Last week we started a bunch of training courses at church that are designed to be practically focussed as we live out our Christianity. I’ve got the opportunity to run one called “God’s Worldwide Mission”. There are a number of goals of the course:
- To remind us of the eternal plan of God to save a people for himself
- To drive us to prayerful dependence on God
- To inspire us to be more committed in our support of world mission
- To be creative in our care for link missionaries
- To empower you to be advocates for world mission at church
In the end I hope that those coming will be theologically informed regarding God’s plan of salvation throughout the world and throughout history. This should remind us of the privilege that God bothers to use us – weak and frail humans – in telling the world about the good news of his Son. Aware of the privilege, how can we best play our part in God’s plan? How can we support our link missionaries? Should we consider going ourselves?
This week we’ll be brainstorming about creative ways to support our CMS link missionaries. One benefit of living in the 21st century is the improved communication methods compared to when CMS started over 200 years ago in the UK. So, this week, in an endeavour to learn from one of our link missionaries how we can better support them, we’ll be doing it through a Skype video call.
I’d like to start brainstorming early. What are some ways you and/or your church have done to support link missionaries? What are some things you’ve heard done to help raise awareness in the regular attender of world mission?
Disclaimer: I’m a big fan of the Church Missionary Society (CMS) as is our church, which is why I particularly mention it. Would love to hear of ideas for supporting any missionary, with associations with any mission agency.
Our daughter Sophie was baptized last Sunday morning. There were three decisions we needed to make about it.
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Did we want to do it?Tom was baptized at under 6 months. Sophie was 16 months when she was baptized. We trust in a great and sovereign God who is often portrayed as choosing, saving, caring for families, not just individuals. We trust that baptism is a sign which points to God welcoming Sophie into his kingdom and our local church congregation welcoming her into the church family.Therefore, last year, our final year at college, when Sophie was born, we decided to wait until we knew were we would be at church in 2009, so that she would be welcomed into a local church that we would be attending for more than the one year we were at our last church. It took until July on the purely pragmatic reason of trying to get two out of three godparents in the same city at the same time.
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Who would baptize her?When we finally picked a date based on godparents’ availability, our rector was going to be on leave. He suggested that I baptize Sophie. I must admit I found this a little odd as it would mean asking myself, with three others, some promises and then making them too. We then asked another friend on staff to baptize her, but in the end the rector was going to be around.Jo and I ended up getting our preferred option. It was preferred because it felt more like Sophie was being welcomed into the congregation by the rector representing the whole congregation. Would it have bothered us if someone else did it? Not at all, for the baptism makes clear that the person baptizing does so on behalf of the congregation, reminding us of the promises in God’s word.
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What promises would we make?By default, I would have expected to use the AAPB first order service. By default, our church uses a combination of that with promises drawn from the gospel tract Two Ways To Live. Initially this threw me a bit. Mostly I think, because I’m conservative. It’s important to remember that the baptism is symbolic and there is nothing magical or mystical about which words are used.Most important is that the promised display and convey our and the godparents’ trust in the biblical message of salvation.
So, we promised different promises to what we did for Thomas, but neither is more baptized than the other because of it. May God continue to look after my kids, keep them close to him and bring them to our heavenly home in his time.
Two days ago, on Saturday, I married a couple for the first time. Sunday morning I was at a church that used the morning prayer form of service. Today I was reading through the prayer book service for infant baptism.
The thing that strikes me most about the prayer book is the quality of the prayers in it. It really is thought through, more so than I am. It’s inspired me to continue to read through the big fat biography I have on Cranmer. It’d be great to understand more about the man behind the prayer book, Thomas Cranmer, and learn about his concerns for propriety of church.
Last week at a training day, Phillip Jensen reminded me of the focus the prayer book services have on the Bible read and taught. It has started some more balls rolling in my head about the purpose and place of preaching in the Christian life and in church life.
If I ever get around to doing further study, maybe something exegetical about the sermons in Acts and/or something doctrinal about the place of preaching, possibly in conversation with Thomas Cranmer. Any other ideas of what I should study?
I use some PC software called Bible Works which is a fantastic resource and almost indespensible when I’m preparing sermons and Bible studies.
Here’s a chance for you to win a copy of it and easily search many Bible versions for words and phrases. Subscribe to this blog, find out more about Bible Works and fill in the form to win.