The Way Ahead – Week 5 - Talking with Jesus again

Of all the many bands I have seen live over the years, there is one that I have seen slightly more than the others – Marillion, who I have seen something like 34 times. In the early days their lead singer was a guy called Fish who I have also seen many times as a solo artist after he left at the end of the eighties. But I had lost touch with Fish and his music and I was aware that he had been through some difficult and trying times. So it was with delight that I discovered his new album which contains some wonderful music. But in the midst of this is one track that has really got through to me, as it speaks of the darkness of being a fifty something year old bloke who has tried it all and it hasn’t worked – and the title tells of the consequences – “Blind to the Beautiful”

If you were at our Lent group the other evening then you will have heard it as I included in our evening, but the words have made me think, and also to think about our Way Ahead material this week, thinking about how the cost of discipleship is hard because God calls us to difficult things, and how on that journey that God invites to take with him through life we will be travelling with people who may not be our first choice of companions.

In the song Fish sings:

“The bread we have broken, the wine we drank from tarnished cups,
And I stopped believing in miracles a long long time ago,
I lost my faith and I sacrificed my soul,
I worshiped fallen idols, chased false prophets to an end,
To where I just can’t see the beautiful anymore”     © Derek William Dick 2013

There is a world-weariness in here that as Christians we feel that we should not recognise, that sense of how we should have joy all the time, but I suspect that many of us feel like Fish from time to time. When I reflect on the enthusiasm with which we started the redevelopment and how long it is taken; I still fervently believe that we are doing God’s will, and that it will happen, but I never knew it would take so long. Then there was all the mess of my failure as a minister last year, the huge number of people that I was not able to be there for and just how badly I failed you all as your minister, there is a sense even though I am trying hard to come back fighting that I am still struggling with those demons. Maybe this is why I felt in the Fish lyrics something of a voice that I could understand, even if I did not agree with it all the time.

He goes on to sing:

“We should have talked about the weather a bit more seriously,
More than stocks and shares and corporate wares,
We were blinded by the skeptics and their greed
I just can’t see the beautiful anymore; I just can’t see the beautiful anymore

I howled and I cried when the melody died, the song was finally over,
There was nothing to say, words stole away, their meaning lost in the ether,
What there was left stopped making sense, a broken up alphabet, language dispersed
I just can’t hear the beautiful anymore”     © Derek William Dick 2013

The companions on the Emmaus Road probably could relate to this as well. Battered and bruised by the events of Holy Week they stagger home, all their dreams have been lost and where was the hope in the middle of all that had gone on – it was lost and trampled into the ground.

Then into the middle of this sense of it all going wrong enters a stranger who makes sense of the things that they do not understand – a stranger that starts to bring order from chaos and hope from despair. As they journey on his message so speaks to the disciples that they invite him to stay with them. It is only when he breaks bread that they realise who it is and hope is restored.

Sometimes when we are journeying with people who are feeling broken the last thing that they want is a bright and a perky companion who quotes dumb platitudes at them, sometimes they would rather journey with someone who is in the same dark place and who understands, so that together you may find the voice in your midst who brings hope.

In our desire to work with our community maybe we need to reflect on how part of what we do is to go to dark places with people and to simply be there with them. It is not always our responsibility to put things right, sometimes we just need to be there to hear the third voice along with the other person.

Our questions from the material this week are:

Thinking about the cost of discipleship

1)            Can you think of an example in your own life when sacrifice or generosity on your part led to a sense of joy and freedom?

2)            How do you make decisions about what you give?

3)            What parts of yourself or your life do you still withhold from God?

Thinking about our company on the road:

1)            How socially varied is your church community> Why is that, do you think?

2)            Can you think of an example in your own life when you shared a sense of fellowship with an unusual bunch of people?

Then:

1)            Has there been any encounter in your life as a Christian, which you would describe as an “Emmaus Road” experience?

If you would like to hear the song by Fish the link is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLUIifWajXU

The Way Ahead - Week 4 - Talking about Faith (Part1)

Dear friends,

Just before we begin, a quick note to everyone to let you know that at the prayer and planning meeting on Monday morning we decided to split week 4 into two parts. This will allow two of the groups to catch up, and for more time to be spent on the wealth of material available for week 4 - any part of which could easily fill a session or a blog.

God Bless,

Ian

There is an old maxim that goes: You should never ask a question if you cannot handle the answer. Many years ago the Youth Group that Karen and I used to lead led a service at Kenton Methodist Church. It included, and please don’t ask me to remember why, a time of getting members of the congregation up to the front and then talking to them about conversations they wished they could have. We said to them that if they could have any conversation with anyone what would it be. The first few were what you would expect, many talking to Biblical characters about what they really meant when they said X or Y. Then we came to Janet Ford, a long standing member of the church, she took a big breath and announced to everyone, “I would talk to the burglar who broke into our house the other evening and ask him why he went through my underwear!!!”. This changed the mood of the worship somewhat and suddenly we were dealing with all sorts of pastoral issues, and real questions that needed to be addressed – what a difference one honest answer can make in the middle of an act of worship.

Jesus seems to have delighted in people who gave him honest answers to his questions, and to people who asked him their real questions. Think of how often we get stories in our Gospels about Jesus having a conversation with someone and it ends up going somewhere exciting. The woman at the well, Nicodemus who comes to Jesus by night, unnamed scribes who are just desperate for someone to talk to and to explore their faith with, the rich young ruler, the lawyer who wants to know who his neighbour is, the list goes on and on. Jesus seemed to love talking with people, listening to their real life concerns and sharing the Good News with them, even if they sometimes did not want to hear his answers.

One of the privileges that I get as the minister is that I get to have BIG conversations with people at key moments in their lives. To listen to people ask the BIG questions such as “Why me?”, and “Why did my partner die?”, and sometimes the one people feel that they shouldn’t ask “Where is God in all of this?” is a huge privilege, but it can also feel overwhelming, especially when people push you for a particular answer that I just don’t feel able to give. That said, it does beg the question, that when we sit with Jesus face-to-face to ask all our questions, what are the things that you will ask him first, and what are the answers that you want and/or expect.

In our material this week there are many examples of conversations that Jesus shared with people, who clearly he did not know too well;

1. in Mark 12 we read of the scribe who simply heard a conversation going on and came up to ask Jesus "Which commandment is the first of all?" (verse 28), only to get the amazing answers "The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these." (verses 29 – 30). But now step back and look at the wider story here, these questions came at a time that some Sadducees were asking him dumb questions that were designed to trick him, and so it is that at the end of his conversation we get the verse “After that no one dared to ask him any question” (verse 34) – not referring to the real questions, but instead to the fatuous questions that the Sadducees were asking.

Questions: 1. In what ways do you feel you are able to love God with your mind?  2. Are there questions about faith that you really want answered, but are afraid to ask?

2. in Mark 7 Jesus has a conversation with a Syro-Phoenician woman who seems to persuade him to change his mind, In Luke 7 we have the story of the Roman Centurion whose faith amazes Jesus so much that he heals his servant – which is a story that can be understood in many different ways. In both of these we read of Jesus engaging with people from beyond his own culture who take him by surprise. Jesus seems to delight in how Gentile people seem prepared to both ask awkward questions and trust him on issues that many of his own disciples would not

Question: Have you ever felt like challenging God in prayer? What happened?

3. in Mark 5 we read about Jarius’ daughter and the woman with bleeding. These were people who did not want to talk with Jesus but where through his actions, a conversation became possible that would not have been possible before

Questions: 1. Can you think of an example in your own life when being asked to talk openly about something vulnerable was helpful?
2. What does this story have to say to those who have to deal with chronic ill-health or impairment and are not healed?

So if I was going to ask you a question this week, the question that I would like to ask is what do you think that God has to say about Harwood Methodist Church? I am a fervent believer that God is with us on our journey, and that he causes us to speed up or slow down as we are ready to face the next hurdle, or need more time to sort something out. I also believe that he wants to talk to us as we undertake this journey.

I think that so often we can forget that the Christian faith is much more about the journey than the destination. A classic example of this is the way that we have so often painted a picture of how the point of life is death. Do we really think that God intends us to simply spend our lives getting ready for this life to end – it all seems a bit negative if that was his plan. That is why I would argue that God is much more interested in engaging with us in the journey, and that this journey does not end when our earthly life does. I think God wants to be talking with us and to us as we journey along, he wants us to ask him the difficult questions, he wants us to turn to him when bad things happen and to scream and shout at him when things hurt or don’t make sense – like Janet asking about why her house was burgled and why her most intimate spaces have been violated. You can call it prayer, or reflection, or whatever, but I just believe that God wants to talk to us as we journey on, and I believe that he will do what is required to enable that to happen – right down to sending his son to die on a cross so that we could be in a right relationship with him.

So, as we talk to each other about sometimes trivial things, how about talking with each other about the things that matter relating to our faith and maybe then, like the disciples on the Emmaus Road, we might find that there is someone else sharing in our conversation and making sense of the things that we don’t understand.

The Way Ahead – Week 3: Talk about Culture

I love the band Dream Theater - I saw them in Manchester the other week and they were amazing, but I have also seen them play many times in London, Leeds and on one occasion I travelled to New York to see them playing with Yes at Jones Beach – I was one of 40,000 people watching them in a concert with waves lapping the stage – it was way cool. On one occasion I was at one of their concerts in London with another Methodist Minister and I was suddenly struck by the type of people that made up their audience. It was almost exclusively male, white and with the same balding head and goaty beard I had. They were also about my age, and from the conversation I had had with the people in front of me, and other friends I knew were going, I knew there was a large percentage of IT professionals present, put simply, I was in an audience of people like me who shared my musical taste. To use street talk, I was with “my people”.

I then suddenly found myself asking a question; if I could tell all these people about Jesus, and they all wanted to know more about him, where would they all go to church? We had all gathered to listen to enjoy an evening of the sort of progressive thrash metal that Dream Theater play – how would these people feel if they turned up at one of our churches only to be given a copy of Hymns and Psalms and asked to sing hymns from 150 or 200 years ago in a service that was structured in a way that they may not understand, and which would almost certainly use words that they would not understand, such as salvation, justification, redemption, and Trinity - the list goes on and and on. I suspect that were this unlikely scenario ever to happen, in reality the reaction would be mixed, and it is all hypothetical anyway, but is interesting to ask what the culture is that the church believes it is fulfilling the needs of – and whether this is the predominant culture of the community within which we are placed. I am afraid that I have always nursed the suspicion that in reality we are a small community reaching out to a few people who are just like us, and no one else – but I would be happy to be proved wrong.

In the tradition of the St. Thomas Christians, the Christians who come from Kerala in Southern India, they have adopted the Hindu Caste system within their Christian faith. You may wonder how they can do this, and when I was talking with my friend Father Abraham Thomas, a Priest of the Indian Orthodox church who is of this tradition, I asked him this question. He smiled and said that everyone was welcome in their churches, but that they “only evangelised within their caste”. Just about every person I have told this story to has started by getting annoyed at it, until the follow up question is asked, “so what is the caste that our church only evangelises within?”. At which point a great deal of “hmmm”ing and thinking goes on – as they realise that this is pretty much what we do as well.

Even if I leave out issues of ethnicity, sexuality, and a number of other things that should not divide us, but which often do; there are much more basic things that can get in the way. How many events in the life of our church are arranged for parents with children? How many of you reading this blog are doing so because work prevents you from getting to one of the groups? How do you give time to your faith, your family, and your career? At Royston we had two groups entitled “Guys in a pub” and “Girls in a pub” – they were set up for Dad’s to go out in one night and the Mum’s on a different night. But behind these groups was a group of older ladies within the church who would come and babysit or help out to enable these groups to go ahead. These groups were trying to reflect a culture of young families within the church for whom there was pretty much no other way they could be involved – but they were supported by others in the church who saw the importance of this work of working with a part of the community that they themselves were not a part of.

Now let me further complicate the mix further. I think I can comfortably argue that there is a spirit in our age that means that we are all trying to do more and more, and feeling that life is evermore getting more complicated – again I would argue that these things can be linked, with the sense of not wanting to fall behind making us do more to stay ahead, which means that we have to balance even more our schedules, which makes feel even more out of touch, and so on. Most of us work hard at what we do, and very often it is our families that suffer that it all gets too much. To people for whom this is the culture that they come from, church can seem like a waste of valuable time – time they could be doing something else, or precious time to be with family. If this is true, how does the church reach out into this culture as well?

Pause for a moment and think about these first set of questions from the material:

1.       Many people feel stressed and lacking in time. It has been suggested that our culture has “a distorted relationship with time”. How do you respond to this idea?

2.       How would you describe your relationship to money?

3.       Where is the space for God in your life?

4.       What kind of self do you feel is being fostered within your working life or retirement?

Our material this week invites us to think about how we can speak to our modern culture in a way that is relevant, real and yet where we seek to put forward different ways of viewing the world. This is a path that is strewn with problems; how do we engage with a British Culture where people are used to being able to choose what they want? How do we offer hospitality to a culture that is used to paying for everything and where they assume that if they are paying, they have a right to say how things are? (You may call it the offertory, but you would be surprised how many people think they are paying the minister’s salary and that they therefore have the right to tell the minister what to do!!) It is an issue that we encounter regularly at funerals where sometimes non-church people want to re-write the liturgy to say what they want it to say – because they are paying the minister!! I had this myself only a few weeks ago.

The material asks:

1)      What traditions do you think you can learn from?

2)      Are there spiritualties it is dangerous to get involved with?

3)      Are there dangers in our own way of believing?

Finally, and at the risk of being controversial, the church loves to think that we are counter-cultural and about the business of changing the world. I would argue that history shows us that in fact the church tends to be driven by the values of society and is often behind the curve. I think the slow adoption of change in relation to attitudes towards women and sexuality amongst other things are perfect examples of where the church should have given a lead, but in fact is actually dragging its feet. Those who oppose this point of view very often see the church as the bastion of “old fashioned morality” but I am afraid that I simply can’t see this in so many cases. In our desire to engage with cultures that are different from our own we need to always be open to seeing that God is in that culture ahead of us and challenging us to accept things that we may feel uncomfortable with. Don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that everything is negotiable, clearly it isn’t, but I do think that we need to be clear on what is “up for grabs” and what is not. To me at least, changing the music that we use to reflect the cultures that surround us is totally acceptable, and part of how we bridge the gap between “us” and “them” – but something like changing my belief in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ is something that is not on the table. I really would like to have worship that Dream Theater fans would feel at home in, but if I have to remove the Gospel to achieve this then I, for one, am not interested, and likewise if by doing this I drive everyone else away, likewise what does that achieve? We need to have a way of engaging with the many cultures that we are a part of, but also of working in partnership with others to ensure that between us the needs of all people are met; we are not called to be all things to all people; but we are called to be what God wants us to be, to those people that he sends us to be alongside.

Some final questions to think about:

1)      What are the principles on which you base your personal morality?

2)      How can different generations share perceptions?

3)      Why are issues about sexuality the ones that divide us?

4)      How exactly should the Bible guide our decisions?

The Way Ahead - Week 2: Talk about faith

Many years ago, when I was a junior programmer, I remember doing a sales presentation to an important client. This was something that I had worked on for weeks and the account manager and I really wanted to show this potential client what we could do. As the client entered the room the computer that we were using failed. Since this was the days of mainframes, we were left looking at a blank screen. Phone calls told us that the failure would take a while to fix and we would simply have to wait whilst others fixed the system – in the meantime the other members of staff who were present got agitated / annoyed / angry / and abusive, whilst senior management tried to keep the potential client happy in the other room. Peter, the account manager, and I were both Christians and so we decided that we would walk away from where the other were and in the corner of the room where all the equipment was set up, we decided we would pray – which we quietly did. The reaction that this caused from the others who saw what we did was, frankly, awkward. They ranged from laughter, to suggestions that we were not taking things seriously. Peter and I thought we were taking things seriously, we did the only thing we could think of to do, and this was what our faith at the time said was the most serious thing to do.

I don’t know what your reaction to this story is and whose side you would take if you were there. It did cause a great deal of comment at the part of Raytheon where we worked, and we got quite a few positive and negative comments. That said it also seemed to give other people permission to tell us what they thought about our faith, and there were many conversations that followed from this – and when Peter got into trouble with the police it again caused eyebrows to rise.

In more recent times I ended working very closely with a wonderful colleague and friend called Irfan Khan who is now a Senior VP at SAP. He is a devout Muslim and the regular pattern of prayer that is part of their faith became a regular part of both his and my life in the years we worked together. When we had a lab built for us in the UK to allow us to spend less time in the office in the US, we insisted that we had a space allocated for Irfan’s prayer mat, and we made it clear that at 3:00pm Irfan would be saying prayers and the door would be closed. He and I discussed our faith’s for hours and hours, both as we worked in the office, and as we travelled the world together. Of all the people I have met on my faith journey, Irfan is clearly a person who has had a huge impact on my thinking and spiritual development, and I will never deny the presence of God at work in Irfan’s life.

When John Wesley set up his original bands he had a question to ask the band members “Is it your desire and design to be on this and all other occasions entirely open, so as to speak everything that is in your heart, without exception, without disguise, and without reserve?”. In the material this week there is some discussion of the Church Life Profile that the writers did that suggests that some people find it “problematic and even offensive to be asked to share what is deepest in their heart – this is private”, whilst others find it a real “disappointment when they do not feel that their church is a place where they can talk to other Christians about the issues they face living out their discipleship in the world”.

Stop for a moment and consider the following questions before we carry on:

1)      Why do you think many Methodists find it hard to talk about faith? (Ian extra: do you think that the assumption in this question is true?)

2)      How satisfied (or not) do you feel with the conversations about faith that happen around your church?

3)      With whom, and in what contexts, do you in fact feel most able to open up and share what is closest to your heart? What makes those people or contexts safe and fruitful for deep conversation?

One of the reasons that people often feel uncomfortable talking about their Christian faith is that the terms that we use are foreign to those who we are talking to, and the concepts that we accept can be subject to ridicule – “what do you mean he rose from the dead? – do you really believe this?”. Comedians at the moment seem to delight in pointing out some of the Church’s idiosyncrasies and where we do things that simply cannot be defended. I would want to argue that the discussion on Woman Bishops, both in its nature and the way that it has been conducted is a good example of this.

I have heard many sermons over the years talk about how as Christians we are called to be counter cultural, and I would agree, we are. But in accepting this there is a danger that we also suggest that it is acceptable to be culturally irrelevant – and here I would argue that we are not. On the night before Calvary, Jesus said to his disciples “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another. If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. If you belonged to the world, the world would love you as its own. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you.” (John 15:17). The fact that there is something different in our lives should be visible to those around us, and we should accept that some people will talk to us about it – but in accepting this I do not believe that we should simply treat this as a license to do things that make no sense. We want people to see that we are different because of the love that Jesus refers to, and because we stand against many of the things that the world accepts (greed, self-centredness, etc).

In my original two examples I think I would now suggest that the first is a classic case of good intentions leading to something that was pompous and made others feel uncomfortable, whereas the second is one of the most precious memories that I have. They were both counter-cultural but the difference was a sensitivity to others and how they felt – being aware of how others would understand the actions that were taken. Surely the same applies to all the things that we do as Christians beyond the boundary of our church buildings – whether it be what we place on our website, the way we walk through our community with a donkey, or the things we do in Christ’s name; we are called to be counter-cultural but we are not called to be irrelevant or frankly, silly.

Our material this week ends by asking us how much we know about the community that we serve, and asks whether part of our issue as Christians is that we do not know these people, their needs, or their ways of working, meaning that any attempt we have at sharing our faith and being disciples to them are almost certain to fail as we do not the right way to approach them and/or communicate our faith. Put simply we do not know how to be Christians in the real world without risking being or doing something that comes across in the wrong way – and the suggestion is that this results in us doing and saying nothing.

Three questions to end:

1)      Who is telling us the truth, and how can we tell?

2)      Are we powerless to influence things?

3)      Who is our neighbour? How can we discern which community we are called to serve in?

The Way Ahead - Week 1: Talk about Discipleship

At the end of Matthew’s Gospel, the final thing that Jesus says to his gathered followers is “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”(Matthew 28 vs 18 – 20). This has to be one of the most mis-used passages of scripture. You do not want to know the number of times that I have heard it suggested that this is a call to evangelism – when it clearly isn’t – this is a call to discipleship. It even goes into detail on what this means – for those who are being charged by Jesus are to make disciples by passing on what they themselves have received in the time that they spent with him – not by embellishing or adding to this, but simply by teaching the next generation what it was that Jesus had taught them – nothing more, nothing less.

It is fairly widely accepted that within the 12 disciples that Jesus chose there were some who were related to him (his brother, and maybe his nephew), people who had known him for a while, and people who literally gave up everything to follow him simply because he called them. We very much view these early disciples as his “inner circle”, the people that he shared his deepest thoughts with, and the ones that were there with him at the key moments in his ministry. Many of these disciples were so close to Jesus that we know their names almost as well as we know Jesus’ own name, Simon Peter, James and John, but then there were others who are less well known, or only known for a particular role that they had. Andrew only even gets mentioned when he is bringing people to Jesus, and others such as Thaddaeus (sometimes referred to as Judas the Son of James) are only names.

The disciples also came from a wide cross section of positions in society; fishermen, tax collectors, and maybe another carpenter. However, one thing is certain, their response to Jesus was complete and total – they gave up everything and followed him. The other thing that we can recognise that they all had in common was that they were all changed drastically by their experience. Leaving out Judas, for obvious reasons, we only have to look at the disciples before and after the day of Pentecost to see how drastic some of these changes were, but this was only the latest in a series of changes that had been happening all the while that they were with Jesus.

When we talk about discipleship we are drawing links between our journey with the risen Christ and the journey of those early disciples – literally we are trying to learn and put into practice all the things that those first disciples learnt in their time with Jesus. We are trying to learn from them what they learnt from Jesus.

The Time to Talk material this week includes a quote “The term ‘discipleship’ designates the whole life response of Christians to Jesus Christ. Everything a Christian believes and does is an aspect of discipleship: the goal of discipleship is to grow ever more Christ-like in every aspect of life” (Time to talk of God pp19), for in the same way that those early disciples were changed by their encounter and journey with Jesus, so are we.

One of the great failings of churches in general, and part of why I was keen that we should undertake “The Way Ahead” together, relates to another comment from the material, it says “much of church culture fails to make the connections between the gospel and our life in the world explicit, people whose primary energies are expended in their working lives, in businesses, public service, schools or the local community can feel that they do not have a ministry or a vocation.”

The material wants to challenge this and frankly so do I – for Jesus and his disciples did not live out their lives in a biblical bubble but instead they lived in the real world, facing the real issues of living in an occupied land with a violent and unpredictable oppressor in their midst. Those original disciples learnt about what God is all about by being with Jesus in real life situations. If we are to grow in our discipleship then what we learn from Jesus must be relevant to our everyday lives beyond the confines of the church, and if we are truly living as disciples, then hopefully others will see that there is something different about the way that we live our lives and will want to ask questions.

In putting together the material, it’s writers produced a paragraph that pulled together what they saw as a consensus of opinions regarding discipleship - before we get into the questions, see what you think “We agreed there was a sense of call – a disciple feels called and chooses to respond. The call is to a two-way relationship, where God keeps us company and we keep company with God. There has to be a willingness to follow – the disciple is on a lifelong journey of faith as a follower of Jesus and must be willing to ‘go for God’. The journey is not straightforward, but can include moving towards and drifting away from closeness to God. The aim is to become more Christ-like, being like Jesus and doing like Jesus. Discipleship is a discipline that can involve pain and cost; in some choices we make, the gospel asks us to be counter-cultural – how should we live, where do we place ourselves, who or what do we really serve? It also involves discipline; we are committed to learn, to pray, and show our faith in action. In our love of God we will also love our neighbour as ourselves. And in order to go on growing, disciples must be vulnerable, curious, able to live with questions, and full of desire to learn. How can the Church help us to be like this?”(Time to Talk of God pp 20)

So, can I invite you to think about this quote for a while – is this how you understood discipleship, and is this how you understood the journey that you are personally on?

In the sessions this week we will be looking at three questions to get us started:

1.       Which of the following quotes about discipleship can you identify with? Which do you disagree with?

a.       A disciple is an active, intentional learner

b.      A disciple is an apprentice and a practitioner – not just a student of the Word but a doer of it

c.       A disciple is a follower of a particular teacher

d.      A disciple is accountable to someone who knows them and helps them to learn and grow and live

e.      A disciple is outwardly orientated, focused on helping others learn what it means to be a disciple.

2.       What would your own definition of a disciple be?

3.       Think about your own life, and us the following exercises as a basis for conversation:

a.       Draw a “life-line” to represent your life so far, and mark on it the points that are crucial in your development as a Christian disciple, or

b.      Draw a large tree shape, with trunk, roots and branches. If the trunk represents your life as a disciple, think about and write in what you see as the important ‘roots’ of your discipleship. Mark on the ‘branches’ where your life reaches out to, and then put in what you believe or hope are some of the fruits.

Feel free to share your thoughts here, as we will be sharing them in the groups.

The Way Ahead - Here we go!!

This morning, the leaders of the different "Time to talk" groups that make up this part of our 'Way Ahead' met to pray, and to talk through what we would be doing this week. In the discussions that we shared, and in looking at the online material that has been produced, we felt that before sharing this weeks material, we wanted to share something from the introduction to the material - it is a description of the priorities of the Methodist Church as laid out in "Our Calling". We used this material when we were looking at our Vision for the church that we called "Which Way", and the famous post-it note that was produced contained its content broken down into "Our Callings" four parts. So just before we begin, listen to what the material has to say . . .

"Our Calling set out the reasons why the Church exists, namely to encourage worship, learning and caring, service, and evangelism, and the ticket of membership applies these to individual members in their continuing discipleship. This includes the calling to 'grow in faith and support others in their discipleship'.

Priorities for the Methodist Church, adopted in 2004, does not mention the term 'discipleship explicitly, but throughout the document there is an implicit vision of imaginative, empowered, confident Christians who are aware of God's presence, with prayer and worship at the heart of their lives, active for justice in the community, and confident in speaking of the things of God to those within and outside the Church. These disciples are to be made and nurtured in a flexible and innovative church culture, which is creating fresh ways of being Church together, and is focused on the growth of people rather than the maintenance of buildings and institutional structures. Clearly, we have agreed to try to create a culture where we intend to be and to nurture such disciples."

Now read on . . . .

The Way Ahead 2014

The Way Ahead

Welcome to the home of the Harwood Methodist Church Blog. We arer beginning 2014 by exploring The Way Ahead for our church family and seeing what God wants us to do to support what he is doing in the community. Watch this space for more exciting new entries when it all kicks off on February 2014.