Creativity
Angie is taking part in a Therapeutic Worship School online at the moment. This is to help her to enable others to encounter God through creativity. She hopes to use this to take simple workshop type creativity a little further and deeper. She enjoyed the challenge of doing a piece based on Psalm 1, which expresses the stark contrast between the one who is blessed and the one who is wicked.
Small things with great love
“The Kingdom of God is like….” Am I the only person who has always subconsciously wanted the Kingdom of God to be like the powerful Kingdoms of the earth: in charge, able to cajole or intimidate people into doing things? Yet the Kingdom as described by Jesus is not like that and if we listen to the words and take note of the ways of Jesus, he models for us a different way. So one of the words for us here in Knowle West is a quote from Mother Theresa, “We cannot do great things on this earth, only small things with great love.” Notice how this chimes in with Jesus’s pictures (often small and domestic) of the Kingdom of God. It is like yeast in the dough (Matt 13:33) or a mustard seed (Matt 13:31) or a single lost coin. Notice also that it says that we cannot do great things, not that God can’t.
Community Quiet Day
On our recent Quiet Day at Home, we reflected first on our own brokenness and that admitting our own weakness was crucial to allow God to be our strength, individually and as a community. This was a moving start to a special day together.
We then moved on to reflect on what the original NT language calls “Koinonia” means, and how we might live it out together. Vulnerable fellowship with great love would be my best attempt to capture what the word means: we certainly experienced a taste of that in a day of worship, word, creativity, tears, laughter and food.
In our final session, we got out a map of Knowle West and plotted activities across the estate which we, and the wider Christian community, are involved in as yeast... and were greatly encouraged! The foundation of our service is our worship and prayer every weekday morning for the estate and we take encouragement that our small prayers, deeds and words, when seen as part of what God is doing across the estate, bring increasing hope for today and tomorrow!
Roger and Angie, Phil and Ruth, Tim and Jill (community members in November 2020)
Comments