Blog
Members from churches all around Westville gathered together at Home Ground Church this week to pray for our community. There is something so healthy about Christians being together in prayer, notwithstanding our differences in tradition, practice and belief. As the psalmist says, "How wonderful, how beautiful, when brothers and sisters get along! It’s like the dew on Mount Hermon flowing down the slopes of Zion. Yes, that’s where God commands the blessing!" (Ps 133:1,3 MSG)
At our leaders meeting this week we reflected on the picture of the early church in Acts 2:42ff - a community who built relationships by eating together and meeting regularly for worship and prayer. There is something deeply attractive about that picture and it is no surprise to read at the end of that passage that "every day the Lord added to their group those who were being saved."
We have been in conversation recently with a company who provide mentoring and training for students in the built environment (ie: engineers, land surveyors, contract managers etc). These students are required to do periods of in-service training as part of their academic qualifications. Most of that training happens on construction sites but there are also blocks of classroom time and we have been approached to be a site for that classroom training.
Charles Wesley wrote this hymn in the late 1730's to express our hope and joy on Easter Sunday. To give you an idea of his passion for the subject, the original hymn contains 11 verses! Notice how the followers of Jesus are caught up in the resurrection of Christ in verse 4 - this is Jesus' story, but it is also ours.
In the penultimate session of our course this week we heard the encouraging truth that, notwithstanding our bad experiences with New Years Resolutions :), it is absolutely possible for God to renew and change us. We need not be stuck - we can be changed!
How long have you been a part of the Westville Methodist community? I've been here just over three years and feel very much at home :) But this weekend marks an amazing milestone for our caretaker, Samson Shezi, who has now worked at WMC for 40 years!
"God created people in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." (Genesis 1:27)
Author and pastor A W Tozer once made the bold claim that the "most important thing about us is what comes into our mind when we think about God". Why? Well, as we learned in our Lent course session this week, we become like the God we worship. In other words, if our picture of God is warped - if we see God as angry, neglectful or disinterested - this will directly shape what kind of people we become. Our Lent course is focused on spiritual formation - being intentional about our role in the process of becoming like the God we worship.
In the first session of our Lent course this week, we were introduced to the concept of spiritual formation - the forming/shaping of spiritual character that has taken place in each of us over time. Dallas Willard said in an interview once that "everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get."
Maybe you have heard the story of the minister who tried to save money by watering down the paint he was using to paint the church building. After the job was done, he could see that it didn't look great at all and, as he stood there wondering what to do about it, a voice boomed from the heavens, "Repaint. And thin no more!".