Church Weekend Away

We’ve just got back from our church weekend away at Cloverley Hall. It was great to get see our old friend Detta - who now lives in Glastonbury. It was our pleasure to ferry her from and to Crewe station.

It was good to start Saturday off with a prayer time as I'd missed Friday's meeting putting Callie to bed. After breakfast we listened to Ian Rawley on a term that has been so overused in our circles as to become meaningless: being a prophetic people. Refreshingly he reinterpreted this as neither withdrawing from our culture or being so immersed in it that we become ineffective but instead being shapers of our culture.

In the second half Carole Rawley did an exposition of Ephesians based on Watchman Nee’s ‘Sit, Walk, Stand’. After lunch and after the Easter egg hunt - for which Callie got a runners’ up prize for her basket - we had a reflective workshop session. There were four stations with various questions and activities relating to what we had been looking at. I chose to identify three scriptures to stand in prayer with. I felt to pick Luke 10:2-3, Proverbs 6:6-5 and Ecclesiastes 11:6 on the theme of work and harvest. All this and a talent show in the evening with Nettes and Callie performing 'Eat Your Peas'. What a day.

Thankfully the Sunday morning prayer meeting was 8:30 rather than 8:00. After breakfast there was worship and reports from areas of the church. Then Steve, our elder, spoke on increasing our involvement in the community around where we meet and working in partnership with other organisations and churches. Over lunch I was thrilled to hear from the creche workers that Callie had been asking deep spiritual questions. And in the afternoon we broke bread and briefly prayed about some issued raised that morning - again using four prayer stations - before departing.

Phew! A great weekend!