#holytrinityrathmines

This Sunday, Rob Jones spoke about the woman at the well in John 4.

With the women at the well, Jesus:

Accepts her

Cares for her

Takes seriously her struggle,

Challenges her gracefully

Invites her

Inspires her

  “Living in community is inevitably a choice to lie down on God’s operating table and open our hearts to the Holy Spirit’s healing through one another. It is an invitation to spiritual surgery, made all the messier by our inexperience in using and submitting to the “surgical tools” of gracious truth-telling and patient listening. It surprises me how the Spirit shows up again and again to help us through these messy surgeries. God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness”

- The Intentional Christian Community Handbook: For Idealists, Hypocrites, and Wannabe Disciples of Jesus by David Janzen

Scott Evans spoke on Sunday with a talk entitled; Your Exodus, Their Exile.

 Just wanted to send you on a quick funding update! So we just had a meeting with the coordinator about how to sustainably invest the money Holy Trinity gave us. Here is what we are doing with your generous donations: 

1. We are buying school supplies (copy books and pens) for every single child in the primary school we are working with here in Malawi. When we were teaching we were shocked to see many kids didn't even have a pencil or a scrap of paper for themselves, so this will change a lot. 2. We will be able to single handedly fund the painting and decoration of the new nursery school block. This new block is important because at the moment 1-6 year olds are all in the same classroom which makes lesson planning close to impossible! Funding to build the block has already been secured. 3. My absolute favourite- in August, the final year in primary school will be getting their state exam results. It is expected that one or two will get high enough grades to qualify for entry to secondary school- but it is far too expensive to afford. We will be able to offer TWO FULL SCHOLARSHIPS to boarding school. This could change the whole course of these kids' lives and I can't describe how exciting that is!! No one deserves that chance more than these precious kids. 4. We will be able to buy toys for the nursery class- they currently have none at all. I'm sure you can imagine how special that will be for the small ones! 5. We have brought two suitcases full of clothes, books and school supplies for the kids in Tanzania already. We had some funds left over and we bought a few football kits and bottles of nail polish (the most coveted items in this village) to give as gifts to a few kids here in Malawi who we noticed being bullied and left out. We wanted to let them know that they were special to us, and to the Holy Trinity community too. Thank you so much!! I'm so excited!!

Recently I've been pondering the role of imagination in our Christian walks and indeed in the future development our new community. Saint Paul speaks of the importance of our imaginations when in Ephesians 3:20, he writes: "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us. " 

Both post-modernity and post-Christendom encourage the use of the imagination. A number of commentators have endorsed and encouraged the use of imagination in responding to the missionary changes facing the Church. Resisting the temptation to advocate minor changes they are urging a more thorough transformation of the church than has yet been envisaged by many. Recently the Archbishop of Canterbury talked about  three major issues facing the church in a changing world; a crisis of foresight, a crisis of vision and a crisis of imagination or creativity. He is convinced that “a number of our tried and tested methods of being the Church won’t carry us very far into the future and warns that a little tinkering and fine tuning won’t be of much help. He goes on to say that the parish model is still extremely important and along side it we need to fundamentally imagine new way of being church, in ways that  authentically reflect a biblical theology of the Church and also equips believers to serve God in the very demanding world of today. He also says, borrowing from Walter Bruggemann, there is presently “a call for all Christians to be a subversive hope kept alive by the ministry of imagination.” Eddie Gibbs confirms this, and reminds not to forget our inherited Anglican traditions but adds that “the issue is not simply one of ecclesiastical re-engineering. Rather, perhaps we are talking about a  different way of being the Church.” So what is actually meant by the term and process of re-imagination in this context? Tom Wright defines it well when he says the “re-imagination should not be regarded as a superficial marketing ploy but as an intellectually serious act of self-definition. To have integrity, the process must maintain continuity with the concerns of the past whilst exhibiting the capacity for self- criticism.”

All the above prompts the question of what might be the components of such a process of re-imagination when we think of church communities today? A great question I think, and one we as a new community continue to ponder as we head into a new season .

On Sunday we concluded our "Going Deeper" series with Dilys Jones speaking about Going Deeper in Belief and Trust - or how to break your stress habits! We Explored John 14 and Philippians 4 v 4-7, we looked at what stands in the way of our trust in God, how well do we know Him and does the Holy Spirit equip us to be less shaken by our circumstances and really stand firm in our faith. You can listen above or download it here. 

Some amendments to the quotes from the sermon - "… maybe doubt is not the opposite of faith, maybe fear is the opposite of faith. And Maybe our lack of faith isn’t so much a disbelief in the existence of God but more a fear and distrust that there is a good God."

This quote is actually from One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp and not Undaunted by Christine Caine.