Church Celebration Meal 2008 - Nick's Address

This is the text of Nick's vision casting address at the Celebration meal

Looking back at 2007, let me pick out a few key facts:

• Around 230 people (men, women and children) now regularly attend our church.

• Over 100 children attended Holiday Club

• 2 editions of Vision reached 4 villages

• The Café, football ministry and Little Fishes continue on a regular basis

• Party in the Park saw a significant involvement from the church

• 400+ came on Christmas Eve

Numbers are not everything, but perhaps one way to interpret all these facts is that we should be encouraged by our ‘reach’ into the community. We’re putting God on the radar of people in these villages and beyond. If 400 people come on Christmas Eve, true, they may not all get baptised and come into church membership, but God’s on their radar! And that’s a big part of our job.

It’s an interesting statistic too, isn’t it, that 230 people now attend our church regularly (figures drawn, with some give and take, from the church directory). Not all attend regularly and often, but they all attend regularly. A key challenge that faces us I think, is to match the numerical growth we’ve seen over recent years, with a similar growth in spiritual maturity – a maturity that’s measured by how much people have a sense of assurance of faith, and by the Christ-likeness of our character.

At a recent Deacons Away Day we had a feeling that these verses from Hebrews 5:12-6:1 are significant for us at this time. They’re challenging words that speak of the need to move from baby milk to solid food:

‘Though by this time you ought to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God’s word all over again. You need milk, not solid food! ... But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. Therefore let us move beyond the elementary teachings about Christ and be taken forward to maturity…’

These are stark words, and I want to lay them before us as a challenge at the start of this year. This doesn’t apply to you if you are new to the church and new to your faith. What you need is milk – the elementary basics of the Christian faith, and we will always seek to provide that. But if you’ve been around here for a more than just a year or two, perhaps you’ve actually been a Christian for several years now – let me ask you this question: How are you going to grow up in your faith in 2008?

To change the metaphor slightly, if you sense that in many ways you’re still relying on being spoon-fed in your faith, then you need to graduate to cooking for yourself.
How will you do that? Will it be through finally sorting out a regular time of prayer and Bible Study? Isn’t it about time to stop making excuses and sort it out? Or perhaps doing the Bible Overview course will help? Or through joining a home group? Or if you’re in one, going to it! Or perhaps Dan Horrex’s proposal that some people look at forming Accountability Groups - seeking out 1 or 2 friends to whom you can be accountable for your relationship with God – would suit you? Please see the blue ‘Accountability Groups’ leaflet or speak to Dan if you’d like more information on that.

Or perhaps you need to find some new way to actively serve God in 2008, and get out of your comfort zone: read through the Annual Review and see what grabs you. I’d like to challenge people to make 2008 a year of coming to a new maturity in your walk with God.

The Renewal Project

Our maturity as individuals disciples impacts on our maturity as a church family, and that’s a factor in the Renewal Project as much as anywhere else.

I’ve always said that this is a discipleship project – that if you and I allow it to, it’ll teach us all sorts of things about what it means to make God’s cause our cause, about trusting God to provide for us, about what it is to give to God’s work, about what it is to store up treasure in heaven.

We will succeed in this project according to the maturity of our discipleship, and the degree to which we learn to put God first in our lives.

Let’s talk about the project just a little bit, and where we’re up to:

As you know, there are two aspects to our giving to this project: In order to draw down a loan from the Baptist Union for the project we need to raise 40% of the total we want to spend. We will then be in a position to draw down a loan for the other 60%. Provided, that is, we can show we can make the repayments on that loan.

Therefore we need 2 things:

• We need to raise 40% of the project cost through giving and fundraising and grants. At the moment that stands at just under £70K so far.

• We need people to commit to ongoing monthly giving towards the project, to go towards the loan repayments. At the moment I believe that stands at around ¼ of what we’d need to repay a loan on the whole project.

What we’re recommending as a Diaconate is that we get our heads down for the next year, working really hard at giving and fundraising, with the aim of actually DOING something in 2009!

The point is we don’t want to go on and on fundraising and never actually get the builders in, as this would just get frustrating.

So we’re suggesting a cut-off point. If we want to get building in 2009, we’ll need to make an application for a loan in September. So when the September church meeting comes around we’ll have a ‘this is where we’ve got to’ discussion, and decide together what we’re going to do next – whether we can do the whole scheme, or whether there’s a particular phase of the work that we could get on and do first, and all the implications of that. It’ll basically come down to what we can afford.

So, there are various fundraising events planned for the year, and grant applications are being prepared as we speak, to go out over the next few weeks and months. We hope that they will all yield some money towards the project, but there’s no doubt that the bulk of the money for this project has to come from our giving of our money to the project. If you weren’t able to be present on Gift Day morning you can make your gift, or indeed a pledge, at any time (cheques payable to Bluntisham Baptist Church. Speak to Gillian Sugden or Rob Gore for more details of financial giving).

I’m challenged and encouraged by this quote from Steve Chalke, talking about the challenges of bringing about change of any kind: he says: ‘I’ve learnt that someone with a vision for change will always live at the same time with frustration. There are bad days, weeks, months and indeed whole years when you just have to put your head down and struggle through.’

So maybe there’s a message there for us: Let’s decide to get our heads down and just work hard at giving and fundraising as much as we possibly can for this next year. Let 2008 be a year when we really focus our efforts on raising money for this project. And as I say, in September we’ll put those heads together and say, ‘Based on the money we’ve raised so far, and the amount that we’re going realistically to be able to repay after that, what can we afford to actually DO in 2009?’

That’s the basic plan. I’ve heard various stories from people who have been committed or creative or both with their giving or fundraising. One couple said this: ‘This year we are giving 10% of our income to charity – ½ of that to BBC General Funds,, ¼ to the RP and ¼ to other charities. In addition, we have started to give 10% of our invested savings to the RP spread over 10 years.’

Another person wrote: ‘I was able through the sale of a picture at auction, to give a substantial donation to the RP – I was SO pleased to do so.’

I know of someone else who is trying to set up Salsa Classes with the profits going to Project. And another couple who are donating part of an inheritance they received after a relative died.

Let me say ‘thank you’ for being creative and committed in your giving. I hope those stories encourage others to consider what you can do. Maybe 2008 is the year when we learn give to God’s work to a level that we’ve never done before.

Why do the Renewal Project?

Because after all, this is a project that is going to make a big difference to the work of God’s Kingdom in these villages. If you leaf through the pages of the Annual Review, as I hope you’ll take a few minutes to do, you’ll see members of the church family writing about what a difference it will make to their area of ministry when the project gets done.

Some of the key areas for that are in terms of our worship together on a Sunday morning, the facilities for the Sunday school that are so cramped at the moment – if you want to be persuaded the RP is a good idea, just talk to a Sunday school teacher!

Another key area is the facilities it will provide for our service of the community: new, convenient, up to date kitchens and toilets will make a huge difference to everyone who uses these buildings, particularly the very young and the very old. This is work that urgently needs doing; it’s needed doing for a long time, and you and I have the opportunity to do it for the sake of the church and the villages, now and for generations to come.

I close with some words that I found written in Vision Magazine. Not one of the two editions that were produced in 2007, but rather an edition that I was given by Win Hiam before she died last year. It was a copy of Vision from the Centenary Year of these buildings that was held in 1975.

These words have a strong application to us today, and might inspire us to get on and work hard for this project in 2008. It’s entitled ‘Looking Ahead to 2075’, and it goes on:

‘Few if any of those attending the Centenary Celebrations this year at Bluntisham will have the opportunity to celebrate the 200 years since the rebuilding of the Meeting House. With this being the case, should we not be asking some vitally important questions? And should we not also seek to try and answer them?

• Will the chapel still be standing?

• Will people still be attending?

• Will the Sunday School still be a thriving one?

• Will it be a happy fellowship?

• Will people still find God here?

• Will people still be praying to him?

‘It is up to us to see that all of these questions are answered.  Is it not our duty to provide for others, as we ourselves have been provided for?  We must all look to the future and provide the future church.’

Surely that’s our job, isn’t it? ‘To look to the future and provide the future church.’ Surely that’s a big part of what the Renewal Project is about.

I invite you to be part of that, part of growing in maturity in our faith, and part of all the ways we’ll be ‘putting God on the radar’ of the people of these villages and beyond in 2008.