It’s been a week of great ones! Firstly, a privilege to host Peter Adam last Sunday. Peter has been so influential for so long in my life. It delights me that if he is ‘chalk’, I am ‘cheese’, yet I have devoured his example and wisdom and teaching most of my Christian life. Do you have any Peters? If you do, I think it’s worth telling them what they mean to you. Peter challenged me with four statements: 1: ‘My times are in your hand’ – For such a time as this I have a God who knows and loves and cares about me totally. Every hair on my greying head matters to him; in him everything past, present and future holds together. What can people do to you when you are so intimately God’s? 2: ‘For such a time as this’ – What is this time in my life? Is there something happening that God is presenting to me at this time as his opportunity? Am I open to him in it? Do I believe my ‘now’ is ordained by Him? 3: ‘Hope lies amidst the ruin of our expectations.’ – Where does my hope lie? What are my expectations of myself, [continue reading...]
A warm welcome to Peter Adam this morning. Peter has been challenging and changing my life for nearly 30 years now. As a preacher first, then lecturer when I studied theology and now as frequent visitor to Perth where he teaches, encourages and (for me) models consistent, faithful, enduring testimony that a life trusting Jesus for everything really works. This week’s musing must be read in conjunction with last week’s in which I referred to an article from The Melbourne Anglican, written by a Baptist, entitled “Church Will Perish if We Wait For Youth to Come”. You can read it on line at http://stphilips.net.au/musings/2012/02/19/ or you might find a spare at the back of the church. The biggest challenge with respect to engaging the next generation for Jesus is that we see the difficulties and cannot see what role the mature have to play. To conclude, The Melbourne Anglican article makes four strategic points about engaging the younger generation. Firstly, am I prepared to cross a barrier, sacrifice anything of myself or be inconvenienced in any way? Because, our friend says, unless I look something like Jesus in the way I live my life out there, forget it! And don’t [continue reading...]
My mum sends me The Melbourne Anglican newspaper every couple of months. It’s a cracker, very diverse, incredibly engaging and something for everyone. There is an article in the February edition that addresses a key issue that bothers me continuously. The attention grabbing text box reads, “Suppose I’m a local minister and our congregation is ageing. We have a few younger families, but by the time the kids reach high school, they tend to drift off. We have no youth group, and struggle to attract teens to anything we do. Without youth and young adults, we’ll eventually fade away. How could our local parish connect with youth outside our church walls?” Despite Linda Hirst’s best efforts and Cheryl’s before her this issue keeps me awake at night. Am I alone? The author says that the best that the best churches manage is fifty or sixty kids meeting on a Friday night with a few of their friends coming along if there is something of interest on offer. With young people being driven by on the spot organisation, frantic school schedules, saturation media, an options focus and little or no spiritual community formation there is no ‘one size fits all’, the [continue reading...]
Do you have a 2012 dream? January and early February are the times of the year when I think about and listen to others’ dreams for the year. The bible is a dreamer’s book. One of its biggest themes is a people looking for what is “not yet” a reality. We are a dreaming people. This year already we have dreamt about a new evening prayer service where people who are keen for God can receive love and spiritual nourishment but can also learn and practise safely their own spiritual gifts. Liz is dreaming about other ways for families to worship together. Excitingly, she is sharing her dream with others who are joining in. Ask her about it. Another person’s dream for 2012 is simply to “come closer to God”. Simple maybe, but hard to do. This person is dreaming about how to do this because they know everything that matters comes out of the level to which they are successful in coming closer to God. Someone else shared a dream about encouraging the spiritual growth of women in our community. The way groups of men and women come together to learn and pray and support one another through life [continue reading...]
I love seeing what God is doing in the everyday of life. It never ceases to amaze me what we can see Him doing in our struggles and dramas if we have eyes to see. I’m musing today from the emergency department in Charlie’s all trussed up in a white gown with my shoulder in a sling. Yes, it could have been worse! A barrister, waste management specialist, town planner, engineer, policeman and two vicars were riding around the river Thursday morning. We had enough human resource to build a small town! It was all getting a bit fast and frenzied when a car just suddenly turned left in front of our bikes. We were in the bike lane with nowhere to go. One vicar slammed into the side of the car. The town planner, forever vigilant, guessed correctly and missed everything and the second vicar hit the road hard and went for a slow motion slide on the bitumen. The rest had time to stop. If you do things, like live your life, things happen! But here is the disturbing thing: if you try to do nothing that will risk anything, things still happen. The two vicars are all [continue reading...]