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In her Monday morning message to the pastoral team Jane Coates encourages them (and us) to stand firm

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Every Monday Jane Coates writes Monday thoughts and prayers for the Pastoral Care Team. This is something she has done every week since May 3rd. Here Jane shares the message she wrote and sent out on 28th September. 

Be on guard. Stand firm in the faith. Be courageous and strong and do everything with love. 1 Corinthians 16 v 13-14 

It is God who enables us, along with you, to stand firm for Christ. He has commissioned us and He has identified us as his own by placing the Holy Spirit in our hearts as the first instalment that guarantees everything He has promised us. 2 Corinthians 1 v 21-22  

When tragic hits and our circumstances are unstable, challenging, uncertain, scary, isolating and bleak- what can we do? Where do we go for strength, perspective and understanding? What is there to keep us on track and to prevent us folding and crumpling? 

When Phil and I experienced a very bleak time in our family we held on to the knowledge that God is faithful, that God is constant and loving and that God is completely trustworthy. We stood firm in the knowledge that He had always been our faithful God through the many years that we had walked with him. This was the foundation stone on which we planted our feet. As He had been with us in the past- He would be with us now and on into the future. We planted our feet and we stood firm.  

Covid days may make us feel isolated and anxious. It is hard to meet with family, friends and church friends. We may know of those who may have received a difficult diagnosis, an uncertain time with employment, a financial concern, tensions in a relationship, a troubling family situation or mental wellbeing issues. How do we stand firm during these times and help others to stand firm? 

I appreciate the tributes that were recently paid to Chadwick Boseman, the Black Panther Marvel star, who died suddenly, at the age of 43, after his four year battle with cancer. During those 4 years he was able to stand firm. He had never discussed his illness publicly and had continued to work on blockbuster films throughout his treatment and surgeries during that period. He was standing firm without drawing attention to his very real concerns. For that, he is a superhero. 

Chadwick had openly spoken about his faith in God during difficult times. On one occasion, he had been selected for a role in a soap opera that involved playing the role of a stereotypical black man. After questioning the producers on the portrayal of the character he was dismissed from the role. He trusted that his disappointment would lead to other opportunities. When he addressed a group of graduating students at Howard University in 2018, he spoke of his faith, quoted Jeremiah 29 v 11, and spoke of God’s purpose being the essential element of who you are. “You are on this planet, at this particular time in history and your very existence is wrapped up in the things you are here to fulfil. Whatever you choose for your career path, remember the struggles along the way are only meant to shape you for your purpose.” 

After his death, the NAACP one of the leading civil rights groups in the US wrote, “ for showing us how to conquer adversity with grace, for showing us how to ‘say it loud’, for showing us how to walk as a king without losing the common touch, for showing us just how powerful we are. Thank you.” 

The encouragement in these difficult days is to stand firm but not in our own strength but in God’s strength. To fix your feet. Instead of giving us strength to face whatever situation we need to face, He becomes our strength. It is His strength. Strength made perfect in weakness. 

Karen and Co’s banner puts Jesus firmly at the heart of the matter

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Way back in June Karen Ross asked for your help with a banner she was making. That request was for those among us that were blessed with nimble fingers to make red hearts. Today that banner is finished and is hanging in church. 

So, over to Karen. “As you can see there were many different types of red hearts sent in by the ten people who answered my plea. Some were on card, coloured or woven and some were made of velvet, tartan, cord or shiny fabric. A few had sequins sewn onto them and one or two were even trimmed with lace. They are all so beautifully made, this really is a great example of how when so many people come together the finished work ends up looking so lovely. My thanks to all who helped.”

PS: YEP prove that everything comes to he who waits

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Eleven days after our drive through harvest and ten after the story was submitted it’s great to see that on Thursday the Yorkshire Evening Post eventually found space to use our little filler. 

With Shelley’s brain working overtime, and already a few irons in the fire, little do the EP know what we’re going to hit them with at Christmas! 

Shelley’s brilliant idea results in MBC’s Carpark Harvest yielding a bumper crop

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Sunday’s drive through Carpark Harvest was a brilliant event! With well over 100 people either walking or driving to MBC and donating literally scores and scores of products it was a terrific example of what can be achieved when you think out of the box. 

Faced with the prospect of Harvest 2020 going unrecognised, whilst at the same time a local foodbank was reporting that since the start of the Coronavirus pandemic demand for their services was up by more than 30% Shelley Dring (above) our Children’s and Families Worker suggested this initiative way of keeping our harvest tradition afloat. 

With a three foot long risk assessment pinned to the front door, and a NHS Track & Trace barcode scanner stuck along alongside it all was set at 1pm when the first of our visitors arrived. By 4, when all was safely gathered in stage 2 of the process began – organising the delivery of our harvest to the Leeds North and West Foodbank

Huge thanks to Shelley and to her small team of helpers. Together, and in just 5 days, they not only organised something that saw an enormous amount of food, toiletries, cleaning products etc being donated to a terrific community project, they also gave many of us our first opportunity in months of seeing and from a safe distance having mask to mask chats with friends.

 

The Old Button Box. As well as reviving some wonderful memories Jane Coates unearths “Sylvie’s” amazing talent

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One of the ladies who under more normal circumstances attends our Beacon café is also someone I’ve had the pleasure of keeping in touch with right through lockdown.

She is a wonderful, generous and very creative lady and I have built up a strong connection with her. Using the pseudonym Sylvie Jacques this lady writes children’s stories that I type up for her and she is also very artistic. I type and she illustrates.

This week she showed me one of her scrap books and I spotted this poem, the subject of which will I’m sure be familiar to many if not all of us. Indeed in my case the mysteries and delights of the old button box live on as I still have my grandma’s.

The illustrations that sit alongside the poem are also Sylvie’s work; what a talented lady she is and I am so grateful to her for giving permission for us to share them.

 

The Old Button Box

By Sylvie Jacques

As a treat, Mother used to say,

“I’m sure you’ll find it in the old button box.!”

 

Whatever was lost, was found.

Whatever we didn’t have……

We found it in the old button box.

 

Treasures to be found in the old button box.

Sequins, ribbon, thread

Buttons galore…… small ones, large ones….

Round buttons, square buttons,

Coloured buttons, Mother of Pearl buttons,

Glass buttons, wooden buttons.

Bits of lace, bobbins and needles,

Even a pair of angel wings.

 

Sometimes we’d count the colours.

Sometimes we’d use the buttons as money and buy whatever we liked.

Oh, what a delight… Mother’s old button box.

 

Now I’m older, I remember why

We loved the box so much.

Mother could remember where every button came from…

every clothes that owned them and every child that wore them and all the stories that went with them.

And that was the treasure in Mother’s old button box.

 

 

In Chad MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship) flies in urgent Covid-19 supplies to our mission partners Mark and Andrea Hotchkin

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One of the items featured in the latest MAF (Mission Aviation Fellowship) newsletter is a short video in which pilot Phil Henderson delivers urgent Covid-19 medical equipment to a hospital in Chad. However, of particular interest to us is that the hospital in question is the one in which MBC’s Mission Partners Mark and Andrea Hotchkin are based. 

You can watch the video in which Mark describes what the new kit is and does by clicking on this LINK and look for the item headed 6th August – Bardaï, Chad

 

 

 

Haddon Willmer points us to an article in The Guardian in which the writer argues that “unconscious bias” thought by some to be a modern day fad is in fact a tenet of the Christian Church

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Why does Peter Ormerod ask ‘Think unconscious bias training is a fad?’ Because he has been listening to Jesus, so he knows it’s been going on for at least 2000 years. And it’s still needed every day.  Not just in politics…

You can see why it might seem a bit faddish or “woke”. MPs are being offered training in unconscious bias: the idea that some of our beliefs may be held so deeply that we are unaware of them. And some politicians don’t want it.

“Leftist infiltration,” the Mansfield MP, Ben Bradley, calls it. It’s Orwellian, too, apparently, as well as an example of “metropolitan groupthink”. But in fact there’s nothing new about it, because one institution has been offering its own kind of training in unconscious bias for roughly 2,000 years: the Christian church.

The conventional Christian understanding of sin seems to me entirely consistent with ideas about racism that appear to some as modern. Christianity asserts that sin is embedded deep in the human condition. Racism is one of its vilest manifestations; there is every reason to expect it to work in us as sin does generally.

Christianity understands that sin isn’t all about the bad things we consciously do. As various liturgies put it, we sin not just “through our own deliberate fault”, but also “through negligence, through weakness”. We “have left undone those things that we ought to have done”. One can sin by omission.

Which takes us to the idea that people can be unaware or ignorant of their own failings. It’s about as orthodox as it gets. According to the gospels, Jesus spent much of his ministry decrying self-righteousness, attacking those who believed themselves to be untouched by sin. He deployed an array of striking images in his condemnation: “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” he asks. Elsewhere, he calls some of the moral arbiters of the day “whitewashed tombs”.

Further, we are often driven by forces and desires we fail to grasp or fully apprehend. Saint Paul was honest about this. “I do not understand my own actions,” he wrote. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” He went on: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” More of us could do with that self-awareness. We can say we hate racism, we can campaign against it, we can damn others as racist. But that doesn’t make us immune to it.

And because institutions are made by people, it follows that these too can harbour and nurture and propagate sin. They may not know are doing it, or want to be doing it. They may say they’re not doing it; they may even say they oppose it. Yet they may still do it.

Given all this, it is a scandal that the church has so often given succour to racism. It has, from time to time and place to place, been an agent of this sin or a complicit bystander; for example, we see today in parts of Eastern Europe how churches can give their blessing to xenophobia and ethno-nationalism.

Yet there is another story. When orthodox Christian concepts of sin, justice and hope come together, we see change. It is surely no surprise that arguably the two most significant anti-racism movements of the 20th century had as key figures men of the church: Martin Luther King and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

There are those who say the church should talk about sin less. I say it should talk about it more. The bleak stuff is a part of it, because it is a part of us. But allied to it are remarkable, life-giving ideas the world needs more of: repentance, atonement, forgiveness, redemption, salvation. And most radical of all is the conviction that, in spite of all our failings, each of us has equal, infinite and inherent worth, and each of us is loved.

I dare say that other religions and philosophies teach something similar. The complexity of human nature has been explored in art through the ages, from Hamlet to I May Destroy You. The theme endures, I believe, because it is fundamentally compassionate and true. Just as each of us is capable of virtue, so too is each of us prone to vice. We need not be self-pitying or hand-wringing about it, but we are all a bit messed up and we would do well to acknowledge this.

The notion of unconscious bias, therefore, need not make us feel attacked or condemned. It invites us instead to accept our humanity in a spirit of humility. MPs may not necessarily be known for the latter quality, but surely anyone would benefit from understanding themselves better. Some of the criticisms levelled at this particular programme, such as its tone and cost, may be justified, yet its core message is as important now as it has ever been. The words may be modern, but the wisdom is ancient.

  • Peter Ormerod is a journalist with a particular interest in religion, culture and gender

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