Week 26 – Reach Out!

St. John’s Methodist/URC market stall has been running for 3 years now. The vision was originally to have a presence in Stone High Street to reach those who never go inside a church, but it has developed into support for fellow Christians and increased fellowship among the Church members as well.

The stall begins each month 2 weeks before we get into the High Street with a visit to the Methodist Book Centre at Hanley to choose the new stock- Christian books, cards, stationery, toys and other gift items. We try to take things we haven’t had before, so while, for instance, we might take a book about prayer every month it will be by a different author. Sympathy cards are always in demand, but we vary the ones we bring.

The day before the market we load up the cars: the night before we don’t sleep very well… and at 8 o’clock we’re in the High Street setting up the stall. The stall is there for us, so we just have to attach the sides and display the banner and the stock, which takes about an hour. On Saturday we got the stall arranged before it rained! There weren’t many people about all day because of the weather, but we still gave away 119 balloons with our church’s name on.

Two of our helpers are members of a Christian motor bikers’ group. On Saturday one was delighted to talk with a fellow Christian motor biker. Behind his back his wife bought a fish sticker to go on his bike. We gave away a couple of copies of the Bikers’ Bible to some interested men.

Our helpers often park one of the bikes by the stall. This attracts a lot of interest from the men, who come over to see it and have a talk. A month ago a young man stopped to look at the bike, and he was asked if he wanted to speak to the owner, who was busy blowing up the balloons. ‘No, just looking,’ he said. Half an hour later he came back and asked if he could have one of the flowers with a text attached, which we were giving to ladies that day, and of course we were very happy to. We used to be visited every month by one of the nuns from the local Dominican convent, but we haven’t seen her for several months. This time another Sister stopped to tell us ‘our’ Sister has been very poorly, so we wrote a Get Well card for her and sent her a little Joy in Your Pocket booklet. We’ve missed her- she often bought books from us and enjoyed talking to us. One helper spent a long time listening to a lady on a mobility scooter.

We’ve recently found a source of beautiful (free!) postcards with a text on, and on Saturday we gave away a lot of these. One young recently appointed teacher was very pleased to take a set of 35 or so of these to use in teaching RE to his class. He’s not a church goer, so we gave him a contact phone number. If he needs resources we can get them for him to see- no obligation, as they are on sale or return. On a previous occasion a teacher said she had to tell Bible stories to her class and didn’t know any: she was very happy with the 2 books of stories she bought. One single Mum told us about the difficult times she had had, and how pleased she was to have moved back to Stone. She bought an Aled Jones CD, and we invited her to Church with her disabled daughter, assuring her they would be very welcome. So far they haven’t come, but we’re still hoping. A disabled lady who had a troubled childhood and who has been victimised where she lives bought a book about someone who had had similar problems and overcame them. The next month she came back for the second book which told the next part of the story. As we were packing up this Saturday a young Mum asked us what time our services are. Will they be in Church on Sunday…?

As usual we had an opportunity to talk to each other and exchange news and concerns. A close relative of a Church member has died; a very difficult situation in someone else’s family has been resolved happily, and one of our members was delighted to tell us she’s got tickets for the Olympics! There isn’t always time for this after services, and we’ve grown closer as we work on the stall together. But we’re in the High Street, giving away mince pies at Christmas and hot cross buns at Easter, always with a Christian message and an In Your Pocket booklet. We’ll never see the results of our work, but we have faith that God will use what we do to Reach Out to people who don’t know Him yet.

Jill Ashmore

Week 25 – Rules

As I drive I try to keep to the left, although I must confess I am not very good with speed limits !   Why bother anyway?  well, apart from not wanting to get killed or to kill or injure anyone else, it is the “law”, there are “rules of the road”!   If you are like me you will not be keen on rules and regulations.   They are often a nuisance and can be rather petty, and now we are inEuropewe have even more!

Many shout about freedom and the rights of the individual, but this is not possible because in order to have a civilised society there must be some law and order.  Even  in churches,  there are rules, and certain things cannot be done on our premises.

What does God think about rules ?    Jesus castigated the Pharisees for their rules, and yet he gave us the Ten Commandments!   At Weston we have been going through these with John, and our studies have brought up some interesting thoughts and comments.   Just as our secular authorities realise that we are not a perfect society, and we are capable of planting large trees in front of our neighbour’s windows, or a skyscraper in the back garden, so God is well aware of our weaknesses, and he starts us off with a framework for living with the Commandments, and in these times of “anything goes” we sure need this !.

Do we see Jesus simplifying or “dumbing down” the Commandments, as in Matthew 22  when he answered the Pharisee with the two basics, love God then love your neighbour as yourself ?     Certainly not!  But rather than advocating a set of rules like the Pharisees, Jesus looks deeper and calls us to live with an attitude of love, in that all our thoughts and actions have this motivation.   All through the gospels we see Jesus considering what is in the heart, not the “notching up” of our obedience to a set of rules!

Of course, all people can be moral, kind and good, but as Christians we seek to live this kind of life to please God,  and he gives that enabling power for us to keep these Commandments.

Les Overton

Week 24 – God of Surprises

I remember vividly the day Jacob was born. It was so unexpected. Sandra was 27 weeks pregnant and we were just about to move house. When Sandra was admitted to hospital the previous evening, we couldn’t have imagined what was to come. Having never been through this before I was expecting many hours of labour, and then the joy of holding my Son!

Sandra went into labour on 4th November 2005 and ten minutes later Jacob was born. He was 2lb 5oz, and was immediately whisked away from us and put on the necessary ventilation system, before being transferred to Crewe to their Neo natal ward. I felt a whole array of conflicting emotions? I felt great Love and joy that Jacob had been born. Equally I felt great fear due to his prematurity and a sense of loss – that he hadn’t been born in the manner I had hoped or imagined. So many mixed emotions!

As I near the end of my time here in Stafford Methodist circuit, I feel a huge complex and conflicting range of emotions again. I feel a sense of excitement as I look forward to a new challenge. I feel a sense of inadequacy as I take on 6 rural churches and all that entails. I feel a huge sadness as I leave behind the people of the circuit. I have loved my time here and have grown attached to the people, the church life and the colleagues I have worked with.
I am truly thankful for my time here.

When I first entered the ordained ministry I did a four year curacy. I was working in four churches, three of them rural, and had a wonderful 4 years. I loved rural ministry, but assumed that from then on, my life would be one of suburban parish ministry. How wrong could I be?

A significant part of the ministry here in the circuit is rural, and my return to the Anglican Church sees me taking on responsibility for 6 rural churches just south of Market Drayton! Ten years ago I could not have seen anyway I would take on this job! It’s strange and wonderful that the Psalmist says ‘That God’s thoughts are not the same as our thoughts, and God’s ways are not the same as our ways.’ He is the God of surprises and sometimes calls us to do things we could never imagine.

I am truly surprised, but I am certain of one thing – that he will equip me for the ministry he has called me too. This God of surprises always does!

Andy Ackroyd

Week 23 – Volunteer’s week

The speaker at the church women’s meeting was from the local Volunteer Centre, he had been invited to give a talk about volunteering.

‘How many of you are volunteers?’ he asked.  Several hands went up.  There was the person who spent a day a week at the Citizens Advice Bureau, the person who helped staff the Oxfam shop, the counsellor with the Bereavement and Loss service, the group facilitator at the local hospice …  The speaker turned to the person playing the piano, ‘So how much are you paid for tickling the ivories?’, he asked.  A similar question was put to the person chairing the meeting, the group treasurer and the meeting secretary.  Of course, their bemused answer was ‘Nothing’.  ‘So that makes you a volunteer – doesn’t it?’

June 1st. to 7th. each year is National Volunteers’ Week.  Voluntary sector organisations the length and breadth of the country hold events to celebrate the incredible work which their volunteers do.  Local Councils for Voluntary Service have road shows to publicise the work of volunteers and recruit new ones.

The Church as we know it could not run without volunteers.  Over three-quarters of all Methodist worship is lead by volunteer Local Preachers; people who work through a part time training course at University level, lasting on average three years and then make themselves available to plan and lead worship once or twice a Sunday; in some parts of the country the majority of Sundays a year.  Those services take place in church buildings which are usually maintained by a team of volunteers.  It is volunteers who form the Church Council, governing the Church and the life of the Church community.

Sunday Schools, Youth Clubs, women’s meeting, men’s meetings, house groups – they all run because volunteers make them happen.  It is volunteer pastoral visitors who bring the support of the church to the housebound.  It is volunteers who undertake the outreach work of the church – groups like street pastors – and carry out much of the social support work which is church sponsored.

But the church hardly seems to recognise all this volunteering.  Church members do not seem to recognise the church work they do as volunteering – so they are their own worse enemies!  Volunteers’ Week comes and goes each year without the Church seeming to notice its existence, a massive piece of institutional amnesia!  Why doesn’t the church celebrate all this volunteer involvement?

Let’s give three cheers for the myriad of Christians who give unstintingly of their time, making the church community work and sharing the good news of the gospel.  The church would be very different without them.

Let’s also give three cheers for the myriad of Christians who give unstintingly of their time as volunteers with innumerable volunteer and community organisations – the country would be a poorer place without them.

And let’s celebrate Volunteer’s Week and give it the place it deserves in the life of the church community.

Ian Mason

Week 22 – Does what it says on the tin!

I had a few days holiday from work recently and I thought that I’d spend time out on my bike or perhaps walking up some hill somewhere in the beautiful spring sunshine.  But following a brief (and to be honest, one-sided) discussion, I was swiftly disabused of these dreams by family members who explained that the word ‘ho-liday’ is derived from the same Latin roots as ‘Ho-rticulture’ and actually means ‘Rest and Recuperation in the Garden’.  Having failed my Spanish ‘O’ level (and Spain is sort of close to Italy) and having attended some strange lessons in conversational Italian which allows me to say “my uncle has a wooden leg” (“mio zio ha una gamba di legno”, if you want to know) but does not allow me to order a cup of coffee and a custard slice in a Rome cafe, then, unlike my uncle I suppose, I had no leg to stand on re: Latin and could not disagree with their plans for me to spend time in honest toil in the garden.

Of course, I asserted my authority and arrived at the D-I-Y warehouse to my own timescale – No, not 9am on Monday as suggested, but 930! (They have staff training on a Monday morning – ed).  The first job lined-up for me was to paint the garden fence because it was a bit tatty looking.  My motto has long since been ‘why do today what you can put off until tomorrow’ and my thinking was that if the fence offended my family quite so much every time they looked out of the kitchen window, then why not drop the blinds on that side.  But they ‘put me right’ and so it was that I was faced with a mountain of different fence preservatives – each with evocative sounding names and pictures of happy gambolling, carefree families caught up in excitement at their beautifully painted fence.  So I picked something called ‘Autumn Glow’ – which had a smiling group and, importantly, a man sitting down and reading a book.  ‘That could be me’, I thought, and rushed home to get started.

Now I should explain that I am a West Bromwich Albion family and our bitter rivals are that lot from down the road fromWolverhampton.  Taking a dispassionate view with an honest caring outlook, I cannot see past the idea that it may be best if they quietly left the league and that their ground should be flattened and turned into a car-park.  But until that happens their team colours are based on something called ‘Old Gold’, a sort of washed out orange, so you can imagine my delight when I opened my tin of ‘Autumn Glow’ to find a perfect match for the Wolves colours!

Now I know that paint may subtly alter colour after drying, certainly the chap on the tin reading his book surrounded by his happy family did not look to be sat in the middle of The Molineux (although the standard of football from his toddler looked to be better than that normally served on a Saturday afternoon).  So I set to work with a flourish confident that the colour would fade.

Six weeks later – it hasn’t.

What is more frustrating is that the paint is promoted with the phrase ‘it does what it says on the tin’.  No, it doesn’t.  It didn’t tell me that I would end up with one half of my garden making me look as though I’m some die hard fanatic for ‘that lot down the road’.

‘It does what it says on the tin’ is a phrase that has entered the language as meaning ‘100% guaranteed’, something you can rely upon….and that’s a promise.

But as I gaze out on my living tribute to Steve Bull, Derek Dougan and Billy Wright, so it occurs to me that I feel let down; perhaps as we get older, we feel this more – certainly there is a cynical view that nothing can be trusted forever, that at some time, whatever is promised, you will be let down.  The latest technology soon becomes obsolescent junk, a ‘job for life’ is a thing of the past, in this celebrity obsessed world everything seems to last for just a few fleeting fashionable moments.

Well can I suggest that there is one on whom you can rely, one who promised that he will always be our friend; that he will be with us every moment of our lives; that he will give us hope and peace; that he will never let us down.  The one sent to give us forgiveness for all that we’ve done wrong in our lives – our saviour Jesus.

My paint will eventually fade and waste away.  Jesus’s love for each one of us will never reduce.  He does exactly what he says on the tin, and promises us life eternal.  Halleluiah!

David Hemingway