Saying Yes to Life

I recommend this years Archbishop of Canterbury's Lent book to you. It is called 'Saying Yes to Life' by Ruth Valerio who works for Tearfund as their Global Advocacy and Influencing Director.
An excellent read with real stories, ideas on practical action and good questions at the end of each chapter to help us think what we can be doing to steward well God's creation.

Lent Lunches

Churches Together in Oadby are once again organising Lent Lunches for the six Saturday's in Lent. St Paul's is hosting the first one this year, this coming Saturday 29th February. Do come along and join us for a simple soup, bread and cheese lunch. Donations are being taken towards the work of Christian Aid.
Christian Aid produce a great Lent resource called Count Your Blessings which I commend to you and is available on their website.

#LiveLent

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of the season of Lent. On Sunday in church we gave away copies of the #LiveLent resource offering a reading, reflection and action to help Care for God's Creation. You can also download a free app to access the material.

Intercultural Worshiping Community

As part of our journey to explore what it means to be an Intercultural Worshiping Community we have added a welcome poster to our foyer which welcomes people to St Paul's in a variety of languages. We have also added a world map and on Sunday interviewed one member of our congregation who was born in India to learn a little about her childhood. We hope to learn more about where people originate from over the coming weeks as we recognise that Oadby is now the place we live and that we are all part of the world wide family of God.

The faith of Millennial's

I have just read an interesting article in the Church Times from 31st January (bit of catching up to do!) by Ruth Perrin who has done some research among millennial's about how faith survives in your 20's. She highlights 4 common threads among those who have kept their faith...

1. Get real. Young adults value authenticity. They are looking to see if Christians live out what they believe and can they be trusted. They want church to be a place of truthfulness (as opposed to everyone saying 'I'm fine') and a place where we stand together against the fakeness.

2. Talk with us. This generation are interested in participation, conversation and collaboration. They want to be included, valued and heard. They want to be respected and have their voice heard.

3. A desire for community. Multi generational relationships were found to be key; rooted in hospitality and generosity. When churches authentically model loving one another across generations, it has a huge impact. Supporting one another in community is a great way of doing this.

4. Something to live for. Younger generations are fare more aware of global issues and have a strong desire to do something about it. They are attracted to a God who shows concern for the poor, the marginalised, the environment etc. They want a church that is unapologetically radical and counter cultural in its way of living. 

The research shows that many wanted the church to be more honest, more hospitable, more relational, more radical, more inspiring and more passionate about Jesus. Bring it on!

Visit from Jakin

St Paul’s Charity of the Month this month is Jakin, a Christian Pregnancy Care and Counselling service for all those for whom pregnancy causes a problem. The charity’s founders included people from St Paul’s and the charity initially used St Paul’s premises.

During the Sunday morning service on the 16^th, Rose Scott, Jakin's counselling coordinator, introduced the charity to us. She used two anonymized case histories, one of a person considering an abortion as the only option and one of a person who had had a termination.

We were encouraged to pray for the work, including its clients and its counsellors

Life's two certainties...

Having faith in Jesus assures us that God is with us in everything we do. Jesus offers us fullness of life in the here and now and also the assurance of eternal life with him forever. Jesus does not promise that this life will be easy but that he will never leave us or forsake us. It is often said that there are two certainties in life, death and taxes! This is true and we don’t really like to talk about either. But death is something we will all face at some point until Jesus returns in all his glory. Many people plan for what they would like to happen with their material possession’s by writing a will. But permit me to ask a personal question, have you planned your funeral?

It may sound a morbid question but it is important to face it. In my time in ministry I have met with a few people to plan their own funeral. I have also spoken to people who had started to think about what they might want at their funeral and then died before they got to share their choices with anyone. One story that always sticks with me from my curacy was of a lady who I worked with on her mother’s funeral, she knew that her mum would have wanted certain things but she didn’t know what they were. After we had planned the service she told me she was going to plan her own funeral next because she didn’t want her children to go through the stress she had faced in planning her mother’s service. So do write down your music choices, hymn choices, favourite Bible reading and any other details that are important to you and let someone know. I have planned mine, make time to plan yours.

Persecuted Church

From Open Doors Secret Church Devotional
The Chinese Pastor pastor Samuel Lamb spent a quarter of his life imprisoned for his faith. "Before I was put into prison in 1955, this churches membership as 400; when I came out in 1978, it built up to 900 in a matter of weeks. Then after 1990, when everything was confiscated here and the church briefly closed, we reopened and in a matter of weeks we had 2,000 members. More persecution, more growth - that's the history of the Chinese church, that's the history of this church"
Do pray for the persecuted church, that it will remain true to its roots.

Jesus Said: I Am the Light of the World

Today's All Age Service was the 2nd of our series in which we are considereing
the "I am" sayings of Jesus. Today this was: "I am the light of the world." We saw how different the attitude of Jesus was to the people around as he dealt compassionately with the woman found to have been in adultery. We realised how Jesus was light compared to the darkness of the world around, the sorrow and evil and how he wanted to change his followers so that they too would be lights.

We continued this theme into our time of prayer as we wrote prayers on pieces of paper for the things that troubled us and brought them with a candle to a larger candle representing Jesus, the light of the world.

The series will continue on the 2nd Sunday of each month. Do come and join us.

Afternoon Tea & Cakes

It was great to see so many people join us yesterday for afternoon tea and cakes in the Barnabas Centre. Thanks to Wendy & Margaret and the team who produced and served it all. It was particularly special to see 3 ladies who have not made it out much recently all be able to come along and enjoy the cakes and the company.

Safeguarding

I recently watched a documentary on BBC2 called ‘Exposed: The Church’s Darkest Secret’. It was a difficult watch all about Bishop Peter Ball, the most senior figure in the Church of England to be charged with sexual offences. He managed to deceive many people and it was shocking how the attitude of the church at the time was to try and cover it up, to refuse to believe those who had made allegations and to brush it under the carpet. Hopefully the church has learnt from this appalling behaviour and now takes Safeguarding very seriously. Church should be a safe place where all are welcomed. Safeguarding is an essential part of our mission to make sure this is so. It is all of our responsibility to report any concerns we have to our parish Safeguarding co-ordinators who in turn speak with the Diocesan Safeguarding Advisors to do all that we can to make church a safe place.