(Blatant plug alert!)
Over on my other blog, there’s a post with my (rather lengthy!) reflections on this year’s Baptist Assembly. As they were personal opinions, it seemed best to put them there. On here, this week (hopefully!) I’ll post some more thoughts about what went on that I hope will be of relevance to our church. So stay tuned!
Over on my personal blog, I’m blogging through Mark’s gospel throughout Lent. This is following the series of readings that forms the basis for Tom Wright’s “Lent for Everyone” series. We’ll also be making available the full list of readings on Sunday, so you can use it for your own Lent reflections if you want.
Go have a look!
…just in time!
Yesterday’s sermon was part of our special service for Education Sunday (as mentioned on this blog previously). The passage was Mark 1: 29-39, which covers Jesus’ healing of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law and His decision to spread His message through the other villages in the area.
We focussed on the latter part of this. It followed a testimony from a teacher from our local infant school who had come to this service. She shared what teaching meant to her, what a privilege it was and some of the ups and downs, highs and lows of teaching.
I tried to tie the sermon in with that. I took the idea of Jesus’ mission being the thing that drove Him on, rather than the popularity He was experiencing in Capernaum; this mission, I suggested, was bringing the good news of the coming of God’s Kingdom. And it was this I likened to what was shared about the job of teaching: how, like a good teacher builds relationships with pupils and parents, God works in our lives by building relationships with us, rather than just telling us what to do.
We then noted how, when Jesus leaves Capernaum and goes on, He calls His disciples to follow Him: “Let us go”. I suggested that Jesus, too, was inviting all of us, in our own callings, to go with Him and partner with Him in His ongoing mission to spread the good news of the Kingdom. This is something that we are learning, but that at the same time we take with us.
Here’s the sermon notes, if you’re interested in reading them, they’re in Word .doc format. Again, I think it works best if you right click on the link and select “Save Link As…” or the equivalent. And if you do read them, please comment below!
(And, for reasons of length, I will post separately about the mysterious story hinted at in the first point!)
Yesterday’s sermon was based on Mark 1:21-28, the story of Jesus driving out an evil spirit from a man in the synagogue in Capernaum. We thought primarily about what this (and the reactions of the people to Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue before the exorcism) might have to say about Jesus’ authority.
Authority often seems to be a dirty word these days: we don’t like being bossed around. Yet Mark here presents a whole town (almost) as being amazed by Jesus’ authority: in his teaching (which Mark says was like nothing they’d heard before) and in his freeing the possessed man.
So what’s going on?
We suggested that Jesus’ authority was something that liberates: rather than seeking to control and exercise power over people (as a “bossy” authority would), Jesus brings an authority that somehow sets people free. It is an authority that exercised over the things that hold people, that prevent them from coming to God; it doesn’t seem to be exercised over people themselves (in the sense of controlling them, putting them down).
(None of this is to deny the ancient Christian truth that “Jesus is Lord”. It’s to simply say that this Lordship, which we submit to, is often not the same as the lordship the powerful in our world often exercise.)
We then thought about some of the things that might hold us: fears & worries; sins; things that have hurt us in life. Finally, we went through a short time of imaginative prayer, picturing ourselves in the synagogue and bringing just some of those things that hold us to Jesus.
The notes (and they are notes – I hope the above helps explain them!) are attached below; please read them and comment on what you think of them!
To download the file, please click with the right mouse button and select “Save Link As…”.
On 5 February, Churches Together in England marks Education Sunday, a “national day of prayer and celebration for everyone involved in the world of education”. As part of this, our service at Greenfield that Sunday will be somewhat different.
We’ve written to six local schools inviting their teaching staff to come to our service. This will then be a chance to show our support as a church for these people who do such an incredible, difficult and pressurised job. Over the last year or so we’ve had good contacts with the children from the local infant school which has been an immense pleasure and privilege. But we want to show that we care about the teachers as well as the children. Hence this service.
So please come along to the service, at the usual time on Sunday 5 February. Please pray for the service, that teachers will want to come, that it will be a valuable way of showing our support as a church and God’s love for them, and that I won’t get tongue-tied talking to a church full (hopefully!) of teachers. And, if you can, try and bring a memory of your favourite teach – what made him or her so special, how did they inspire you?
I thought (to give me a reason to blog regularly) I’d upload my sermon notes from each Sunday on to this blog, so that if anyone wants to read them for whatever reason (if you can’t sleep or something!) then they’re here. Sometimes they’ll be the full text of the sermon, sometimes just a set of notes which I’ll try and make legible for you. Please feel free to download and read them and then add any comments you want on the blog.
So if you click on the link below, you’ll get a Word document with the sermon I preached yesterday on John 2:1-11, the story of Jesus turning water into wine. Please especially tell me if the link doesn’t work – this is all a bit new to me!
Update: The best way to do this (quite probably the only way) is to right click on the link and then select “Save link as…” or the equivalent in your browser. This will then let you save this wherever you choose and read it to your heart’s content!
Due to the time other people need to have the order of service (in order to prepare Powerpoint etc.) I normally choose the songs and hymns for our service on a Thursday. However, it’s not very often that the sermon is written by this point.
(I should say here that I like the songs and hymns, especially the ones immediately around the sermon) to have some kind of thematic connection to the sermon. Not that they have to exactly tally with the sermon’s theme, but that there should be some connection there.)
Normally this isn’t a problem as I know roughly the direction the sermon will be heading in. Sometimes I have to guess, as it’s still not clear by this point what the overall theme of the sermon will be.
This week, I thought by the time it came to song-choosing time that I knew where the sermon was headed, what the main theme was about. So I chose the song that immediately followed the sermon to fit closely with that theme (“Meekness and Majesty”) and duly e-mailed off the order of service.
The trouble is… the sermon is now about something quite different! So that song doesn’t fit in particularly well – but it’s too late to change it. So the options are:
Option 2 sounds the best to me…
Hello,
You may have noticed that I haven’t posted here for a little while (save for that post the other day about Beyond 400 – go and see it if you haven’t already). Anyway, I’m trying to get back into this and, as part of that, I’m updating the blog to try and make it look a bit fresher and nicer. You know how it is when you haven’t seen something for a while; you see all the things that need changing. So please bear with me and I’ll hopefully have it looking really quite super soon!
(Oh and don’t worry about the random images at the top – I’ll change those for something more meaningful…)
(Oh, oh and don’t forget to visit my personal blog for non-Greenfield related stuff.)
Beyond 400 is a new site that started properly yesterday. It’s a place for all the discussions about the future of Baptists in Great Britain (and especially BUGB), a conversation that has become especially significant following BUGB’s realisation that it may have a significant deficit in its finances.
There’s only one post on there at the moment (along with comments, such as those by some minister called Stephen…), but it’s already looking like some very thought-provoking ideas will be appearing there as time goes on. So, if anyone’s reading this blog and is interested in our wider Baptist life, then it’s definitely worth keeping tabs on the developing conversation(s) there.
Hello and a Happy New Year to you!
For those that can make it through the ice and snow this Sunday (and I completely understand if you can’t), I hope you’ll feel rewarded with what I hope will be a special service. It is our Covenant Service, where we renew our promises to serve God and each other in the context of our life together at Greenfield Church. As well as making those promises, we’ll be thinking a bit about what it means to do so, what it asks of us and the character of the God to whom we belong. If you want to know the passages we’ll be thinking about, they are:
Isaiah 43:1-7
Acts 8:14-17
Luke 3:15-22
Please don’t forget that the following Sunday 17th) is our next church meeting. Please make every effort to come to that if you can, as it will mark the start of what I hope will be a very significant period of thinking, praying, reflecting and praying over the next few months leading up to our AGM in May. I’ll tell you more this Sunday – another incentive for you to brave the Arctic conditions and come (but, please, don’t take any unnecessary risks to do so.)