times of worship
Not wanting to ‘tidy us up’ too much, but wanting to create a stronger, more focused and richer environment for worship, in January we are going to try a new simple layout for our times together. Starting at the same time (10.15am), the first 45 minutes will be a time solely focused on what we might call ‘worship’ – no notices, no peace, no news updates, no happy birthdays – but instead the more ‘vertical’ stuff such as; praise, listening to scripture being read out, psalms, confession, singing hymns and songs, times of silence and stillness, meditations, prayers, communion etc. (not that we will do all of these every week!).

If you are currently one of those who help bring over our brothers and sisters from Poolemead, we are arranging to have them picked up from 10am and brought over to the church so that everyone is settled for the start of the service at 10.15am. If you are a parent with children can I encourage you to involve them in time of worship as much as possible, praying with them and teaching them about your relationship with God by your behaviour. It is very much my intention that these times will be varied and accessible for all ages together, so please do arrive in time so that we are ready as a whole family together.

Developing community
After this time of worship, we will break for 30 minutes when we will have coffee, tea and maybe some doughnuts or something like that. This will be an extended time of catching up, greeting new comers, praying for each other, and relaxing together.

As this time comes to an end the children will be able to go with their leaders to their different groups and the rest of us will gather again for a time of teaching and reflection together.

Relevant teaching
More recently I am aware that my teaching has sometimes been over heavy or a bit long and am keen to make sure that this new focused time of teaching is a genuinely useful time of exploration, learning and thinking. As well as presentations, I hope we will also have times of discussion and questions too…

Making a good thing better
While this is very much an experiment, I am hopeful that structuring our times together in this way will bring considerable benefits to us as a community:

• Richer times of worship – helping make them more creative, more focussed and less distracted
• Communion will be more central and will feel less ‘tagged on’ to the end of a service
• More useful times of teaching – Using a wider range of teaching approaches and making sure the teaching is relevant, applicable and more accessible
• Less distractions from people arriving/leaving part way through services – encouraging a prompt start at 10.15am with every ready to worship together.
• More involvement – opening up the leading of the worship segment to individuals, to house groups, or to the young people, I hope that more of us may become involved in shaping our times together
• Clarity for families – Working hard to create new children’s groups for 3-5 year olds and a crèche at both parts of the morning (during the worship part and the teaching part) freeing up parents to join in fully with at least one aspect of each morning
• A shortened service more appropriate for residents from Poolemead
• A more intentional approach to discipleship and learning together

The First Sunday of the month
Just as we do at the moment, we will continue to share communion on the second and fourth Sundays of the month (during our first 45 minutes together) and on the first Sunday there will be the usual traditional communion (BCP), followed by breakfast, followed by ‘Sunday Live!’.

Feedback
Making these changes to the way we use the times we gather together may take some time to feel normal and we may find that there are a few teething problems. We are going to growing in this together. As we go along, I am sure you will let me know how you think things are going and I am sure that we will find out what works and what doesn’t quite work the way we might have hoped.

Developments at Church Rooms

As some of you will have heard, over the last few months the PCC have been thinking through how we use Church Rooms and in particular exploring two new ideas – creating a new church office in the back room, and creating a recording studio in the loft space. These are two separate ideas and have arisen for different reasons, but makes sense to talk about them together as they both relate to Church Rooms.

An Office
Over the last month or two Mike, Dave, Charles and Colin have been helping create a brand new office at the back of Church Rooms for the staff team. We haven’t completely finished the work, but hope that by early January the office will be up and running. I am really looking forward to working from this space which I think will be much more accessible than working from home, and also help me to separate my work and home life a little better. It will also give Shelley a ‘church office’ to work from on the days that she is in and a central hub for other staff to work from as needed. Moving the photocopier and other office furniture down from the ‘vestry’ will also help us create a more usable space for the crèche on Sundays.

The Rec House
A little while ago – in the summer – I took the funeral of a young man who had tragically taken his own life. He was 23. The church was full – 300 or more young people – some needing to stand outside. The service was moving, but I think it was when we put some pictures of his life up on the screen accompanied by his own music, some of which was his own composition, that everyone was engaged.

It was only afterwards, as I reflected further on the sea of lost looking faces that I began to wonder how we might truly connect with young people, raise self esteem, encourage expression and develop creativity of this age group. Not knowing what exactly to do but thinking that it probably would be a good thing to base it around media and music, I invited 6 friends over for curry, all big into music, and I told them my story. Then I took them around church rooms.

“If you could do something with young people in this space, then what would you do?” I asked them.

And then they began to dream. The enthusiasm among the group was immediate and catching, and we quickly got talking about converting the loft into a recording studio space and using the downstairs area for performing, teaching, music lessons, workshops and activities. And so the ideas for the ‘Rec House’ was born – a professional recording studio, come rehearsal space, come media centre, come dance centre, that enables youth to make music together and collaborate creatively within the community and aids personal development.

Unashamedly excited I took these ideas to the PCC where we we liked them so much so that we asked the group to come back with more fully worked up plans of how ‘the Rec House’ might actually work, how much it might cost and who might run it. A few weeks later and after a special meeting to talk it all through further, the PCC gave the group the go ahead to see if they could make it all happen.

The team hoping to make all this a reality are at a very early stage with all this, but they have been working hard to prepare funding applications and set the project up as soon as they can. Dependant on funding from outside to make the project work, we are hoping that by Easter we may know more and that the project might start soon after that.

Do pray for this project as it hopes to connect with young people in Twerton.

A weekend away together

At the last Annual Meeting a number of people suggested that it would be a great idea to go away together as a church for a weekend. I am delighted that we have found a fantastic place to go – Windmill Farm Conference Centre – from April 17th – 19th. Over the next few months, Tory and a team of others will be working hard to make this one of the best church weekends ever!

Some of us may have been on these kinds of things before – others of us will never have done – but it is our aim to make this a truly memorable weekend for ALL of us – all ages, all backgrounds. I am really hoping that virtually every single one of us will be coming with us. Here’s why:

• It will help us get to know each other so much better
• It will be a significant time when God will speak to us as a church and reveal himself to us
• It will be fantastic fun
• The worship will be great
• The times of teaching will be really helpful and relevant for us personally as well as as a church
• There will be stuff for everyone to enjoy – all ages – from 1 to 101
• The food will be great
• It will be affordable
• The place is really attractively decorated and very comfortable and set in beautiful countryside
• It is not too far away, but far enough to feel we will away from it all
• We will all leave having had a great time and wanting to do it again

Significant Time
I truly believe that this will be a really significant event for us as a church family and I really want to encourage you to join everyone else in coming with us. Don’t be left out. Put the date in your diary. Make it part of your Easter Holiday plans (it is the weekend after Easter) and begin to budget for it. You won’t regret it!

Watch out for more updates coming soon.

Devotion

As I look back over the past year I am aware that it has been a difficult one for a number of us – for many reasons… Each of our journeys with God is unique but as life takes us one way or another we are all constantly faced with deep questions of faith and trust. Old age, serious illness, bereavement, problems at work, new challenges, and relationship issues, all impact us and effect in some way the way we pray, the way we worship, or our relationship with our Father. We also live in a culture that is at best apathetic to Christian faith and at worst wary and mistrustful of it, and this also impacts the way we feel about our faith and our confidence in it.

It is in times like these when we often realise just how much others mean to us and how much we value our brothers and sisters in Christ. And as we move ahead it is very much my hope that we will grow in honesty and vulnerability together, increasingly learning how to share with each other our failures, concerns and worries, whilst also honestly seeking God’s best for our lives. We really need each other’s help to remain faithful, holy and enthusiastic in our faith.

As I look around us too, I see many more people whose lives seem to be crying out for some of God’s grace and peace and I want to encourage us all to be bold in our sharing of our faith this year. Wouldn’t it be amazing if in a years time 40 people had come to faith in Jesus through our witness and care. That is what I am hoping and praying for. Maybe I am setting my hopes too low. So be it.

And for this to come about I know that it will need us to be fully ‘devoted’ – to God, to each other, to upholding truth, to breaking bread together and to sharing our lives together. I sure that a half hearted devotion will not be sufficient to attract people around us to Jesus.

So, will you join me in recommitting yourself to this cause… and to being fully devoted to it. It will cost you energy, money, and effort – but it will be worth every bit of it. For lives will be changed and so shall we.

Let’s do something brilliant together again this year.

Grace and peace
Richard