Monday 3 December 2007

Local Preachers and Big Ideas

It's been one of those days - the kind you get when you come back from a holiday or a weekend away - a pile of post - a mountain of email - and some fairly urgent tasks that didn't quite get done before the weekend...
I spent most of the day working my way through some urgent jobs - keeping my eye off my "to do" list which is undoubtedly showing a number of red overdue items... Hopefully, however, we're moments away from an agreed share allocation, Walton will recieve the letter they asked for, and the Team Meeting agenda will go out ready for Wednesday. I've designed a labryth for Taste and See, discussed SU material for June and proposed some Church Council dates for 2008 - for three churches... All in a day's work... but not very exciting if you're reading this blogg.
On the other hand, I had lunch with Mike and we talked about people we would like to talk to about becoming Local Preachers. This is a big step forward and something I've been hoping for and praying about for a few years. We're going to pick up the Diocesan scheme for preacher training which is portfolio based and designed for those who are either exploring ministry, called to preach - or too busy to train as an LLM, NSM or OLM. We've got a small handfull of candidates who are in one or more of these categories - which is brilliant - and it's about time we did something to support them...
It may seem a small thing, but I am convinced we need more opportunities to build up local ministry - even if people like me have to fade away into the background a bit. For me, this isn't about filling some gaps in our service plan - it's about remodelling church...
Mike, on the other hand, is now organising fourteen Christingles in fourteen of our twenty schools! I suspect this is the only way to tackle a task of this scale. Great news, but I sincerely hope people give him the space to do it...

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