Holy Spirit

Last Sunday I actually got our churches main meeting. In the last few weeks I’ve been I’ve either been on Sunday school, crèche or visiting friends. All of which I’ve enjoyed very much and I’ve not felt like I’m missing out. But it is good to get back home, as it were.

Anyway, during our worship a number of us were bringing our prepared and spontaneous contributions in prophecy and prayer. These are precious times for us as a community of those baptised in the Holy Spirit to use these gifts. During this time the Holy Spirit clearly encouraged us to reawaken the visions he has given us in the past and that with his power we can accomplish them

It was also good to then hear Mike Rimmer speak from John 14 on how the Holy Spirit is to us now as Jesus was to the first disciples. He is there to answer our difficult questions and to lead us into peace. Mike encouraged us to allow the Holy Spirit into all our lives – not just church life overcoming the sacred and secular divide.

It’s good to be reminded in so many ways of the importance of our relationship with the Holy Spirit.

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Blah!

On Tuesday I went to the ‘Blah!’ tour at Birmingham Cathedral hosted by the Church Missionary Society that was looking into a new grassroots movement that is emerging that calls itself the Emerging Church. Not that I am thinking of defecting at all, I hasten to add! I feel that we as charismatics with apostolic links are in an extremely good place with God. Yet I do think it is good to look at what is happening around the body of Christ to see what we can learn from it to bring back to our own churches.

Ryan Bolger co-author of the book Emerging Churches outlined the findings from his research about how many churches are revising their practices in attempts to be more relevant to their culture. The churches that he looked at the US & UK are investigating their own culture and getting everyone involved in designing new ways of outworking the New Testament in today’s world. I felt that there is much that they are doing resonated with our own values as a church: the emphasis on following Jesus not just as saviour but as a role model, hospitality, community, kingdom, etc.

I feel that an emphasis that is relatively new to us that we can learn from this movement is the importance of creativity reflecting God as a creator. For instance, this was illustrated in the worship sessions by the use of spoken mediations over ambient background music with some enthralling video images. Anxieties about dodgy theology were alleviated by the assurance from those presenting stories from their churches that they are expressing the historic faith just in different ways. One leader Karen Ward explained how her church is using both ancient traditions and contemporary styles in their worship but only as far as they felt that these were consistent with Christ.

I think, used sensitively and with discernment, creative elements such as these could be a way forward.

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The Eastern Bride

I just heard that Open Doors have won an award for this film that brings attention to the restrictions on Christians expressing their faith in both China and the Middle East. It is a drama about two westerners who travel to these parts of the world and experience these effects first hand. By all accounts it is a stunning film.

I am impressed generally by the work of Open Doors in promoting awareness of how the Christian church is persecuted throughout the world. There is plenty of information on their sites. Hopefully these are stimulated us in the relatively persecution free parts of the world to pray for Christians who are suffering. As well as moving into action those who might otherwise have stood by and allowed these things to happen.

I am thrilled that in our church we now has an Open Doors rep. A few weeks ago in our small group we had an excellent time learning about the situation in China and praying for Christians there.

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Extreme Prophetic

When we were in Winchester our friends told us about this website. Extreme Prophetic contains teachings and stories about what is happening in the churches that relate to Patricia King’s ministry based in America. The most intriguing part of this are a few videos that relate to a phenomena of gemstones being found apparently miraculously. There is an account of one man finding a number of gemstones in his garden while having a vision of an angel placing them there for him. There is a shot of him finding it. These videos are part of a sort of video blog of Patricia’s. These are all very recent phenomena. Patricia relates it to a prophecy about God doing miracles this summer. Apparently they’ve just had a big conference where people began to find smaller gemstones on the floor where they were meeting. The hard evidence appears to rule out mass hallucination – of course it could all be a fake – but these appear to be godly Christian people who want to give all the glory to God.

Please have a look and let me know what you think of it.

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A Healing Trend?

Nettes and Callie were on holiday this week in the Isle of Wight with a very good friend of Callie’s (with her mummy too) but I was still at work. I've been reading about Jesus sending out the disciples to heal and preach and getting excited about stories such as this one. A Christian stall for talking to people about faith and to pray for them by laying-on-of-hands... at a new age festival!

I went to meet Nettes and Callie at the weekend in Winchester where we stayed with some old friends of Nettes. We went with everyone to Winchester Family Church with which we were very impressed. Callie enjoyed the Sunday school for pre-schoolers.

The church is part of New Frontiers and is cast in traditional charismatic style but nowadays of course the preacher uses PowerPoint. There was plenty of praying for the sick in response to specific words from God and a couple of testimonies to healings that occurred during that time. The general feeling was that this was something that was an increasing trend.

How did I feel about all this? Well I’d love to do a stint on a stall like the one I’d been reading about during the week.

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Calligraphy

During one of the special times Nettes and I get together to pray in more creative ways that we have dubbed our Sacred Space we were writing out phrases in different calligraphy styles with lots of different papers and pens. This week in our prayer times we had been meditating on the fact that God gives us life. And at the start of our Sacred Space I got some dry bark from the garden and we were contemplating how God gives us life and without God we are like this dried up bark.

I then found this phrase that I liked and wanted to calligraphy in a book called the Wisdom of Solomon. This is a book in the apocrypha and although I don’t believe that it is inspired like the Bible, I think there are plenty of good thoughts there. As I drew these words I was struck by the fact that God made us to receive eternal life because we were made to be like him. Not that I have an immortal soul just because I am human but that God has given me this everlasting life by his grace.

Wow!

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