Beginning as we mean to go on!

Happy New Year to all our readers! I hope that 2010 is a year full of God's grace and peace in your lives, full of God's blessing for you, for Church, for the world.

This week, I have been at Crieff. Every January there is a conference in Crieff Hydro, a fellowship of ministers who meet to listen to a couple of speakers and to share and pray together. There were 5 set-piece sessions, talks from our two speakers, Ted Donnelly a Professor of New Testament studies in Northern Ireland, and Dick Dowsett who works with the Overseas Missionary Fellowship.

But it's actually a comment from someone else that sticks in my mind. In the evenings, we hear from people in Christian ministry across the world and one of those contributions came from Lindsay Ferguson, a geologist by training who now works in the administration of Perth Bible College (Australia). She was describing a Church that she went to in Liverpool, when she first left Scotland; she became part of that Church because "they love me well" she said. That phrase stuck in my mind - "they loved me well". She described how they cared for her, made her feel welcome, accepted her as she was, and so on.

There are certain individuals who stick in my mind from our Church over Christmas:

• the little girl who took part in the nativity play with great gusto (they all did, but she did so perhaps more than the rest)
• the teenager who decided to come to Church for the first time in years on the Sunday between Christmas and New Year
• the man and woman who came (individually and separately) to Church for a couple of the services as a result of the Christmas cards we delivered
• the gang of people who came into Church all together last Sunday, having ploughed their way through the snow.

What do we do with these first 3 examples? There is a great temptation in Churches to make them conform to our patterns, inherited and traditional, and to love and accept them only and when they conform. Much better to "love them well" for who they are and accept them for who they are and make them feel part of our Church family.

PS: Church Wednesday is planned to begin again this Wednesday at 7pm with the Prayer Time and Bible Study at 7.30pm. The weather may change that plan, but I'll circulate an e-mail if it is cancelled.