chocolate mission

I was preaching on Sunday – at Patchway – and picked up this great little leaflet (if you click on the image you can, hopefully, see more clearly)  they’re using to drop into people’s homes in their community. I thought it was really good because, whilst I try to be ruthless with stuff through the letterbox and don’t always even open things before they go in the recycling, at least everyone, I reckon, would use the tea bag and eat the chocolate.In fact,  Patchway generally was a great encouragement – how we’d like to see Home Mission money working fruitfully all the time. I remember going to one or two Church meetings when the church were trying to work out how on earth they could move forwards from the mess they were in. We appointed Andy, who was a member there and also studying at Bristol Baptist College, as their Pastor. General wisdom would suggest not a wise move. Thankfully General wisdom wasn’t around and the Church went with the one guy most could trust in the circumstances. Three years on, he’s been appointed full-time. The Home Mission money will enable that to happen, just as it’s enabled the Church to benefit from Andy through College. The age profile is significantly down, there are more people in a way that really hits you when you only go once a year or so and there was a real sense that God is good around the place.

I compare that to the deacons meeting I went to last evening. (nothing wrong with the deacons you understand, just the content). Before that I’d watched the first two sets of Andy Murray v Richard Gasquet. Two sets down going into a third set tie-break, we had to switch off to start the meeting (I don’t always get my way). As part of the evening we did one of my little exercises, which I love, about which season the deacons felt their Church was in – overwhelmingly ‘winter’! So, how do we prepare for spring becomes the question? When I finished, I jumped into the car, switched the radio on and he’d done it. Maybe we should have all watched the tennis after all.