I know that many people were not able to attend the APCM because of childcare commitments, or got caught out because of the holidays!
So I'm posting my sermon for the meeting, and hope that members of the congregation will take the time to both read it and take up its challenge for the coming year.
Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.
At the PCC recently we have been discussing our mission priorities. It is only 3 years since our Growing a Healthy Church exercise, and we are still being guided by our conclusions on that day that we need to be working to develop our spirituality and be a Church which clearly puts God at the heart of everything we do.
But that is a general aspiration, and this discussion was about trying to focus our energies over the coming year in response to a suggestion from the Diocese. This suggested three aspects to mission – Attending to God, Building Community, Commending God’s love for the world. We looked at what we were already planning practically and how they might fit into these categories. It’s an ongoing discussion and the new PCC will have to take on the task of thinking this through further with me.
What was clear from our discussion is that as with all these schemes it is a useful exercise to concentrate on improving one thing at a time. You may remember from Growing a Healthy Church the advice to concentrate on doing a few things well. Yet at the same these priorities are part of the same thing.
As individual Christians and as a church family we have three interwoven parts of our Christian lives; knowing, living, and proclaiming.
Knowing the faith is both about our personal relationship with God, and knowing the content of our faith.
Living the faith is living out in our own lives and as a community the implications of that faith.
Proclaiming the faith is about sharing our Christian lives with others, both in the specifics of encouraging others to know the Lord Jesus, and in the love and care for our neighbour which he demands from us.
You can see at once how these three are related. Clearly one of our priorities at St Peter’s is to share our faith with others, to encourage others to join our church family and to grow our church.
As you know we are using the Credo course again as a way of giving us something to invite others to. We were one of the parishes in the Diocese who experimented with Back to Church Sunday last year and are looking forward to using it again this year supported by some Diocese wide advertising. These are some of the structured practical things that we can do as a church to help encourage others to come and join us, or to become more involved.
Yet clearly we cannot effectively proclaim, share our Christian faith with others if we are not committed to living it clearly ourselves. The most effective way to evangelise is to live such a distinctive and clearly committed Christian life that other people are interested and encouraged by your witness to find out what makes this so important to you. This is true whether you are sharing your faith with a work colleague or your children.
One of the many encouraging things that has happened this year is the effort in the Children’s Liturgy to make provision for our children over the school holiday periods, this is a very important and symbolic move. I quite understand that our children’s liturgy leaders, who do a sterling job, are often on holiday and need time in church themselves. Yet if we have no provision for our children at these times, what are we saying? Are we not encouraging a view of church that it is indeed like school, something that is only a part time commitment, and one you grow out of. It was precisely for that reason that we began to stop talking about Sunday School and talk instead about the Children’s liturgy. If we want others to respond to our invitation to join us as Christians we have to show them that we are serious about what we are inviting them to. That it matters to us.
I am very interested in some of the research that shows that how committed we are to our celebration of the Eucharist plays a big part in whether we provide a community in which others find this service a good place to meet God, as it should be.
And how can we live our faith effectively if we do not know what the faith is ourselves. How can we share our faith if we do not know what we are sharing.
As many of you will know my girlfriend is a Roman Catholic, and with her little girl we regularly attend a Saturday evening mass so that she can fulfil her obligations as a catholic and still attend St Peter’s as well. It has given me a new level of respect for all of those of you struggling to help your children through the service, as there is usually no children’s provision on a Saturday evening. At the same time it also makes it very clear how much you need to be connected yourself to what is going on in order to communicate it to others.
What I really want each of us to do this year is to reflect upon what we as individuals are doing to grow in our Christian faith. It is perfectly possible to come to church faithfully every Sunday, listen attentively to the readings and the sermon, reflect upon them and grow in our life with God. However many of us aren’t able to do that. If you are helping with the Children’s Liturgy or looking after children you won’t have the luxury of even being able to listen easily to the readings and sermon. So I want each of us to reflect on what we are doing to grow closer to God.
Maybe you are the sort of person who gets on best beavering away on your own. Check out the resources as we slowly add them to the parish library, or come and ask me for suggestions.
I suspect that most of us however are not cut out for self study. I really want to encourage you to think about joining in some of the groups we organise. There are the Credo courses, Bible study groups, especially at Advent and Lent, and many other opportunities. I have been leading the Following Jesus course at Church house this year and it has been very helpful. It is not demanding, other than a commitment of an evening a week during term time. It involves getting to know the Bible better and seeing how it connects with what the rest of our Christian and Church life. I really can’t recommend it highly enough to anyone who has been confirmed. This is a very good course, and there will be another one beginning in September.
As always, within the constraints of time I am always happy to take suggestions as to what we could be doing better or differently in the provision of groups and other support to help us grow in our faith.
By doing these things we will, both as individuals and as a church, be able to respond better to the challenge that we heard in the first letter of Peter.
Always be ready to make your defence to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you.
Because it is together that we make up the church – and our lives are shaped in this way then when we invite or welcome new members to our family they will see a church in which God is known and our faith lived out and proclaimed.
As always be assured that you are all daily in my prayers – and I ask you to remember me in yours.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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