Message from Tim

 

'All Hands to the Pumps!'

According to the Collins Dictionary, if you harness energy, you bring it under your control so that you can use it. So when horses are harnessed to a cart or and plough, the strength of the horse can be harnessed for a specific purpose. These days, advances in technology mean that we are able to harness solar and wind energy to generate a considerable proportion of the electricity that we use. On a ship, the cry, ‘All hands to the pumps’ means that the combined energy of the crew needs to be harnessed for one specific purpose – in this case, keeping the ship afloat.

Churches have energy as well, not least because we rely upon the inexhaustible grace and power of the creator of the universe. When we use the gifts that God has given us to serve one another, then God works through us and the energy of the Holy Spirit is released in ways that build up the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12:4-7). Worship enables us to tap into and draw on that divine energy source. I don’t know what spiritual diet you have followed while we have not been able to worship together, but I hope that the regular disciplines of prayer and Bible reading and online worship have kept you going during the stressful times, or have enabled you to maintain or to build up your reserves of spiritual energy when (maybe) you have not been quite so busy.

But it would be disingenuous to pretend that church life does not take a lot of energy on our part: church can be hard work. Is it worth it? You will not be surprised to read that I think it is, because if church works as it should, then when we expend energy in one direction, we find ourselves being renewed from a different direction. That only happens if everyone works together. Paul says that when all the different members of the Body of Christ are working properly, then the body grows and builds itself up in love (Ephesians 4:16). Church can and should be a place where relationships are fostered that are mutually beneficial: as I give of myself to others, others in turn are giving to me. In that way we are all enriched and encouraged and supported ourselves as we serve each other. For that to work, there needs to be a generosity of spirit in all our dealings with each other, and the motivation for that comes from the love of God which is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit – enough to fill and to overflow out of our lives and into the lives of others.

Can I encourage you to pray that this vision would be a reality as we begin to resume face to face meetings? How do you feel about that? I began this piece in the bulletin by talking about harnessing energy. Some of us may have been accumulating reserves of pent-up emotional energy over the past 18 months that are just waiting to flood out in unpredictable ways. Brighton Road should be a safe place for that to happen, because there is no expectation that we should all be perfect people – that is why are relationships also need to be characterised by love, acceptance and forgiveness. Church should be a place where people’s pain can be expressed, absorbed and healed, and part of that healing is God giving us self-control, so that we are not at the mercy of our forceful emotions, but instead God redeems our experience so that we can then be in a position to understand and support others, and our emotional energy is harnessed in constructive ways.

Those past two paragraphs have expressed why I feel active involvement in church is worth the sacrifice of emotional and physical energy that this entails. If church works properly, then we will find a measure of wholeness, and we will receive at least as much as we give, and we will be built up rather than being drained. And when we all play our part, by the grace of God and the working of the Holy Spirit, the cycle of giving and being replenished gathers momentum.

What will meeting together look like? At last week’s church meeting, we talked about maybe having two services on a Sunday morning – one specifically designed to be interactive and inclusive for all ages, and the other based around what is perhaps a more traditional programme of worship and preaching. Between both services could be a time of fellowship over coffee (maybe even doughnuts) with perhaps a high-energy, activity-based programme for youngsters upstairs. It sounds exciting, and my impression was that people warmed to the idea of taking Sunday mornings in this direction as restrictions ease over the summer.

But if we go down this path, it will take a lot of hard work and resourcing, particularly on the technical side So if you have (or would like to develop) technical skills (sound, streaming, AV), people skills, music skills, skills with children and young people, artistic skills, leadership skills, then Brighton Road can be the place where God harnesses your energy for the life-changing work of his kingdom. Like the sound of that? Not sure how to get involved? Just ask.