London is a very beautiful city and I do enjoy opportunities to be there but wouldn’t swap it for Northumberland as a place to live. Driving through the centre of London following the Thanksgiving Meal, it was lovely to see the sights and lights of the city at night. I drove down to Surrey where I was to lead a Church At Home weekend on the theme of A Praying Community. One of the privileges of being involved in training people in Leadership and Ministry is to build friendships beyond the lecture and seminar room and it was a delight to see Diane and David, two of the three ministers who I had been involved in training in their church context. I stayed with Diane and her husband Gareth who live in a beautiful part of Surrey. Pulling back my bedroom curtains the next morning looking out across their garden to the woods beyond, was a lovely view. After the demands of the previous week, I had most of the day to myself and after some reading and the inevitable necessary email correspondence, I went out for a lovely walk in the Surrey countryside. I potted my way back to my hosts and felt rested and relaxed as we moved into the weekend programme beginning with a meal with all the church folk.
It was really good to have the opportunity to share ideas and material that I have been working on for a few years which have not found their way into any public sharing. I centred my teaching around Thomas Merton’s phrase, “Prayer is life” and Brother Laurence’s “Practising the Presence of God”. So often Christians have relegated prayer into a religious activity and not seen it as essentially communing with God and listening to His heart for the world. A mixed church community including a number of what some would describe as fairly traditional Baptists and conservative evangelicals. Bless them, they responded remarkably well to teaching on prayer that was drawing from some of the other Christian traditions and the whole weekend was a very pleasurable and encouraging experience as I took people on a journey in the seeking of God and what it means to be a community of prayer. My down to earth style and Geordie humour generally warmed the hearts of the listeners and to my knowledge I only managed to offend a few (actually just one person) and not the many. I find that appreciating God’s grace and goodness affords much laughter and I use humour intentionally to help us to be real about ourselves and also to bust religious pomposity and superficiality. Most of it is at my own expense but I can also aim it at exposing the nonsense of things that the church and wider society engage with.
One of my favourite memories was sending people out on a prayer awareness walk down the High Street and to hear peoples experiences and the insights they had gleaned from such an exercise. It was good to be with the church on the High Street, a praying community on the High Street and I pray that they might in listening to God, respond as a praying and serving community in their town.
Another memory is that of the church gathering both mornings before breakfast to pray; open, spontaneous prayer to God at the beginning of the day and the ease with which prayers and intercessions flowed, was really encouraging and a joy to be part of. Good people, good place, about to enter a new year of much change but on a good basis – a praying community.
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