Thoughts From The Cottage
Dear Friends
If you come into our buildings during the week you will often find it a lively place with plenty going on, sometimes two or three activities simultaneously. Depending on the week between thirty-six and forty-seven hours are taken up with activities for all ages. On top of that are special events like tea parties, drama group plays, Christmas Cracker and other special activities. On average around four to five hundred people come through our doors each week. Somewhere in all this we hope to start a youth club soon. The majority of activities are community activities. However church-based activities are slowly growing through things like Messy Church, and to a lesser extent Café Church and Talking Jesus.
Alongside this we have a numerically declining, ageing membership and are anticipating Ministry Scoping being reduced from 50% to 33.33% when I retire in 2020. How do we reconcile this with the lively community use of the buildings and, perhaps more importantly, how do we work for church growth with declining resources?
Of course, we can see this either as a problem or as an opportunity. No prizes for guessing which view I take. As an optimist I naturally take the view that this is an opportunity. However, that does not mean that I know the answer to how this will work out, but I do know the one who has the answer – God- and I am prepared to trust him.
The opportunity of growing community and outreach work coupled with declining resources is that we will have to find new ways of doing things and not stick to the old familiar pattern that we know so well. This is, of course, scary because it leads us into the unknown and forces us to trust God more. The temptation is to come up with our own plan for managing decline and coping with the new situation. Wherever that has been tried it has simply led to further decline. Our starting point needs to be somewhere else. As a church we are led by God and the most important thing we can do is to seek God’s will.
A lot of prayer goes on in this church and for that we are all grateful. We regularly pray for healing, for guidance, for help. We regularly give thanks for blessings received. We ask God to bless our programmes and activities. In addition to this we need to engage in Listening Prayer. You will find a helpful resume of Listening Prayer later in this issue.
Essentially, as Christians, our role is to seek God’s will and then practice it. That is what we are asking for when we pray the Lord’s Prayer. It is what we seek when we come together for public worship. It is the desire of every Christian and every Church. Quite simply it is our raison d’etre.
God has a future for the Beacon. He will reveal it to us when we are ready to receive it.
Ian Ring
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