Dear Friends,

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As I prepare for my final year in ‘active’ Circuit ministry before retiring next August, I’ve been reflecting a little on the last 31 years since I began in my first appointment. As I reflect on those passing years, so I see how much has changed; how our churches have changed; how I have been changed through those experiences. Change is not something many of us cope with well but change we must. All this can sound very negative and yet another attempt to keep going as we have always done but we must face reality and be prepared to accept change. It seems to me that now more than ever we need to be prepared to really change; to really become a ‘discipleship movement shaped for mission’ (to quote a Church report of 2011).

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And there is still good news! Change is happening, perhaps dare I say, almost despite us.  Recently, I was encouraged by both the absolute reality but also faith and hope in the President & Vice President’s addresses to Methodist Conference (you can read these on the Methodist Church website). Many are writing and speaking of a ‘Quiet Revival’ and certainly we are seeing signs of that in a few of our churches in the Circuit – people coming to join us – some ‘returning’ to church; some seeking out what we’re about and what is to be a Christian; all seeking a sense of community.  
What an exciting challenge for us as to how we will welcome, how we will enable folk to belong; how we will walk together in discovering what is for now; it is all too easy to look back with a golden nostalgia; things are not as we think they once were and never will be again. We must, I think, be careful in all of this to not mould people to fit in with all our ways but to be prepared to accept the change that is happening; to willingly join in with what God’s Spirit is already doing.

Whatever the future will be, I pray that we will: ‘Walk together and whatever comes, love each other in the way that I have loved you’ (STF 266)
 

Every Blessing,
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Deacon Jackie Fowler

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I share the following prayer which I recently discovered again. May we make it our prayer for ourselves and our churches and may we be ready for change and to be changed:.

 

God does not always lead by the shortest route,

because some things are best learned on longer journeys.

God sometimes leads us into the wilderness,

as well as by still waters,

because some destinations are reached with scars as well as smiles.

God urges us to travel light,

but also to take things of our precious past with us,

because some things remind us where we’ve come from

and bring hope of a future.

God guides in different ways, sometimes half-hidden,

as in grey cloud,

sometimes blazingly clear because God’s people are called to travel

as God guides them,

and there is never a time when God’s guidance fails or ceases.

As Jesus said, ‘I am with you always’. Amen.

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Revd Martyn Atkins