Dear Friends,
Is it just me or does this year seemed to have just flown by? I suspect our different circumstances have really affected how we have perceived the passage of time during the last few months. For me I had great pleasure in the glorious quiet months of April, May and June when the human world stood still, but the glory of God’s creation did not. It just flourished! Many of us enjoyed our gardens sowing and planting and watering. Watching the flowers, fruit and vegetables grow. We appreciated the cleanness of the air, the lack of aircraft chem-trails in the sky. In fact the lack of noise in general. All this allowing us to hear the wonderful natural sounds of our planet, the heart beats of nature. This way of living cannot carry on of course, but we must learn from it and take a new way of being into the future.
And now, it’s time to thank God for the harvest that we see around us. I know many cereal farmers have suffered greatly reduced yields owing to the very wet winter last year, and we must hold them in our prayers, but even in difficult growing seasons we must always give thanks to God for that which he has provided.
God’s wonderful world of which we are stewards has had a well deserved break from our consumerism and it is less polluted. So as our lives speed up, time may seem to slow down again. But let not the pace we live have a detriment on our natural world again. Let us live and learn from our mistakes.
Thanks be to God
The Walesby Group, set into the north western edge of the Lincolnshire Wolds, consists of 10 parishes, 10 worshipping communities and 11 church buildings. With a population of around 2100 we are a benefice of very small communities, living in the vast open spaces of this Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. As worshipping communities we aim to grow ourselves in our faith and discipleship, support and engage with our local communities and bring new people to Christ.
We are blessed with beautiful buildings and faithful commitment from our congregations. As the group continues to integrate together, we are being enabled to offer a variety of worship and outreach styles. Lay ministry and leadership is key to all we offer, and encouraged as we endeavour to open the Kingdom and its values to all.
The Christian faith is focused on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ. We also believe his death achieved something very special: the opportunity to reconnect with the God that we might believe in but might sometimes feel remote from.
We believe that Jesus was not just a human being but, in some way that we cannot fully understand, God as well. We believe in God the Father, the creator of the entire universe, and the Holy Spirit, who is the way we can experience Jesus today. Not three gods but one, who together are described as the ‘Trinity’ – a description not so much of philosophy but of the relationship at the heart of God.
In the most famous Christian prayer we pray ‘Our Father…’ This creator God wants a relationship with us, for us to be his children and to give us, as Jesus says, ‘life in all its fulness’ (John 10.10).
