Articles – Page 111 – Moortown Baptist Church

Tasks and responsibilities
1. To plan and run wellbeing sessions for 16 – 25 year olds.
2. To be alert to new possibilities in relation to wellbeing work with young adults.
3. To take practical day-to-day responsibility for health and safety and safeguarding during sessions.
4. To liaise with volunteers and other sessional workers.
5. To ensure that any volunteers are appropriately supported.
6. To liaise with other professionals and voluntary groups working on wellbeing.
7. To update the management group on progress and write a short report at the end of the period, which should include both work done, numbers attended, feedback using an appropriate validated tool and proposals when appropriate for new development.
8. To participate in regular supervision and always work within the values of Beacon Wellbeing.

Person Specification – Project coordinator

E = essential – D = desirable

Experience

1. Some understanding of wellbeing. E
2. Some experience of working within a diverse community. E
3. Some experience of working with volunteers. D

Knowledge

1. Knowledge of voluntary and statutory agencies working promoting wellbeing. D
2. Knowledge of and transferable skills in working with young adults. E
3. Sympathetic to the Christian faith. E

Skills and abilities

1. Ability to relate to a wide range of people. E
2. Basic IT skills. E
3. Ability to work on own initiative. E
4. Basic report writing skills. E

Personal qualities

1. Willingness to work in a flexible way. E
2. Commitment to working in a welcoming and inclusive way. E
3. Calm approach. E
4. Creative. E
5. Good sense of humour. E

Closing date for applications is Monday 30th April.

An application form is available for download HERE

Friday 10 – Sunday 20 May. Thy Kingdom Come, an invitation to pray

October 30, 2019April 11, 2018 by John Sherbourne

Thy Kingdom Come is a simple invitation to pray between Ascension and Pentecost for friends and family to come to faith. Now in its third year, participation has grown every year. In 2016, 100,000 Christians pledged to pray. By 2017 – more than half a million had pledged to pray from more than 85 countries including Ghana, Netherlands, Malaysia, Cuba, South Africa, Australia, Korea, Japan and the Philippines to name a few.

The campaign’s broad ecumenical appeal led to more than 50 denominations and traditions being involved last year; including the Baptist Union of Great Britain, the Roman Catholic Church, the Methodist Church and the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

The positive impact of Thy Kingdom Come 2017 continues to unfold as numerous stories of personal and communal transformation pour in from churches, families and whole communities alike. Among the stories arising from the initiative – many of them deeply moving – is one from a couple who had not seen their son for 22 years. “We pray every day obviously for him but during Thy Kingdom Come he was one of the people we prayed for as a group”, they say. “We put his name on the altar before God and… yesterday he came home.”

This year also sees some digital developments including a brand-new website and a Thy Kingdom Come devotional app created by leading Christian publishers SPCK. Both products will be translated into several languages including Spanish, Korean, and Swahili and will be launched in time for Easter.

Here’s a short video in which our General Secretary Lynn Green reflects on what it means to her to pray ‘thy kingdom come’.

To download please click here.

Click here to sign up for this year’s Thy Kingdom Come campaign and to find out more information about the campaign.

National Mindfulness Day – May 2018

April 19, 2018April 9, 2018 by John Sherbourne

For more information and to book visit http://christianmindfulness.co.uk/events/national-mindfulness-day-christians

F word thoughts – more than acceptance and a little bit of Kielty

April 5, 2018April 5, 2018 by Graham Brownlee

The Forgiveness Project exhibition has concluded at Moortown Baptist Church. It added a dimension to our Easter experience. The stories and pictures were profound and have a deep effect on many.

The words of Jo Berry (daughter of Sir Anthony Berry MP, who was killed in the IRA Brighton bombing) stand out for me. “Now I don’t talk about forgiveness. To say ‘I forgive you’ is almost condescending. It locks you into an ‘us and them’ scenario keeping me right and you wrong. That attitude won’t change anything. But I can experience empathy, and in that moment there is no judgment.” IRA activist Patrick Magee, responsible for Jo’s father’s death, responds – “It’s rare to meet someone as gracious and open as Jo. She’s come a long way in her journey to understanding; in fact, she has come more than half way to meet me.”

We should take care in connecting a theology of forgiveness to these words or linking them to Easter. It seems that forgiveness is at one and the same time and confrontation and a moving forward. To forgive means to name a wrong and a person or institution that needs forgiving. Forgiveness makes a judgment and then seeks to reconcile. Jo Berry sees this and the risk of that act of forgiving setting us apart.

Jo Berry and Patrick Magee are pictured together above.

As a result of this many of us cannot get to the place where we name things and speak forgiveness to another. Rather we show as much love as we can, and we offer acceptance to another. Jo describes that as empathy. This keeps relationship open and is wise and noble but stops short of forgiveness and reconciliation. I honour those of us who practice such empathy, but I recognise that this an ongoing commitment that stops short of forgiveness.

So we discover that forgiveness is a risk. In offering forgiveness, we can make matters worse and lose what we have of a relationship. I believe that this is just such a risk that God was taking in Christ. To meet us more than half way and then confront things that need forgiving in a costly way.

So Christ died! His resurrection showed that this paid off. The cost and possibility of failure was real. It is not that Christ jettisoned acceptance and love, but that Christ chose to add forgiveness to them. In order that God could move beyond empathy to reconciliation.

This is the miraculous hope and truth of Easter. It is dangerous and risky stuff.

In the meantime, many of us travel with acceptance and love on a lifelong journey towards forgiveness. The Easter story tells us that we don’t live in vain. This is a truth and a story for our time. It echoed again as I watched Patrick Kielty’s excellent BBC documentary on Northern Ireland and the Good Friday agreement 20 years on. In it Kielty (right) powerfully explores acceptance, forgiveness and moving on – looking at how difficult and essential these things are. Well worth a watch.

Graham Brownlee, April 2018

Feast and Fun… a great time was had by all

April 5, 2018April 5, 2018 by John Sherbourne

Here’s a gallery of pictures taken at our Easter Feast and Fun event, and huge thanks to those who organised it.

Three images that provide a moving commentary to the sadness and the joy of Easter

April 5, 2018April 3, 2018 by John Sherbourne

MBC has many talented members, no more so than our Administrator Kate Slater. And it’s Kate we need to thank for the three amazing windows that were on show over Easter.

The first two, that’s the two below were on display on Palm Sunday. However, the unveiling of a third, pictured above was reserved for Easter Day. Thanks Kate and to those people from Beacon who helped you; the Easter story has never been so beautifully and so effectively taught.

After the F Word…forgive me for asking but what should we do next?

April 3, 2018April 3, 2018 by John Sherbourne

In her foreword to the brochure that accompanies The F Word Exhibition, the founder of the Forgiveness Project, Marina Cantacuzino, says this…

“The stories aim to open up a debate around forgiveness, calling into question our often fixed beliefs about right and wrong, good and evil, justice and morality. Forgiveness is not held up as a magic bullet or a panacea for all ills. Rather, the stories reveal the journey to be tough but compelling, often painful and costly but also potentially transformative.”

I don’t know about you but I find these words almost as compelling as the exhibition itself. That’s why I believe it would be a huge waste of precious resources if as a church we now simply move on having, as it were, ticked forgiveness off our to do list.

In itself, what form such debate takes isn’t important; what is important is that it actually takes place. Perhaps it could be accommodated within something quite structured, say through a half day conference. It could be a one off topic for discussion at House Groups (some I believe have already started down this road) or it might be something much more personal, maybe something you and I could chat about over a coffee.

Having now made these suggestions my only fear is that if we all get too hung up on the subject of forgiveness this may give oxygen to a quite worrying remark I recently heard; that whilst it’s right that every church has a hospital wing, what we must at all coats avoid is turning the whole church into a hospital. In other words concentrating so much on just one or two “blue light” type elements of what it means to be part of a community that seeks to love God, live generously and follow Christ that any number of competing issues risk being eased into the background.

I appreciate that throughout much of Lent our Sunday morning sermons have been all about forgiveness, which for some might well mean that enough is enough. But today with The F Word exhibition boards now carefully packed away I think it would be foolish if as Marina Cantacuzino suggests we didn’t take this opportunity to create some time and some space for debate, some time and some space to unpack and share our reflections, our personal beliefs about forgiveness and what it is that forms them, and if we feel we need to even our experiences.

John Sherbourne

PULSE – a message from Cas to all team, parents and carers

April 2, 2018April 1, 2018 by John Sherbourne

Parents: Our Pulse groups on Sunday mornings are going really well, and we would love to help you engage as a family. To this end you can download a free app called parent cue which will keep you up to date with everything your children are learning about and experiencing.

Likewise for leaders: Thank you to all the leaders and helpers that make Pulse happen. To help you there is also a free app, this one is called lead small from which you can download all the small group material direct to your mobile phone.

To help you to download either of these apps simply click on the relevant link above or visit the websites listed below.

http://theparentcue.org/app/

http://leadsmall.org/app/