If you’ve still to confirm that your son / daughter would like to go to the BBQ, please contact Sarah Tomb

Church Building directions can be found here – Church Building_Ladycroft map

What are you doing for Orange Thursdays this week?

Pentecost Sunday:  Celebrate Pentecost (next Sunday, May 19) by wearing very bright ‘flame’ coloured clothes – Yellows, reds, oranges etc!

GO KIDS: there’ll be opportunities to serve across all the Go Kids’ groups (0-12yrs) after the summer. Teams work rotas and all materials are provided. Taster sessions are available. For more details please contact Clare Gardner, Go Kids’ Director at clare.gardner@stmungos.org

HOPE 13:   A big thank you to all those who volunteered for the Hope weekend!  Balerno High School and Harmeny School are thrilled with what we did for them and the Family Fun Day was a huge success.

Gala Day  volunteers needed – can you help with facepainting or supervising inflatables for 2 hours on Sat 2 Jun  12.15 – 4.15pm? A great way to serve the local community.  Contact Richard or Maggy McArthur (richard.mcarthur@stmungos.org).

Tearfund:  Thank you to everyone who filled in an Enough Food for Everyone campaign card – we sent a total of 175 signed cards to Tearfund.

P7 BBQ and nrg taster on Friday 17^th May, 6pm at the Buchanan’s for a BBQ and then the leaders will escort them to nrg at the church building.  Parents are to collect them from the church building at 9.30pm.  For more info, please contact sarah.tomb@stmungos.org.

Malcolm’s Blog:  “Malcolm will be writing a new weekly blog article to accompany our new sermon series on ‘Postcards from Centres of Spiritual Health’.

Staff availability – most of the staff team will be at the HTB Leadership Conference on Monday and Tuesday so you may not get a reply to emails and phone calls until Wednesday.

 Prayers

Pray for the staff team at the HTB Leadership Conference on Monday and Tuesday – Nicky Gumbel, Bill Hybels, Justin Welby and others speaking.

But from the moment I got there I realized that this church truly was a place focused on the Presence of God.  So much so that it had become a habitation of the Holy Spirit.  While the setting on a hill in a wonderful California valley with distant mountains visible in all directions meant the church campus was beautiful, the actual building cannot be said to create an ambience.  It’s fundamentally a 1000 seater auditorium that doubles as a school gym with no natural light.  Yet the light of God’s presence seems to hover the minute worship starts.

Undoubtedly the live sung worship was probably the best I have ever experienced in my Christian Life.  They have gathered a phenomenally talented group of world class worship musicians, writers and worship leaders.  I already have most of the Bethel worship CDs but was incredibly impressed by hearing the whole team including  Brian and Jen Johnson, and Jeremy  Riddle leading worship live, for a minimum of an hour every service or session.  But it wasn’t just their skill in writing and leading songs.  Their aim was to usher us into the presence of God which you could feel in extraordinary tangible way.  Much of that was also due to the fact that the whole church congregation really are thoroughly engaged with sung worship which creates a powerfully intense atmosphere.

But if I couldn’t stay in the auditorium I was just as happy to go out into their beautiful prayer chapel in a specially designed wooden building overlooking the valley surrounded by a beautiful garden of running water and small ponds.  The chapel itself with almost 360 degree floor to ceiling windows was a place of peace where you are either listen to worship music being played or just relax to the sound of running water from the central water feature.  I just lay on the floor soaking in God’s presence, sitting up occasionally to stare at the distant mountains.

But under the apostolic leadership of Bill Johnson the church has become an international centre of spiritual health. Its schools ministry alone  has around 2000 students from every nation, and church leaders and ministers like myself travel from around the world just to experience what God is doing in that place.

Those who either have read his books or listened to his talks will know that Bill Johnson’s vision is to help the church experience as much of the kingdom of heaven as possible right now, to echo the words of the Lord’s prayer “on earth as in heaven”.  They are most famous for their very high level authenticated healing miracles, as healing is a very real expression of the kingdom of heaven on earth now.  And they take this healing out into the non-Christian community seeing many people come to faith because they experience the healing power of God in their own lives.    This teaching means there is a compelling and ever present exhortation and inspiration to be expectant,  to constantly experience more of God’s presence and power right now.  Hope and expectation permeates every meeting and every conversation.

The other distinctive teaching, is helping people to    discover and experience in a deep and profound way  their true identity as sons and daughters of the King in a way that would transform their every day thoughts and feelings and life so that their ministry in miracles and signs and wonders   emerges from their security of identity.  It produces truly confident Christians.  Yet all the leaders are totally aware of their spiritual authority and impact, and while clearly being very strong characters and personalities, also come over as being very gracious, generous, and compassionate individuals.

I can fully understand why it appears that God has chosen this place to manifest himself at times in the same way as in the old testament the presence of God would be actually manifest in a pillar of fire, in the cloud or the Glory in the temple.  While Jesus Christ was the ultimate and complete manifestation of God on earth, and God through his holy spirit everywhere  – yet in his   sovereignty Father God sometimes chooses some places to intensify his presence in a dramatic way.  (in many ways it’s a modern experience of what the Celtic saints used to call “thin places”) Bethel church is one of those special places where at times you could almost feel heaven invading earth.

I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to personally visit it – a genuinely infectious centre of spiritual health.

 I found the idea of a personal statement in a book by Bob Buford called “Half Time”, a book which I have really benefited from and still refer to!

 “To serve others pointing them to a heavenly father that loves them”

“To enable others to achieve their goals in business and in Christ”

“To lead others into the love and freedom the father makes available, and to make heaven an accessible reality”

“To serve God by encouraging others, fully using the gifts he has given me, and if possible, putting/keeping a smile on other’s faces at the same time”.

“To be an encourager, building up everyone I meet to fulfil their God-given potential”

“To know God and make Him known”.

“To serve him and to make him known in the spirit of Acts 20:35”.

“To serve, care and encourage people to build their calling and gifts for God and to touch people, through my love for God, as I walk through life.”

“To be a carrier of the Presence of God into every situation, bringing hope, healing, power and freedom for all”

Creating Your Personal Mission Statement

To make life easier (I hope!) I have listed some of the questions that Bob Buford considers helpful when creating a statement.

1.       What do I believe?

2.       What do I do uncommonly well?

3.       What is my passion?

4.       What needs exist in the world that I would like to meet? What do I bring to the party that others need and could benefit from?

5.       What are the “should haves” that have trailed me all through the first half that I really care about?

6.       How could my story and God’s larger story connect?

7.       What difference do I make through my efforts?

Bob suggests that we write the statement in 100 words and then condense it down to a short sentence!   Over to you if you want to write a 100 words, but I hope you find the above helpful to consider when you write your statement.

 For those of you who did not make the breakfast in February the questions that we discussed in small groups following the sessions were:

 Resilent People Run Inspired By a Big-Picture View of Life (Pete’s talk)

 Where am I headed, and what are the great questions that challenge me along the way?

What kind of a person am I becoming as a result of this journey?

What does God expect of me as I run the race?

What have I been equipped to accomplish?

What can I give?

What is my personal statement?

 Resilient People Run Free of the Weight of the Past (Bill’s talk)

 Questions for contemplation and prayer:

 Is there something in your life today that could do with some ‘repair’ work –something that requires attention to it, sooner rather than later?

Who have been the key people or critical events in your life (good and bad) that have shaped you, and how do you reflect on these?

What are your cherished memories, and do they have any bearing on how you live today?

 Thanks again for coming along and I hope for those of you who could not make it that some of the above encourages you.

What has this got to do with Mungo’s – well because I’m off on a trip to Bethel church in Redding California, I’m writing this blog before St Mungo’s has our own tartan celebration, and I am wondering if it’s going to look a little bit like a Bay City Rollers fan convention! because I suggested that everyone consider wearing tartan for the last in our special series on the “colours of spiritual health”.  At the point of writing I have no idea whether any one will wear tartan, let alone the challenge of wearing a kilt on Sunday! I hope we get some pictures!

We started the series by giving everyone a small piece of tartan to introduce the idea of integrating the colours of spiritual health before going on to looklooking at the 10 individual colours representing 10 different aspects of personal spiritual health.

I must admit I don’t think ever in my wildest dreams did I expect any sermon series to have caught the imagination that this series appears to have done.

When people started to wear the colours of the week to church on Sunday I thought it was a bit amusing but the fact that for ten whole Sermons people have gone out their way to dress in certain colours to me has been astounding. Church has never been so bright and occasionally quite strange to see such odd and flamboyant dress appearing!

That alone would be enough!

But other forms of creativity have erupted, pictures, paintings, jewellery, candles, computer graphics have all been made up to represent different colours and their relationship.

On Sunday we will have given out a final card of all the colours and subjects together -apparently it’s called a ‘wordle’. The original version of that was on my email the Monday after I announced the colours from a brand new church member!!

Then only this week I got an email with a picture of a mug with all the colours! I want one!

But I honestly believe it’s more than just a gimmick – I think people have actually begun to get the heart of what we’re doing, taking personal spiritual life seriously.

But as we finish the series, I want to remind us of two keys for the future.

Firstly a 10 a week sermon series will not sort out our spiritual health.

It raises the issue but doesn’t deal with the issue.  The image I have already used is that we are on a sliding scale and I hope we have all moved up a few points on that scale for each of the 10 areas we chose to highlight. (Though do remember there are many other areas of spiritual life we didn’t have time to include.)

I don’t want people to be disappointed or disillusioned because they don’t feel that they have dramatically changed and become perfectly healthy in 10 weeks. So we need to continue to control our expectations.

Instead we celebrate if we have moved up a few points on the scale, that is great as long as we  also commit ourselves to continue to move into a greater spiritual health. And we will intentionally return again and again to aspect of this spiritual health over the next few months and it will always be an important part of Discipleship.

Positively that means we have got to continue to work on each of these areas.

Just like, although I have made great gains in weight loss and fitness in the last three months of exercise and dieting, now it must become a lifestyle or it will all reverse!!

Now it’s about keeping the momentum of the colours of spiritual health going even if we are not focusing on them every Sunday. Some of that will be done by us continuing to use the new language of colours we seem to have created to describe spiritual formation.

Secondly we have got to keep remembering it is the integration of these colours that will make us healthy. We’ve got to develop our strengths but also all our weaknesses and we’ve got see this as an integrated idea, hence the idea of a tartan! A tartan is a model of integration. In fact someone even did a computer designed tartan of all ten colours!!

We can’t just use our favourite colours the way we do when we choose and buy clothes.

All the colours are important to stay healthy which is why Mungos must always be the Tartan Church!

What are you doing for Orange Thursdays this week?

Cherished (St Mungo’s Women’s Ministry) Invite your friends and join us on Saturday 11^th May 8-10.30pm in the Church Building for another craft evening. Pick up an invitation or visit the website for more information.  Let Alison Wilson , Maggy McArthur  or Jackie Smith  know if you are coming or email cherished@stmungos.org today if possible.

Colours of Spiritual Health Mug  – Andrew Mackay has produced a great looking Colours of Spiritual Health Mug.  A few examples of the mug are on the table near the Welcome Desk, they are available for order today £5 each or 2 for £9.  You can also e-mail Andrew – Andrew@graphitees.co.uk

P7 BBQ and nrg taster on Friday 17^th May, 6pm at the Buchanan’s for a BBQ and then the leaders will escort them to nrg at the church building.  Parents are to collect them from the church building at 9.30pm.  For more info, please contact sarah.tomb@stmungos.org.

Mission Giving – last month we gave £1,000 from our World Mission Fund to Living Stones School in Pakistan towards the cost of a new school library..

Congratulations to Jason & Claire Murray on the birth of Elliot on Monday 29^th April.

Car parking on Sunday 12 May
St Columba’s Hospice holds their sponsored walk along the Water of Leith Walkway next Sunday the 12 May.  The walk starts in Balerno at 10am, which will mean Bridge Road is likely to be busier than normal, so please leave plenty of time for parking and if you can walk to church then please do so.

Prayers
Pray for the Hope13 Family Fun Day – for good weather, great fun, families to be strengthened and blessed, and for people to be attracted to the church.
Please pray for Pat as she runs a training session for Street Pastors in Edinburgh on Thursday evening.

Eat on less than £1 a day for 5 days ….

this year’s ‘Help the Hungry Week’ challenge

• Plus come and watch the Live58 film on Tues June 11 – 8pm.

• And give and pray as much as you can!

This year our Help the Hungry week will be from June 9-16.

Isaiah 58 v 10 calls on us to ‘spend ourselves on behalf of the hungry’ and this is just one way of living that out!  The hungry in the world still need our help!

To find out more about eating on less than a £1 a day, look at the live below the line website – www.livebelowtheline.com/uk

You can still pray, give and get involved even if you can’t face the ‘eat on £1 a day’ challenge!  The money raised will be going to the Maseno Project to help further develop that ministry.

More information and resources will be available from Sunday May 26.

And do come and watch the Live58 film if you can – it is a powerful and hopeful presentation of the call God gives us to end extreme poverty – a mixture of great bible teaching and on location filming in Africa, India and Brazil showing what the church is doing.  Produced by Compassion.

What are you doing for Orange Thursdays this week?

Enough Food for Everyone IF campaign – if you didn’t sign a campaign card last week there is another opportunity to do so today – sign up points at the concourse entrance and in the coffee area.  A simple way to stand up for the rights of the poor.

Cherished (St Mungo’s Women’s Ministry) invite your friends and join us on Saturday 11^th May 8-10.30pm in the Church Building for another craft evening. Pick up an invitation or visit the website for more information.  Let Alison Wilson, Maggy McArthur or Jackie Smith know if you are coming or email cherished@stmungos.org by Sunday 5^th May, if possible.

HOPE 13 – serving as a church in and around Balerno with gardening projects at Balerno High School and Harmeny School on Saturday 4^th May and a Family Fun Day on Monday 6^th May. Visit the sign up desk after the services if you would like to get involved. Invitations for the fun day are available on the information table. Think about who you could invite. There is more information on the Back Page.

Colours of Spiritual Health Mug  – Andrew Mackay has produced a great looking Colours of Spiritual Health Mug.  A few examples of the mug are on the table near the Welcome Desk, they are available for order today £5 each or 2 for £9.  You can also e-mail Andrew – Andrew@graphitees.co.uk

Mission Giving – we have given £1,000 from our World Mission Fund to Living Stones School in Pakistan towards the cost of a new school library.

Business Alpha 6 week course on 9^th May – 13^th June over lunch (soup and sandwiches) 12.30 for 12.45 finishing at 1.30pm at the Roxburghe Hotel, Charlotte Square. Gill Scott (HR Director, Aegon) will be giving the first talk and each week there will be a different business speaker giving the address. It is particularly for those in business – those who work in the city centre or beyond. Flyers on the info tables.

 Prayers
Please pray for Malcolm as he attends a leader’s conference at Bethel church in Redding, America later this week.

Hope ’13 weekend – Sat 4 May – Mon 6 May

We’ve got a great number of volunteers already but there is still room for more!

The Saturday Projects

Harmeny School grounds

• Preparing large vegetable plot – sifting out stones, rotavating, digging in compost, possibly planting
• Path work – laying barrier fabric, barrowing and spreading woodchip and gravel
• Also potting on and planting out various plants, building and filling raised beds, shed painting, joinery work in the shed, post digging and concreting and some rough joinery.

Balerno High School Community Wood

• Pruning back all vegetation overhanging & tidy up large fallen branches
• Dig out existing path to allow new layer of bark
• Saw of broken branches and cut back branches overhanging the path
• Create habitat piles

 Saturday Time Slots

• 9.30am to 1.00pm and/or 2.00pm to 5.00pm
• Meet at the Church Building for prayer & worship. Then teams head out.
• Soup will be served between 1pm and 2pm for all volunteers

The Monday HOPE Family Fun Day & picnic

• 11.30am-2pm in Currie Rugby Club and on Malleny Park playing fields
• A day of fun activities and challenges for any family with pre-school & primary school aged children.  If this includes you come along and bring other families too!
• Meeting from 10am onwards at the church building, Ladycroft to pray and then head over to Malleny Park to set up
• Volunteers are needed to help to run the variety of indoor and outdoor activities and challenges – eg crafts, story telling, a quiz, football skills, messy art.
• Plenty of tea, coffee and homebaking will be on offer but please bring your own picnic!
• Ideally we could use another 5-6 adults (plus youth) to have adequate numbers.

 “For the early Christians Koinonia was not the frilly “ fellowship” of church   sponsored  bi-weekly  outings .  It was not tea, biscuits and sophisticated small talk in  the ‘fellowship hall’ after the sermon.  It was an unconditional sharing of their lives  with the other members of Christ’s body”.

 Ronald J Sider

 ‘ It was an unconditional sharing of their lives with the other members of Christ’s body’.  That is a pretty good definition of the word fellowship.  Having spoken in the last of our sermon series on the ‘Colours of Spiritual Health’ about the ‘Yellow of Fellowship,’ I am aware how important the benefit of the “body life” that we get, some being with other believers in the local church, can have upon our spiritual lives. (If you missed it watch it here – http://www.stmungos.org/?page_id=43&sermon_id=441 )  But real fellowship for Christians is even much bigger than that idea .

 The first time I became aware of this was many years ago when I was a Christian Union president in a London university college (the now extinct Westfield). We decided that the theme of our CU house party was going to be on “the fellowship” based on  Acts 2:42 (NIV), They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer… Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people.’

We wanted to build up the relationships between the members of the Christian union, and to help us grow spiritually healthy.

However the speaker, (a Christian Union UCCF staff worker) had another purpose in mind.  In the very first meeting he explained the Greek word Koinonia, sometimes translated ‘fellowship’ in the New Testament, is far more than just being together.  He went on to show us from the Bible that real fellowship, Biblical fellowship, was something much more radical.  Now in retrospect I believe he had an ulterior motive –because we’d just experienced a powerful move of the Holy Spirit at the previous house party and almost overnight  became a very charismatic Christian union, and he was very anti charismatic,  I think he was worried we were going to become very inward looking and become a Holy Huddle, or even turn ourselves into a church, as other Christian unions in London were at the time, when in fact we were becoming dynamically missional and seeing quite a number of students get saved, and wanted to improve  our body life to receive all the new young Christians!

But whatever his agenda may have been, I’ve never forgotten what else was involved in the fullness of Biblical fellowship because the word includes the concept of deep sharing, costly participation and real communion.

He showed us that fellowship was about how we handle our money, as that word is used in Paul’s great teaching on giving in 2Cor  8:4 (NKJ)  ‘imploring us with much urgency that we would receive the gift and the fellowship of the ministering to the saints’ and 2 Cor. 9:13 (NIV)   ‘Because of the service by which you have proved yourselves, men will praise God for the obedience that accompanies your confession of the gospel of Christ, and for your generosity in sharing (koinonia) with them and with everyone else.’

And that real fellowship might involve suffering as in the apostle Paul’s famous cry in Philip. 3:10 (NIV) 

  ‘I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.

It is also about mission,  Philip. 1:5 (KJV)   For your fellowship in the gospel from the first day until now;

and also about our relationship with God, 1 Cor. 1:9 (NIV) ‘God, who has called you into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, is faithful’. 2 Cor. 13:14 (NIV)   ‘May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all’.

But of course it is also all about our relationships as Christians. The very fellowship we have with the living God is the basis but it is the intensity and depth of fellowship we have with one another.

1 John 1:3 (NIV)     We proclaim to you what we have seen and heard, so that you also may have fellowship with us. And our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son, Jesus Christ.

1 John 1:6-7 (NIV)      If we claim to have fellowship with him yet walk in the darkness, we lie and do not live by the truth. But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.

 So perhaps JR Tolkien  , who as a committed Christian and a linguist understood the real depth of the word ‘fellowship’, did give us an illustration of what true fellowship in action looked like when he called his first volume of the Lord of the Rings –  “The Fellowship of the Ring”. A story of fellowship in action!