In periods of change it can be easy to get a bit flustered: to let things get under our skin that wouldn’t normally bother us. Things will look a little different at times, and mistakes will doubtless be made.  We’ll feel the insecurity, the seeming fragility and the strangeness of the New. At the same time, our lives may well get busier in all sorts of other ways, just with the stuff of work and family, especially in the run-up to Christmas.  And along with that comes an opportunity the Enemy never fails to take: to accuse the church of ignoring us, taking and never giving back, and perhaps above all of MAKING us too busy to enjoy life.

If we are to cope with this well, the first thing is to know our enemy, and see what he’s about.  Let’s all decide right now never to blame the church for over-busy-ness that really comes from other sources.  The second is to take adequate time to REST: and I don’t mean indulging in “leisure activities”, I mean proper, Sabbath-style Rest.  I’m not going all Pharisee here, or even Western Isles Presbyterian.  I just mean that high octane computer games, paint-balling, sky-diving, road-racing etc are leisure, but they are not REST.

Sitting with a Bible or a novel in the garden where you can hear the birds singing and the trees rustling in the wind would qualify.  Sitting with a coffee listening to a favourite album would qualify, especially if you have good hi-fi.  Going for a walk would qualify.  A night of pure silliness in the pub with people you are in no way responsible for might qualify.  If your work is mainly in the mind, even a vigorous work-out at the gym might qualify.  Certainly the prayer of thankfulness: best done with a journal, qualifies.  (In fact you might say that’s one of the purposes for godly rest: it gives us time and space to count our blessings, which re-calibrates our life-dials in a most wonderful way.) These are all activities that actively reduce stress.  They allow our adrenalin (etc) levels to return to normal.

Rest is a discipline.  That’s why God insists on it.  We’ve all got a thousand reasons not to rest, and if we allow our stress levels to get unhealthily high, we all have a million reasons why we CAN’T.  And that’s enemy activity too: telling us we don’t deserve to rest.  In fact I’m not sure deserving comes into it at all.  Rest is a medical necessity and a Biblical imperative, so only a fool wastes time wondering if he deserves it.

And the third thing, I think, that helps us keep a level head (“when all around are losing theirs and blaming it on you”{RK}),  which again takes time I’m afraid, is deliberately to reflect on the past.  We’ve been through changes and difficulties before.  We’ve added new activities and ministries before.  Things have gone-wrong-before-they-went-right before.  And as we look back, we can clearly see that most of the changes we’ve gone through have been for the better.  The church has grown in size, in the ministries we are able to support, in our understanding and dedication to the King of Kings, and in the quality and depth of relationships too.

We are all signed up to a vision that is simply encapsulated in the tag-line: “helping people make connections with God”.  We don’t have to do a thousand new things to achieve that goal.  In fact, on the basis that we want to try and proceed at a pace that doesn’t kill the church, best we don’t.  But it is time to welcome more pre-Christians through Alpha, Christians into existing and new Home Groups, and Everyone to more Sunday worship.  As we seek to help people find answers to their deepest questions in Alpha, friendship and support in Home Groups, and an added opportunity of meeting with Jesus on Sundays, I think we’ll tick most of the boxes for what we need to be doing as a church right now.

Let’s grab a coffee some time and talk about it.

Toby

Podcast from Sunday 15th August 2010

Continuing our series on the book of Acts

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Against his better judgement he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever.

In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant THE SHACK wrestles with the timeless question, ‘Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?’ The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him. You’ll want everyone you know to read this book!