Whew, what a day!
I started by getting up later than usual - although one may argue that I started by taking a very long time to put an end to the previous day. But that's another story.
Then we had this great service with Jez, the Baptist Bishop :-) OK, please don't quote me on that! :o
It was great to hear him say that he never saw so many people in our church; I actually thought we are a bit low. But beside that, worship was exciting, his sermon was great, we all had a wonderful time.
But what made my day was the lady who just popped in to ask if we will have a service of dedication for her baby. Completely out of the blue, non-churched mum. These are the people we are here to serve - Yes, God, please keep them coming!
All right, some of the people who still had a margin of hope for me might now declare me a blooming heretic for even considering this - but so what, a while ago people said that about some teacher from Galilee too.
Evening service was a bit of a damp squid by comparison - I had a bit of a struggle preaching today's Lectionary passage. Normally I wouldn't have touched the subject with a 10 foot pole, but I promised I'll follow the Lectionary for a whole year, and so far I've been a good boy. Or something.
Then we had a long discussion about the 'problem'. What do we do with all these teens that have been invading our church? Ha, if they keep it up, soon there'll be more youngsters than pensioners in the church, and then what do we do? Or something. (I see a pattern developing here)
And then later we had a group discussing what's the next step in our link with this orphanage/school/church/thing in Malawi. Great stuff. We may be a tiny church but who says we can't have a global impact?
So now I'm up trolling the blogs (great something-to-think-about article regarding The Coming of the Evangelical Collapse at Persona, here, borrowed from somewhere else, see the links at Persona.
Well, it's only 2 am, can't go to bed this early, can I?
OK, maybe I should leave this post and go get myself into some other mischief.
2 comments:
Sounds like a great day and God be praised a great problem to have. Send me some of those teens. Tell me more about malawi.
Hey, David, great to hear from you!
It's a bit far from here to where you are at, even if certain pilgrims did make the trip a while back. Besides, our teens are not for hire! :)
It's really funny; we've been pestering them to do a Christmas play, so this year they did it. It was GREAT! But the greatest thing is what it did to them - now they are haunting the church building almost every day, they started their facebook page, with comments like how great it was to be at church, and, well, it's like they are a totally different bunch of teens. Some 25 of them, 2 of which are from Christian families.
Malawi is just another unlikely story. This young Romanian lady finished her University training as a doctor, and before getting a job, she borrowed a lot of money to go work as a short term missionary in Malawi. No organisation or anything, she just bought a plane ticket and went there. She served in a hospital, a small coutryside clinic, and then she went to worship in this village church. So she found out that the church started their own orphanage, built a small primary and secondary school, and supports over 30 families who care for other orphans who don't have a place in the orphanage.
So, the lady moved from Romania to England, and now she is in my church. In fact, she is my sons' girlfriend. She's been to Malawi twice since, and we and another local church did some fundraising for them. There is now a link with this work in Malawi that we try to keep and expand, so a bunch of us have been playing with the idea of establishing a proper registered charity to deal with the legal and financial side of things on our end - and also to help us expand this to other ministries that are involved in child care in Malawi and elsewhere in East Africa. In the meantime, a family from Kenya moved here and joined our church, so through them we have links with a few charities in Kenya too - we are turning into quite an international little group.
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