Message from Tim

 

A Watershed Moment?

This week marks the last of our pre-recorded services, which we have been producing every week since 22nd March last year. The group who came together to do this referred to themselves as ‘The Interim Worship Group’ and at the time it was envisaged that this was something we would be doing for a few weeks, not for fifteen months, and on behalf of everyone I’d like to express my deepest gratitude to the team.

Although the final stage of national lockdown easing has now been postponed for four weeks, the recommencement of regular on-site services at Brighton Road, combined with the fact that many of the team are no longer working from home, means that we are no longer in a position to prepare and deliver pre-recorded services going forward. It is our intention, though, to livestream our onsite services, and these will continue to be available on our YouTube channel.

Disks of the service will also continue to be made available by the trusty team who prepare and deliver these (thanks again!), but I regret that logistically it will not be possible to people who receive the service by disk to watch the service at the same time as everyone else. I feel bad about this, but can’t see a way around it at the moment. So, my apologies to anyone who will miss out in this way.

It feels as though perhaps people are starting to get back into the swing of attending church at 10:30 on a Sunday morning, with over 60 people attending last week. The services are not what we are used to at Brighton Road, and not just because have to observe social distancing, wear face masks and refrain from joining in the singing. We are also experimenting with a style which is accessible to families, and which facilitates children actively participating in worship, and while it will take us a while to get this right, I am grateful to Deborah Packham who has led the way in showing how to do this, leaving the rest of us with quite a bit of catching up to do! It looks as though these services could have some potential for growth, with families or (relative) newcomers at the younger end of our (quite extensive) BRBC age range representing over 40% of those attending last week.

At the same time I am aware of a large number of deeply committed church members who treasure a more contemplative, or traditional style of worship and who set great store by more in-depth teaching which seeks to interpret and apply the text of scripture to our own, increasingly secular, twenty-first century context. There is much to value here as well, and I have long been aware that a ‘one size fits all’ approach to worship can easily end up sustaining the spiritual needs of a relatively limited range of people, and we all need worship that builds up our relationship with Christ and which empowers us to live our daily lives for him in our community. Yet I am also aware of how much pressure running a variety of services will place on the committed, but relatively small group of people, without whose support and hard work no worship services at Brighton Road would take place at all.

So, I envisage the summer being a period during which we explore together the shape of worship at Brighton Road, with a view to establishing some kind of routine in the autumn (for those who like everything done decently and in order). So I am using this message to ask you all to please bear with each other in these coming weeks as we transition from worshipping almost exclusively online back to worshipping together onsite.

I am also aware that many of us might feel a degree of ‘disconnect’ from the church as things start to open up again, and I would like us to find ways of helping us all to recover a sense of belonging to God and to each other across the summer. Please pray for us and with us as we look at ways of turning these sketchy ideas into some kind of reality.

Many of you will know the chorus, ‘Spirit of the living God, fall afresh on me’. It continues, ‘Break me, melt me, mould me, fill me’. We are clay being worked on by the master potter, who wants to fashion us into a fellowship that is as beautiful in his eyes as we are useful in his hands. My prayer for us at Brighton Road over these coming weeks is adapted from that song: ‘Hold us, break us, shape us, fill us. Amen.’