News : We are looking forward to summer now, with holidays, BBQs and long summer nights. Or maybe its the World Cup, Formula 1, Wimbledon, or The Open (in the home of golf). Whats important to you this summer? What brings you contentment? Maybe you should explore how God can bring you peace, an inner confidence, a hope, a never failing love.

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Below you will find the lead article from our regular monthly magazine The Rhubarb Patch ...

More Boldness please

I was recently at a conference, where I heard some wonderful stories of things ordinary folk were doing in churches up and down our country to reach out to people with the good news.

There was the church in Wolverhampton who had been given a three-storey building in the heart of the theatre area with a ground floor space suitable for a coffee shop, an auditorium seating 400 on the top floor and a middle floor which is adaptable. They are launching this autumn to coincide with the new intake of students in the area and seeking to fill the place with people.

There was the church who five years ago began reaching out to the old people’s home next door to them by offering a meal; next, they added a movie afternoon, then an afternoon tea and then a service, and who but God knows what is next.

Each story was of ordinary people beginning a journey, doing something they felt God was calling them to do and not really knowing where it would eventually lead them, or what the finished product would look like. Each one was a story of whether to listen to the seed of faith within them, or the doubts from all around them.

It is easy to reason ourselves out of any new adventure. We can think of hundreds of reasons why something may not work, but faith is the substance of things as yet unseen. Doubt can rise within us and cause us to see all the difficulties, rather than the God who can change the impossible into the possible.

The early church at various points in its history met together and prayed for boldness; perhaps too today we need to pray for boldness. Not that we might necessarily speak before those in authority or against those that seek to persecute us, but in our every day lives to do the things that God calls us to do.

The apostle Peter often gets a hard time for sinking after he had walked on water, but he still remains, as far as I am aware, the only man other than Jesus, who has walked on water, if only for a moment. Maybe we need more boldness to step out of our comfort zones, to step out of our boats and begin walking on water.

Perhaps it is not going to be something as big as the stories I heard when I was away (or walking on water just yet), but they were all stories of God doing things through ordinary people who were willing to take a first step.

Maybe it will be being obedient to what God is calling you to do; maybe God is calling you to do something other than what you have been doing in church for years and years; maybe God is calling you to a new direction in life; maybe you have an idea, while someone else in the church has the means and the vision to change the idea into reality.

May we all have faith and boldness to do the little things God calls us to do. Who knows what might be just around the corner!


JONATHAN OATRIDGE