Our Minister

April 2024 Circuit Link Letter from Rev Deborah Kirk, Superintendent Minister

Dear Friends
We are in the middle of the most important days of the Church year. We have walked with Jesus once more through the days of Lent, and tried to prepare our hearts as best we can, so that we face this most significant time with reverence and perhaps some glimpses of new understanding.
The events of Holy Week have taken us on a roller-coaster of reactions and responses. We plunge from the highs of Palm Sunday to the gathering shadows of Maundy Thursday with such speed that the contrast in the emotions we feel can be so overwhelming that we are tempted to push them aside. We don't want to think about them, so we hurry on to the brilliance of Easter morning, rather than stay with the shadows.
Perhaps this is because we recognise our own complicity in the unfolding story; and we are reluctant to be so involved. But we are involved in spite of ourselves. We protest with Peter as Christ kneels to wash our feet; we question with the disciples as he shares bread and wine with us and shows us a new depth of meaning in those humble objects; we watch fearfully from the shadows and deny we know him when others recognise us as his followers. We want to be different, but we know in our hearts that surrounded by all that hatred and danger, we too would have joined the crowd in shouting 'Crucify!', or at the very least, we would have run away to hide in fear, our despair growing as our hopes crashed around us.
But perhaps we have to honestly face our faithlessness, and our fears, and our despair, in order to glimpse the significance of Easter morning. Because the Resurrection is a message of hope and victory against all the odds, in spite of everything that tells us differently.
The world tells us that life is fragile and haphazard, and reminds us day by day that we are going to die. The Resurrection tells us that God’s love for his world is faithful and transforming, and reminds us day by day that we will live forever.
So as we remember and reflect on the events of these precious days again, let's be prepared to face the shadows, waiting for the moment when the brilliance of Easter morning shines its amazing Resurrection light into all the darkest corners of our hearts and renews our lives again.
As someone much wiser than me said ‘We do not pretend that life is all beauty. We are aware of darkness and sin, of poverty and pain. But we know Jesus has conquered sin and passed through his own pain to the glory of the Resurrection. And we live in the light of his Paschal Mystery – the mystery of his Death and Resurrection.
“We are an Easter People and Alleluia is our song!”

Peace and joy for the journey, Deborah

Letter from Rev Annie Deche, Circuit Minister:

Lent this year starts on Wednesday, February 14th and ends on Thursday, March 28th with an evening Service on Maundy Thursday. The start of Lent is, in some Methodist church traditions, marked with Ash Wednesday and lasting for 40 days (not including Sundays), representing the 40 days Jesus spent fasting in the wilderness. This 40-day period for Christians is a time to reflect, pray, fast if you are able and practise almsgiving, in preparation for the resurrection of Christ on Easter Sunday. We all know the 14th of February as a day to celebrate love - and how lucky we are this year significantly to celebrate the love of God from the season of Epiphany, the gift of baby Jesus, and how through his birth, life, ministry, death, resurrection and outpouring of the Holy Spirit in a few months’ time to celebrate Pentecost. We are here because of the faith we have in Christ Jesus as our Lord and Saviour.

As we ponder on what we will be thinking of in all these things, I would invite us to get into the zeal of being A Justice-seeking Church as we continue to support many around us - some we don’t see or know - by heeding the call from the ‘Walking with Micah’ project which Rev Rachel Lampard has embraced. I have arrived back from the under 5s retreat where Rachel was the key facilitator, and she has asked us to look at, and possibly join, in the ‘Let’s End Poverty’ community of grassroots activists working together to create change. Sign up at letsendpoverty.co.uk, speak up and invite others to this diverse, growing movement of people who are united behind a vision for a UK where poverty can’t keep anyone down.

May we make this Lenten season one of a memorable encounter with God, join in where others are meeting, as one of the principles of a justice-seeking church says: God desires the flourishing of creation and human community within it…the search for justice does not diminish or limit the flourishing of others but seeks to enable it.

Charles Wesley's famous hymn ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’ (Singing the Faith 503) talks about Jesus as ‘unbounded love’ – a kind of love that cannot be contained, that works in our lives and in our world to free us and heal us. ‘Unbounded Love’ is the theme of the Lent campaign of the Methodist Church in 2024 – holding together our commitments to be a justice-seeking church, and a people who experience and proclaim the good news of God’s uncontainable love. (Methodist website)

Lent themes from the Hymn Love Divine:

Week 1 - “Unbounded love”: Jesus’ baptism and wilderness experience – God’s love bursts the barriers of heaven, and then bursts into the realms of darkness.

Week 2 - “Visit us with thy salvation”: Losing our life (psyche) to find it – the ways we attempt to insulate ourselves from God’s love.

Week 3 - “Pure and spotless let us be”: Turning the tables in the Temple – corporate religious attempts to boundary God’s love.

Week 4 - “Finish then thy new creation”: God’s unbounded love for the cosmos.

Week 5 - “Changed from glory into glory”: Like a seed that has to die before it bears fruit, death is no barrier to God’s love.

Week 6 - “Till we cast our crowns before thee”: As Jesus entered Jerusalem the people responded by taking off their cloaks. What’s our equivalent?

Holy Week - “Lost in wonder, love, and praise!”: As Jesus becomes bound by his opponents, will God’s love stay bound?

“Humble yourselves, therefore, under God’s mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time.” 1 Peter 5:6

Annie