Association Days

November 6th 2010 - Yearning for God

IONA COMMUNITY INSPIRES EMBA WEEKEND

 The East Midlands Baptist Association drew on the resources of the Iona Community for its latest relating and resourcing weekend. On Saturday 6 November 250 people packed into Melton Mowbray Baptist Church to focus on the theme of yearning for God. On Sunday, at Seymour Road Baptist Church, Nottingham, there was a Worship Workshop in the afternoon and an event for young people in the evening, ‘Hidden humour in Holy Scripture’. All sessions were led by Revd John Bell, a resource worker with the Community and a frequent contributor to BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thought for the Day’.

“We plan our Association Days so that they’re challenging and inspiring events,” explains Becky Nicholls, EMBA administrator. “On this occasion we looked to a group outside our immediate network, to the Iona Community, which is a dispersed Christian ecumenical community working for peace and social justice, rebuilding of community and the renewal of worship. They share an experience of the liberating power of Jesus Christ, and a commitment to the personal and social transformation that spring from the vision and values of the gospel.”

John Bell’s first session on Saturday began with a testimony of faith in the church. He said, “I want to say that despite its faults I believe in the church, not the Baptist church or the Anglican church or the Presbyterian church or any other of its other incarnations. But in the church of Jesus Christ, in the community of faith - the body of Christ, which has been transformed continually since Pentecost, sometimes into a kind of unchanging cabaret of orthodoxy, sometimes into an oasis of radical discipleship and sometimes into an ecclesiastical theme park.”

He went on to unpack his ideas and laid down three sets of choices which he believes the church today needs to grapple with. “One is to do with the connectedness or estrangement. Are we a church which is connected to the body of Christ, when one part suffers other parts share the pain, or when one part rejoices other parts share the happiness? Or are we a congregation of estrangement where we look with some suspicion at each other?”

“Are we a congregation which believes in participation or do we believe in performance, that other people will do the worship, other people will do the service but not the whole congregation?”

“Are we a congregation which believes that experience of relating, of loving, of sharing is at the centre of faith, or is an intellectual apprehension of the gospel which we think leads to salvation at the centre of faith?”

He concluded by saying, “I hope that God will give us the integrity and the perceptiveness to discover what’s appropriate in our congregation, which might be different from other congregations,  so that we might both glorify God and enable people still to be touched by Christ’s love, to be attracted to the winsomeness and converting nature of our Saviour.”

PICTURE CAPTION - John Bell takes to the piano to lead the congregation in song at Melton Mowbray Baptist Church.