I wonder how you feel about swimming. Just take a moment and think about it. If someone suggested going swimming to you, what would your gut reaction be? Perhaps you swim every day, or two or three times a week, and it would just be normal for you. Perhaps it would depend on where you’d be swimming – I love swimming in lakes and the sea, but not so much in swimming pools – you might be the other way round. Perhaps you’ve not been taught to swim, or are afraid of water, and the idea fills you with dread or sadness that you’d like to swim, but don’t know if you can. Such simple and normal thing – swimming. Such a range of reactions that are possible. I wonder where you are in that range.
Those of you who have been coming along to All Saints for a while will know that close to the beginning of each year, we remind ourselves of the vision that we believe that we’ve been given to energise and direct our work as God’s people in this community. For those of you who have joined us more recently, this might not be as familiar to you, so it’s a good opportunity to hear what we are about here.
At it’s most basic, we believe that are called to be closer to Christ and sent to be closer to others.
For the last five years or so our vision has been seen in these three key images.
This first one reminds us of all those things that God has poured into our lives, as individuals and as a church. A church that has experienced and is experiencing the generosity of God in so many ways cannot be hidden. It has to shine out, it has to spread out. In this image of our vision we see the generous riches of God pouring into this church, a beacon of light, overflowing to the community around us.
Here we have a representation of a meal in a house in Bethany. Jesus is seated in the middle. Mary is abandoned in adoration at Jesus’ feet. Martha is serving faithfully in the kitchen and Lazarus is leaning, in friendship against Jesus. All three are coming closer to Jesus, who is our Lord, our God, and our friend. In this image of our vision we see a Christ centred church of faithful service, abandoned adoration, and intimate friendship with Jesus.
Thirdly we have a strawberry plant, spreading by sending out runners. On these runners are tiny baby strawberry plants that have the opportunity to take root and to grow to become plants themselves, and to bear fruit. In this image of our vision we see a connected community of fruitful congregations, sharing the same DNA, growing in a variety of contexts.
As we work towards this vision, we do so in a way that expresses our core values of Loving God, Loving Each Other, Loving Our Neighbours, Celebrating, and Exploring.
Before I dive into talking about what we’re looking forward to in the coming year, and some changes to one of these vision images, I would like to take a moment to look back to last year, and what I said last January in this service. I shared at some length about the heritage of interchurch unity and its impact on evangelism in the past in Wellington. I suggested that our watchwords for last year would be evangelism and partnership. So what happened?
Well, on the evangelism side we welcomed the folk from Start to Stir, and explored together what it means to initiate conversations about spiritual things with our friends, families, and colleagues. On the partnership side we had some joint Wellington Worship Nights, joining with other churches in the area in worship. To be totally honest with you, we didn’t see as much immediate fruit from this as I hoped. Nevertheless, we are going to be continuing these endeavours. Work is already in progress on revitalising the links between the churches of Wellington and the wider area of Northwest Telford. We are working towards new opportunities to worship together.
Whilst I was on Sabbatical I did some reading around evangelism, and how we can encourage each other by sharing stories of how we came to faith, how we can pray faithfully for folk we know to come to faith, both expressions of that value of loving others. We are going to continue doing these things.
Also while I was on Sabbatical, on retreat at the Bless retreat house in France, I had a sense that God might be calling us as a church to a deeper intimacy with God. The retreat house is called Bethanie, and so my mind was drawn particularly to that second vision image that we have, which depicts the scene in the house in Bethany where Mary, Martha, and Lazarus lived. It is the scene described in the reading that we heard this morning from John’s eye witness account of Jesus’ life. My thoughts were initially drawn particularly to Mary and her abandoned adoration of Jesus, pouring out perfume and wiping Jesus’ feet with her hair. But, as I was reflecting on it further it occurred to me that actually all three of Martha, Mary and Lazarus were experiencing intimacy with Jesus, just in different ways. It seems to me that there is a true intimacy with Jesus in abandoned adoration, in close friendship, and in faithful service. We all express and receive love in different ways in our human relationships, so it makes sense that it’s the same in our relationship with God.
As a result of these reflections, and their clear links to one of our vision images and our value of loving God, I had already planned that at the beginning of this year we would spend some time in our morning services exploring different aspects of worship, the different ways in which we can grow in love for God, express our love for God, and deepen our intimacy with God.
And then, towards the end of last year it felt like God was showing us something in addition, something about a river. Ellie shared with us a picture of a river welling up from the front of church here, flowing down the central aisle and on into the community. As we explored this together, in a series of sermons and in conversations, this idea seemed to resonate with a growing number of us. People emailed and talked about similar pictures that they had had over the years, and how excited they were about it. Richard recalled a song he had written a couple of years ago, which we’ve already heard once this morning, and will be singing together later.
With all this bubbling up, I wondered if God was directing us to change our vision, to include something about the river in our vision. If so, was it an addition, or was it to replace something? As I explored this with the leadership team, it seemed right that it should take the place of the strawberry plant image. The ideas that this picture symbolises, of a variety of expressions of church will continue to be important to us, but we are going to replace it with an image of the river that wells up here – an image that Caroline is creating as we go this morning.
It seems to me that this also provides a healthy, Trinitarian, aspect to our vision images. The Father pouring in the treasure and light that pours through, the Son as the centre of our service, worship, and adoration, and the Spirit bubbling up and flowing out.
There are a number of Bible passages that we could have drawn on as a basis for this. Richard’s song is based on John 7. Psalm 107 speaks of the parched ground which is turned into flowing springs where the hungry can be brought to live. The main one we’re going to draw on, though, is the passage from Ezekiel that we have read this morning.
This speaks of God’s life-giving water pouring out into the community, where there will be freshness, creatures will come alive, and trees will be fruitful.
I wonder how you feel about swimming in this river?
Perhaps you swim in it every day and it seems completely natural to you. Perhaps it would depend on where you’d be swimming. Some people love the idea of wild swimming, others prefer the more controlled surroundings of a swimming pool. Perhaps you’ve not been taught to swim, or are afraid of water, and the idea fills you with dread or sadness that you’d like to swim, but don’t know if you can.
As we go into this year, and beyond, we are going to continue living all of our values. We are going to be Exploring this river that God has given us. We are going to learn together to swim in it, to be refreshed and healed by it. We are going to Celebrate with each other as we see the life that it brings to places that are dry. We are going to love each other as we encourage each other to splash out whilst being gentle and patient with each other. We are going to love others as we go out, dripping wet, so share this life giving water with others. We are going to love God as we accept the good things he is giving us and allow our whole life worship to be refreshed and filled.
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