Welcome

Services are held weekly, starting at 10:30am.

Communion Services are held at 6:00pm on the 1st Sunday of each month, and at 10:30am on the 3rd Sunday. Special all-age family services are held regularly, check the calendar for details.

Creche and Sunday School are held each Sunday during the service, and refreshments are served afterwards.

A psalm for the Sabbath day.
It is good to praise the LORD and make music to your name, O Most High, to proclaim your love in the morning and your faithfulness at night, to the music of the ten-stringed lyre and the melody of the harp.

Psalm 92:1-3 (NIV)

Recently I have been reading a book called ‘The Day is Yours: Slow Spirituality in a Fast-Moving World’ by Ian Stackhouse (Pastoral leader of the Millhouse Centre, home of Guildford Baptist Church). Ian explores the speed of our culture and asks questions of how we root each day in God’s presence. One of his arguments is that we must learn from the monastic liturgy a rhythm to life of work-rest relationship, worship and prayer that are held together in creative tension. We are to live one day at a time with gratitude and contentedness as our witness before a world full of fast-moving distractions that so often the church seems to join in with rather than learning to move to the beat of a different drum.

The rhythm that God invites us to participate in creatively again leads us to be rather than to do. It is less about time management that crams more into the day but more about prayer, values that sustain God’s rhythm that we find in each day.

One of the ways Ian challenges us to learn to be is to start by rediscovering what Sabbath is. This in our culture may be Sunday but also may be another day. Ian explores the notion that Sabbath is more than stopping work to enable you to work for another six days. To obey the fourth Commandment we must do more than stop working but embrace a different kind of day to discover what brings rest into our busy lives. So important was the Sabbath in Jewish tradition it took a special act of creation to bring it into being, that the universe was incomplete without it. The climax of the Genesis liturgy is not the creation of humanity on the sixth day but the blessing of the seventh day. It takes creative energy to learn to do more than just stop but to embrace what and who gives you Divine rest.

One of the ways Ian challenges us to learn to be is to start by rediscovering what Sabbath is. This in our culture may be Sunday but also may be another day. Ian explores the notion that Sabbath is more than stopping work to enable you to work for another six days. To obey the fourth Commandment we must do more than stop working but embrace a different kind of day to discover what brings rest into our busy lives. So important was the Sabbath in Jewish tradition it took a special act of creation to bring it into being, that the universe was incomplete without it. The climax of the Genesis liturgy is not the creation of humanity on the sixth day but the blessing of the seventh day. It takes creative energy to learn to do more than just stop but to embrace what and who gives you Divine rest.

‘The Day is Yours’ by Ian Stackhouse (page 39): “Without Sabbath, Christian communities degenerate into doing church rather than “being church”. Churches are not recruiting agencies or activity centres; they are not a means to an end rather they are called to exist, to be. Churches that consciously enter into Sabbath rhythm, both in terms of ministry as well as the shape of programmes, protect this being church and model to the world a way of being human community. Without Sabbath Christian community ends up being bland; with Sabbath the church becomes a foretaste of being with God in the future.”

I hope that as we move deeper in ‘Making disciples through being Jesus’, my prayer is that we as a church never lose what it is to celebrate Sabbath by deeply trusting God in those activities that bring rest into our lives.

Blessings,
Stuart