Looking forward

While the rest of the world was celebrating Holy Cross Day (!) or the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity, All Saints' was following the readings for Proper 21, 2009!

This was primarily to allow me to test run some SU material, but it was also a good opportunity to talk about pastoral care.

This was a good Sunday. For the first time, we sent the children out before the first hymn - rather than before the service - which gave me the opportunity to pray with them and do a bit of input with my new sunglasses (modelled here by Rozi).

During the service we also prayed for our new authorised preachers and gave them their "letters". Rozi, John, Sue and Phil have all shown that they have gifts in this area and have therefore been made authorised preachers on the understanding that they will all complete three portfolio competencies during the next three years - or produce evidence of previous work. There are six other preachers in the Watling Valley who will also receive their letters in the next few weeks... This is an exciting development!

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...