Message from Tim

Cultivating Self-Sufficiency

The other day, in an online meeting of local ministers, Dave Taylor in Southwater asked us to consider how we would have prepared the people in our congregations to cope with the pandemic, if we had known it was coming. It was a great question that made us all think. For myself, I found myself wishing that I had prepared you all to be more self-sufficient in terms of sustaining your own spiritual lives. Now, being self-sufficient may sound a bit unspiritual – shouldn’t we be relying on Christ? However, in Philippians 4:11 the word commonly translated ‘content’ can also convey the meaning ‘sufficient for oneself, strong enough or possessing enough to need no aid or support, independent of external circumstances’ (Thayer’s Greek Lexicon), and, given the situation in which we find ourselves, I think having that quality is actually really important. Perhaps before lockdown there was a sense in which all we had to do to sustain our spiritual life was turn up to church once a week and there we found, laid on for us, fellowship with our friends, worship and teaching. But, now that we no longer automatically see each other face to face, we have to make more of an effort to stay in touch. If we sing, at all, many of us sing alone, so we are not buoyed up by the worship of those around us. And some of you have said that you miss the teaching – a five to ten minute sermon does not really satisfy you the same way as a twenty-plus minutes sermon used to do. I am also deeply conscious that some of us are missing studying the Bible together in small groups, and many of us were not in a small group in the first place.

So, one of the regrets that I expressed to my fellow ministers the other week was that I had not equipped you with the tools to be able to read and understand the Bible effectively for yourself. What about reading the Bible with others? One of the things to which the first Christians devoted themselves as they met in each other’s homes was the apostles’ teaching (Acts 2:42-47). These days, inside our homes, we are only allowed to meet with people from one other household at a time, and this restriction pretty much rules out housegroups as we know them. But there is no reason why two households should not get together to read the Bible and pray together, is there? If you find that idea a daunting prospect, what it is that deters you? Is it a lack of confidence in terms of being able to read and understand and interpret the Bible for yourselves? If that rings true with you, then that means the sense of regret I felt with my fellow-ministers the other week was well founded.

You probably know the saying, ‘Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day; teach them how to fish and you feed them for the rest of their lives.’ So, while we are not meeting ‘as normal’ on a Sunday, it is on my heart to offer a brief course explaining how each of us can begin to read and interpret the Bible for ourselves, or with one or two close friends, because where we gather in twos and threes in Jesus’ name, he has promised to be with us. What I have in mind is four teaching sessions to be held on Sundays at 6:30pm. The aim would be to hold these sessions in the main church at Brighton Road so that people could attend in person and, technology permitting, to make them available and record them on Zoom so that people could attend remotely as well. Others could then access these sessions online at other times. Each session would last about an hour and include time (I would hope) for some questions and maybe even some discussion. The plan, at the moment, is to have four fortnightly sessions on Sundays as follows:

• 13th September – Getting into the Bible – good questions to ask
• 27th Sept. – Reading the Old Testament
• 11th October – Reading the New Testament
• 25th October – Putting the Old and New Testament together

If you would like to attend any of these sessions, please let the church office know, either asking for a Zoom link to the meeting or indicating your desire to attend in person. My hope and prayer is that, as we do this course together, we will be all the better equipped to make it through the winter with our spiritual vitality intact, because each of us will be reading and understanding God’s word for ourselves.

‘And what about the other Sundays?’ I hear you ask. At 11am on 20th September and 18th October, we will be holding two more of our ‘Family Worship Events’, tailored specifically to enable families to begin to read the Bible, pray and worship together more effectively. On the first Sundays in October and November we will be celebrating Communion together at 9am, as we did on 23rd August. Again, if you would like to attend any of these, please let the Church Office know. That takes us up to the start of November. Our online services will continue for the foreseeable future and we will be celebrating Communion in our online service every third Sunday in the month.
I am aware that none of this feels much like it used to be at Brighton Road, but as the mainstay of our spiritual life moves from a centralised meeting at BRBC towards Bible study, fellowship, Communion and prayer in our own homes, it might begin to feel a little bit more like the early church – and I find that prospect quite exciting!