Rivertown United Reformed Church

Minister’s Letter – February 2012

“Truth and balance on the high wire of life”

How balanced are you? If your bodily centre of gravity is, like mine, pretty high, you are more likely to find balance harder to achieve. I once attended a canoeing course in Dover harbour – the morning saw me underwater no less than 6 times! Ad my attempts at a “canoe roll” were positively out of this world! I find even a low level attempt at balance – on one of those long narrow planks – quite nerve racking. Possibly my most nervous experience was when our family took on the high ropes course at Porthmadoc. Now the zip wire was fine – but when it came to what seemed like a good 30 feet above ground, albeit safely harnessed and in no real danger, I found myself almost hyperventilating as I tried to cope.

“Hard-wired love”

It is one thing to put your ideas in the hands of someone else. It is quite another to put yourself in their hands. Christians believe that was what God did in the birth, life and death of Jesus. From start to finish the Bible story is about how people like you and me began to realise that God was not one of many, one of a group of distant dictators doing little more than playing with human fate. God has never sat on the sidelines and fiddled, while humanity tore itself apart. God has wept bitter tears of despair; demonstrated angry jealousy over us his children, when we have fallen under destructive influences. God has, through his chosen leaders and spokespeople, appealed to us, all but begged us to go his way.

The writers of the Bible believed that, throughout history, God had continued to speak to his people through prophets, priests, and kings. And ask great things of them. Things they could not possibly achieve by themselves.

Minister’s Letter October 2011 - “Delivering the goods”

I have a confession to make. I’ve been too soft. Not in the head (though family and friends may beg to differ) but in the garden. I’ve not been pruning enough. As a result the tomato plants, the roses, and goodness know what other plants have been spending all their precious energy making themselves bigger, higher, almost “fatter”. And the fruit, though it has come, has not been anything like as good as it could have been. Not enough, if you like to pass on to others.

Does that thought ring any bells? I hope so, because, as one local gardening expert told me the other day, “it’s been a good year for growing, but not for ripening”. The purpose of any plant is to produce fruit or flower. But, just like us, if it gets too big, the fruit, if not the flowers, suffers. The human race has been acquiring knowledge at an ever increasing rate, especially in the last 50 years.

On Thursday 20th October we will continue our outreach into the community by promoting the Bible and handing out CD copies of Matthews gospel to passers by. We will also be playing audio tracks of bible passages from the porch.

On Thursday 22nd September we will continuing our Vision4life programme by opening up the church and handing out apple pies to passers-by from 10.30am. We will also invite people to offer any prayer requests so we can pray for whatever concerns them. This follows a very successful event on Maundy Thursday when we received well over 60 prayer requests and engaged with lots of local people in the street. Come along - get a pie and a prayer!

In the coming weeks we will start a programme of sharing our stories during Sunday worship. Initially we will invite those who are bold enough to start us off and we hope this will encourage others to share their stories later on in the series. We will assess how this goes and then look for other ways we can encourage each other through sharing our faith journeys.

20th September

It is some months since we posted any news under this item - this is becaus we 'pressed the pause button' but now we are very keen to seek God's will for Rivertown and discover what it is we will do next. Part of this work is to conduct a local survey to determine:

• what the local people want from their community
• what Rivertown can offer in terms of resource
• what others' in the community can offer to meet needs

All this will help us determine how Rivertown can help meet community needs. At the same time we will pray for God's will for it is then we know progress will be made in faith. Subject to both answer to prayer and community needs we may progress to our next vision - to open up the front of the building, making it into a welcoming place and coffee area. Also, we may be looking at enhancing our worship area to make it a more comfortable place for worship and more flexible for other uses.