NEW! Over the next twelve months BUGB President John Weaver will reflect in his monthly blog.

May 2008

Will it be Ken, Boris or Brian as the new Lord Mayor of London? How will Alan Craig of the Christian Peoples Alliance and Christian Party have fared? By the time you read this we will probably know whether or not London will be beginning on a new path. There are always new beginnings and expectations in the news. Many in Zimbabwe still look for a new president, a new parliament, and hopefully a new and better future.

For me, as I begin my year as president of our Union of churches, the question concerns our expectations, yours and mine.

I look forward with anticipation to seeing what God is doing amongst his churches. I am a ‘glass half-full’ person, and I expect to see and hear about all sorts of opportunities that God is opening up for congregations throughout the country. I believe in looking forward because looking back is rarely a good idea, especially when it comes to church life.

As time passes memories fade and we tend to look back through rose-coloured spectacles remembering a time when we had to carry more chairs into the building for a service. This then becomes a blurred memory and we imagine that all services used to see such attendance, forgetting that this was the nativity service when the local school choir were also taking part, supported by those children’s families! Such recollections become detrimental to those who minister within such a fellowship in future times.

This does not mean that we should never look back. There is a right way of looking back - to draw strength and hope from God's past actions. Israel looked back to the Exodus. They celebrated the Passover with lamb, bitter herbs, unleavened bread, and with wine - they entered into the experience of Israel of old, and participated as the chosen, rescued people of God - they shared the same covenant as they recited the story.

Jesus celebrated that same Passover the night before his crucifixion, and he gave it new meaning - it has become the celebration of his death and resurrection for us. As we eat and drink we participate in Christ’s death and new life - we share in the dynamic vitality of the new covenant in the power of the Spirit. Jesus calls us to celebrate, to remember, and to participate in his new life.

We look back to our Christian experiences, and to our collective church experiences. We celebrate and give thanks to God for our church fellowships and all that we have done together in the mission of Christ. We may also look back and feel ashamed and sorry for past failures. We may look at the current state of our lives and be disappointed, but God encounters us with the promise of forgiveness and the possibility of transformed and renewed lives, and so we look forward with hope.

I want to encourage us to look forward – what is God doing? What does God want to do in the mission of our fellowship within our community? We need to be alive to the opportunities that God is presenting to us. Isaiah tells the people in exile that their rescuer, the God of the Exodus, is going to bring about a new exodus through the desert, providing water in the wilderness for God’s chosen people. God says that they are still God’s chosen people; and that God will act again, here and now. (Isaiah 43:14-21)

We should not be praying that God will bless what we have decided to do, but rather pray that we might be doing what God wills to bless. I believe in the God who is in the business of doing new things, and that he call s us to trust in his guidance as we venture out in Christ’s mission.

Look back by all means, but recognise that the God of the Exodus, the God of the Cross and Resurrection, the God of each church's story, is the God who goes with each of us into His future.

He says: Fear not for I have redeemed you, I have called you by name, you are mine. (Isaiah 43:1-5)

John Weaver