Pilgrimage in Prayer - and Non-Identical Triplets
St David’s Cathedral, Pembrokeshire
Inspired by our Pilgrimage theme for 2023, Beccy and I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to visit St David’s in Pembrokeshire last week, where the site of the cathedral has been an official pilgrimage location since 1123 (according to their website!)
One of the routes pilgrims of old would take through Wales passed St Brynach’s church in the very north of Pembrokeshire, where they still have a Celtic cross in the grounds, dating from the 10th Century. We walked along the old pilgrims route to get there. To prove it, there’s time for one more holiday snap for you…
It is inspiring to think that people on our islands have been seeking closer encounters with Jesus for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. We’re not doing anything original really, are we?! The inner longing of every human heart has always been for more of God. And for the last two thousand years, specifically for more of Jesus, by His Spirit. We’re simply continuing that heart cry in our era and in our communities.
Let’s keep pressing into the Rule of Life resources, including maybe planning a physical pilgrimage in 2023, that will help you do just that. You can find the worksheets to help you build your Rule of Life on our website, here. This week we’re working on defining what “Work” means for us, so we can fulfil our call to bring God’s Kingdom in our areas of responsibility, and build in stop times when we know we’re NOT working! The podcast for Sunday’s message will be up here shortly.
“Non Identical Triplets”
Our next Site Prayer Meeting will be on Sunday 5th March at 7.30pm in the Kerith Centre (we’ll be in person again). We’ll continue seeking God for what we do next with our Sunday gatherings. You may remember from a previous blog, last time we were seeking God to discern whether to multiply our Sunday morning meetings (since we’re rather full at the moment) and how we might do that.
The stand-out answer we felt we heard at our prayer time was that God was giving us Non Identical Triplets. That meant not just two repeated morning meetings, but three different expressions of meeting from which to choose one to attend! (Probably not all at once as a next step, but maybe these would become weekly in time.)
As we continue to pray into that (and ponder how we might do it!) the front-running ideas that came out of our time of prayer were:
KEEP our current Sunday mornings every week - but only once - don’t double it up and lose the treasured connection times with God and one another.
NEW: Consider a meeting for parents and kids to attend together in the afternoons. This would be different from dropping kids off in a Kerith Kids. It could be geared around activities families with younger children could do together.
DEVELOP: Enjoy extended periods of prayer and worship. No planned message, no fixed set list. Time to pray, to worship, to listen, to process together. This would be the new home for our current prayer meetings on a Sunday evening, and would likely last a little longer, to ensure we still make time to pray. Our Young Adults experimented with a few of these in 2021/2. This would now be for all adults.
Googling “non-identical triplets” brought up this image!!! It’s cute, but that’s all - I’m not suggesting any kind of colour themes for the meetings here!
The initial reaction in our prayer time was mixed! As well as an excitement of new things, we also noticed our anxiety and concern over how we might be able to do any of this - particularly given the stretch felt by existing teams on Sunday mornings, and the determination not to build back after Covid in a way that exhausts people. We want to multiply our teams with new people, not add to existing loads. We prayed through Psalm 131:
Psalm 131 - A song of ascents. Of David.
1 My heart is not proud, Lord,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
2 But I have calmed and quietened myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
3 Israel, put your hope in the Lord
both now and for evermore.
The overwhelming sense was that God has this in his control. We do not need to be anxious about anything - including this. He will provide! As we work it through, and identify folks wanting to take these forwards, we’ll be sharing more and more info. In the meantime, please do keep praying into this. If you have any sense of God speaking, let us know at info@kerith.church. If having prayed, you sense God wants to use you to make these new expressions a reality (we’re thinking after Easter), then please get in touch the same way, too!
Finance Prayer Meeting - it’s back
Finally, still on the subject of prayer, the Elders are also praying every week this season for our finances as a church. As Simon expressed at the start of the year, we’re knowingly heading into a season of financial deficit (a year when we’re spending more than we’re expecting to receive as income) as we fill out the spaces that God has given us in Bracknell, Windsor, Farnborough and West Wight. We don’t want to be in this position for long and so the finance prayer meeting (that once was the engine room for God’s provision for The Kerith Centre in Bracknell) has made a post-Covid return on Zoom, at the new time of Monday evenings (8pm). To join in, you only need to Sign-Up for an automated reply with the link. We’d love to see you there!
God bless you as you bring God’s Kingdom rule and reign in your part of the world this week!