PASTORAL MESSAGE

Pastoral Message for May
from Revd Wendy White

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Having spent a large proportion of my life as a minister working outside the formal church, the key thing I have learnt is that God meets us where we are.  Jesus didn’t wait for people to come to him, he went to where they were both physically or spiritually. He invited himself to meals, he struck up conversations with strangers.  He listened.

As I listen to people, I hear they worry that they need to have all their beliefs in place before coming to church and often they have been told church is the only place God is to be found.  People who do attend church worry that they somehow don’t know enough or are concerned that things have to be done ‘just so’.

Nothing could be further from the truth.  The church community is where we come to worship but also to learn, to share, to listen.
Church community is where we gradually become family: room for everyone, even the awkward aunts and the shy youngsters.  We listen for God not only in the words of prayer or hymn but hear God in the stories that others tell, in the words of children.  We support one another, laughing and crying together.

But we also find God wherever people are:  listening to the person working the checkout, sitting side by side with a passenger on the bus.  God is out there ahead of us, so we can hear God’s words in popular music, (I’ve been known to preach from Chumbawumba as well as Michael Ball), in art, in cinema, in all the circumstances we find ourselves.

Our work is to recognise where God is working and join in.
Wherever you are, you are welcome, wherever you hear God’s word come and share it with us.

Rev Wendy