Pastoral Moment
The season is changing: cooler air and warmer colours. I’m not a fan of winter, but Autumn I can do! Beautiful days for being outdoors, enjoying the green before it gets brown. It also means Easter is around the corner!
Easter Series
Easter is without doubt our biggest, most important, favourite time of the year! This year we have something special for you: a mini-series called ‘Gospel Images’, where we’ll re-tell the Easter story through some of its symbols. Intrigued? Diarise your Easter times with us!
End of the Gospel Culture Series
The start of a new series also means the end of our Gospel Culture sermon series. This coming Sunday is the grand finale, so be sure to join us as close the series out with a ‘boiling intensity’ (that will make more sense on Sunday!
In the next few weeks we will have some Gospel Culture digital wallpaper downloads for you, which will helpfully keep these Culture Codes in view throughout the year. Look out for these in the coming weeks (Warning: it’s a diagram!)
The end of the series also means a time of reflection for myself and the preaching team on the series. Did it go the way we wanted? Did it achieve what we hoped? Could we have said things better?
Answers: Mostly, Not sure, Yes! We’re going to process all of this in a special, once-off Scratchpad podcast episode. Look out for this in the coming few weeks.
Structural Change
As a Church we have obviously been concentrating our attention on Culture Change for the last few months, but there has also been some structural change going on!
Last week we had our Church AGM, and at that meeting approved a completely revised version of our Constitution, as well as some improvements to our Rules. You can see these documents and catch up on our AGM here. We believe this new constitution better reflects who we are as a Church in 2022, and will hopefully anchor RUC for the next 100 years!
At our AGM Bruce, our Treasurer, reported on the generous giving in 2021 which resulted in a healthy surplus at the end of the year. However, he also reported that in the first two months of this 2022 that surplus had eroded, funding a significant deficit in our year to date offerings. If you are in a position to start, or increase, your tithe, or give an additional once-off offering, it would enable our ministry to remain strong heading into this next quarter.
Ministry strength is something we celebrated at the AGM for 2021. There is a stunning video reporting on our work in 2021 which you can view here, or download a digital brochure here.
End of Restrictions?
I have been so grateful that we have been able to start the year the way we’re supposed to: Doors wide open, ministries pumping, people gathering for (mostly!) unrestricted for worship. We didn’t have that opportunity last year, and we certainly didn’t take it for granted this year! We’ve been excited at the steady growth in our Sunday gatherings and Next-Gen ministries.
Launch of JBC in Alex
We also saw the exciting launch of the JBC campus in Alexandra, the culmination of a year’s work from the team and the generous giving of our Church and Gospel Partners.
If you missed the update video this past Sunday you can see it here.
Now as the seasons change, and we look towards Easter, it’s a chance to really immerse ourselves in the central story of our faith.
We look forward to this next season with you!
Richard
