Just Imagine
Download - 
Just Imagine Helping Each Other Animation Video
Just Imagine Helping Each Other (Animation Notes)
Download - Just Imagine Sermon Notes - Outrageous Grace
Download Just Imagine Posters
Download - Baptist Times Just Imagine Centre Spread
Download transcripts of the Just Imagine film and the collection of prayers
Transcript - Just Imagine Film
Transcript - Prayers from the Heart
Baptist Times Feature on Just Imagine
Home Mission: telling the stories
BUGB head of communications Amanda Allchorn introduces the new Home Mission Promotion project.
Just Imagine seeks to take our Baptist churches on a three-year journey together to capture a fresh passion and understanding of what Home Mission is all about. Over the next few years we will prayerfully imagine how God is already working through current Home Mission-supported situations. We will also invite you to dream together about what could be done for the Kingdom if we cared a little more for each other and gave more sacrificially.
Just Imagine was developed by representatives from our 13 regional Association teams and the National Resource, who all have a passion for the way they see God using Home Mission funds to support, equip and empower a range of situations across our denomination.
Their prayer is that as we ‘walk together and watch over each other’ the Baptist family will learn to love each other with greater compassion, care more deeply about what God is calling others to do, and move us to step out in faith and give with a new spirit of creativity and generosity as a Baptist people.
So why is Just Imagine so important now?
In many ways Home Mission is one of our Baptist family’s bestkept secrets, and many people in our churches know only a little about what we call Home Mission.At a challenging economic time, as we make decisions about giving five per cent to Home Mission from our church budgets, many have lost the connection between a figure in the church accounts and the exciting and humbling ways those funds are used to make a
difference for Christ’s Kingdom.
Over the next few weeks Baptist Life, the BUGB website and fresh posters which will start arriving in our churches will gently invite us all to Just Imagine. So look out for these resources and join us in a new journey to discover what God is asking us to do as a Baptist people. When we started working on Just Imagine it felt like a project, but as we have prayed and grown the theme it has become more like a new spiritual adventure.
We are already developing ways we can be more creative in our storytelling, such as a fresh all-age worship pack written by a father and son team, audio-visual materials, use of social media and much more. We are also setting up online giving to Home Mission and a new Legacy Programme in the near future. So join this exciting journey and lets find out together where God is leading us. Just imagine if we didn’t.
How you can support Just Imagine
Pray
Use the posters arriving in your churches, these articles and Baptist Life as a starting point for prayer
Say thank you
Thank your church for their current giving to Home Mission and share with them the difference they are helping to make.
Discuss together your giving for 2012
Show one of the current BUGB Home Mission DVD’s at the church meeting. Then pray together about the decisions you make as you plan for 2012 (five per cent of your general fund is a good starting point)
Invite speakers supported by Home Mission
Speak to your Association team and find whether Home Mission supports a church or a project near you. Then invite someone along to share how God is working through them
Encourage your Home Mission Representative
Chat with your Home Mission
Headland’s story
Kieran Banks feels he is helping to unlock potential – and the congregation at Headland Baptist Church have embarked on quite a journey as a result. When the former head teacher was inducted into the pastorate in January 2010 he became the Hartlepool church’s first paid minister in 15 years. His arrival has coincided with a flurry of activity that has seen the church grow its membership and increasingly reach out to its community. The children’s club on Tuesday nights has mushroomed, and there is now a youth group on Thursdays, from which a number of the teenagers have attended a youth Alpha on Sunday.
The church has launched a luncheon club for the older generation who live locally but don’t go to church. This attracts between 20 and 30 people each month, and plans are afoot to introduce a short service. Nativity plays, involvement in the mission at the Tall Ships Hartlepool 2010, when the church was helped by a team of 10 from Spring Baptist Church in Texas, and leading a Churches Together Event at Christmas have also featured.
Although the church has a small fellowship, it is growing and has hosted several baptisms with more on the cards. Kieran is reluctant to take too much credit – the church had been taking some encouraging steps which led to the need for his arrival – but acknowledges he has helped to spur things on.‘When I joined them the fellowship was definitely growing, and what’s happened since is not directly attributable to me. But I’ve played a part in encouraging and providing contacts, opening up the possibilities.
‘For instance the will was always to do the youth work, but they weren’t getting the people in. I’m a governor at a local school, and we’ve been able to get the message out.’ Church secretary Gwynneth Hauxwell is under no illusions about Kieran’s impact, made possible because Home Mission pays for half his salary. ‘Kieran has been like a breath of fresh air, challenging us passionately to embrace the whole Gospel of Christ, and to acquire, equip, and employ disciples of him. ‘We are very grateful for the support from Home Mission, as we would not be able to maintain a minister without that. We thank everyone who shares in giving in this way.’
Alongside the increased outreach is a deepening of faith that a full-time minister can help provide. The church has had a couple of weekends away as a fellowship. ‘They love the word, are really keen on expository ministry, the focus on grace and Christ,’ says Kieran.
‘Their appetite for the word and for prayer is discernibly growing.‘Together we are definitely growing and are full of hope. It’s a joint venture that has definitely been made possible by Home Mission.’ But he adds that the fellowship does not want to rest on its laurels. ‘The church definitely has an ambition to be free of the need of Home Mission. It’s committed to growing.’
Gwynneth agrees. ‘Our vision is to see people of all ages responding to the gospel and becoming followers of Jesus, then making other disciples as they allow the Holy Spirit to take control of their lives.‘We are excited and challenged by what God is doing and will do through his very ordinary people at Headland Baptist Church.’
Rowena’s story
‘I was loved into life,’ says Rowena Wilding.
She grew up on the deprived Chelmsley Wood estate on Birmingham’s eastern fringe. ‘I believed there was no God where I grew up. Just pain and fear and abuse. I was physically and emotionally abused by my father until I was 12, when my mother realised that if we didn’t leave, we were going to wind up dead. We left with nothing but the clothes on our backs and found ourselves homeless.’
They found shelter with Neil Roberts, minister of the Home Mission-supported Baptist church, who with his wife Helen gave them a home until the Council rehoused them. But Rowena’s mother found life very hard, and Rowena found herself on her own much of the time. She became a drug abuser and overdosed at the age of 14, saying ‘I woke up in hospital bitterly disappointed.’ Nothing changed for her until she was 16 and got her first job – as an elf in Santa’s grotto. There, she says, ‘I met a boy who shared his faith with me. He befriended me, not to convert me, just because he wanted to show me that I was loved. ‘We talked about God for several months and I resisted, until he finally asked me a pertinent question; having tried and failed to fill the hole in my life with drugs, sex, alcohol, fashion, music and whatever else, what’s stopping me from trying to fill it with God? ‘I went to church with him the following week and listened to a sermon on Romans 8; God uses all things for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.
‘It was, I suppose, a Damascus Road moment. All my anger and pain at what I’d been through dissipated as God showed me that there was a plan, that he was going to use every experience and every mistake to help others. ‘A year later I formally gave my life to God and was baptised and made a member at my local Baptist church by the minister who had given me a home three years earlier.’ Now Rowena’s married to the boy – now the man (pictured above with Rowena) – who took her to church. She and Andrew have just moved to Edgeside Baptist in Rossendale, where she’s been inducted as the minister.
She’d won a place at Birmingham University to study philosophy. ‘I loved it, but my heart and mind were in two places – I liked being at Uni, but I was more drawn to getting involved with the church. I never really left Chelmsley Wood.’ A University Bible study group challenged her to see that her heart was for ministry. ‘That was the moment it really clicked, and I understood I was doing the wrong thing.
‘I realised that I wanted to work at a church and show the love that I’d been shown.’ Her three years at Regent’s Park College in Oxford were, she says, the best of her life, though it was ‘incredibly tough’ – and she’d said that Regent’s was the one college she wouldn’t go to (‘the idea of a Chelmsley bird going off to Oxford!’).
But she’ll carry her experience of grace into her ministry at Edgeside. Looking back, she says, ‘I wouldn’t have survived and I wouldn’t still be alive it it weren’t for Neil and Helen. ‘I saw a group of people demonstrating self-sacrificing love. I used to call Christians hypocrites; I was no longer able to do that. ‘I’d had so much negativity and sadness. The church gave me a family who believed in me and nurtured me into a functional
human being.’
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