Winter: you love it and you hate it. The first snowfall of winter has children out sledging and building snowmen, but it tends to bring disruption to roads, airports and train 
services. The camera comes out to take pictures of the snow because it has a beauty to it, but this week I have also been the target for snowballs as some children waited for the school bus. On Tuesday, I went to Lendrick Muir to lead a seminar on mission with some of the Regional Staff teams and on the way I stopped at Loch Leven to take photos because the loch was frozen over; it was quite a sight to behold, the first time it had been like this since the 1950's apparently; but also this week there were reports of at least one child dying after falling through thin ice on his local pond.
services. The camera comes out to take pictures of the snow because it has a beauty to it, but this week I have also been the target for snowballs as some children waited for the school bus. On Tuesday, I went to Lendrick Muir to lead a seminar on mission with some of the Regional Staff teams and on the way I stopped at Loch Leven to take photos because the loch was frozen over; it was quite a sight to behold, the first time it had been like this since the 1950's apparently; but also this week there were reports of at least one child dying after falling through thin ice on his local pond. Winter: you love it and you hate it. It is nice to look at, but it can be dark and depressing; if you are old and frail when you can become isolated for the duration of the snow and ice because the wise thing to do is to stay indoors. The sledging and snowballs are fun, but there are people caught on the mountains who die in the cold. Why do Councils grit roads that are dry and on which there is no snow and ice, only later to run out of grit and salt when it really matters?
Lest this become a complaint about the weather (Victor Meldrew, eat your heart out!) let me turn this into a reflection on another idea. I once had a conversation with Jim Graham, who for many years was the pastor of Gold Hill Baptist Church in Chalfont St Peter's and a renowned speaker (and I was at university with his daughter and shared a flat with his son-in-law), in which he introduced me to the notion that Churches go through seasons. There are times when Churches are strong and enthusiastic and everything is growing well (as in summer), and lots of new initiatives are put into place, but there are also times when Churches find life hard, when people grow tired and weary, when they want to shed responsibilities rather than take on new things, when it is time to stop certain activities and when it seems to be enough to keep the ordinary things going.
I wrote something of this in an article in Church News last year, in which I said that I could see signs of this in our Church at that time. Some people wanted to give up doing the jobs they were doing; in Church we're not very good at allowing people to give up without a sense of guilt and failure, but we should be better at it. Why can we not simply let a person retire in peace and with our thanks, without making them feel guilty because we will find it hard to get someone else to do the job? All is not gloom and doom; it wasn't then, it isn't now; there are people taking on new responsibilities and new ideas are being pursued in order to build the Church for the future.
Here are some thoughts:
- at the St Margaret's Court service on Thursday, the visitors from outside the complex outnumbered the residents by a ratio of 4:1. Is it time to draw a graceful line under this event because it is no longer meeting a need for the place and its people? It worked for a time, but is that time past?
- Last year, Colin Anderson gave up as our Christian Aid organiser. In the 6 months since then, no-one has volunteered to take it on. Does that mean that we should stop the door-to-door collection? The sponsored walk hasn't happened now for at least 2 years. There is anecdotal evidence to suggest that door-to-door collections for Christian Aid are actually becoming more and more difficult, if not even dangerous! Should we focus our efforts on other things?
Here's a quote from a booklet by Robert Warren, now retired, but once the Church of England's national Officer for Evangelism. The first of his writings that I read was a booklet called Building Missionary Congregations published in 1995 and now out of print. In that booklet he writes: "Such a challenge calls the Church to move out of the guard's van, where we are looking back over the distant and disappearing peaks we have passed (or desperately clutching the brake to slow down the pace of change at every point). We are to get out of the guard's van, recover our nerve and re-discover our true role in the vanguard of society, shaping the new world order in and after the likeness of Christ... through incarnate exposition - both of our words and our lives."
We are meant to be a pilgrim people, but we keep parking up, saying 'here will do just fine!'
