Down to the River

WEBA's autumn newsletter has just gone to the printers, and many thanks to Sue Humphreys who helped me with an article about the canoe club she runs with her husband Ed and others from 3C Community Church in Gloucestershire.

I run out of words quickly when trying to describe the way someone like Sue and the others are serving God. I want to avoid overusing new jargon like 'missional' and 'incarnational', but also old jargon like 'sharing the gospel.'

What they are doing shouldn't need jargon - it's too straighforward and natural. They're running a canoe club. Most of the members aren't Christians, but the leaders see it as their life ministry to have fun with these people and help them acquire skills. They are being faithful to God by continuing to be their friends. What happens next is up to him. I wonder why this seems so easy to understand, and so tricky, in a church context, to describe.

Two copies of WEBA news will be sent to your church secretary next week. Please make sure you see it!

What are we doing about making disciples?

Here are a few clips taken from the interview with Peter Lynch of Worle Baptist Church at the 3 in 1 Event at Clarence Park on Sunday 19th June 2011.

He talks about children who are discovering and spreading the gospel on their own initiative - and about the way the church needs to re-think its planning as a result.

Mutual Mentoring

On Thursday this week, Rick Lewis, author of Mentoring Matters spent the day with a small group of WEBA ministers and other leaders to talk about how to meet the mentoring needs of our church leaders. If you'd like to find out more, please contact the WEBA office.

Burnham's Transatlantic Baptism Service

Sophia Hurley with Steve Ayers

Steve baptises his daughter Becky

Burnham-on-Sea Baptist Church will be welcomed into the West of England Baptist Association at this Sunday's 3 in 1 Event in Weston-super-Mare. So it's especially good to share with you this baptismal service with a technological twist:

When Sophia Hurley was planning her baptism at Burnham-on-Sea Baptist Church she thought that one member of her family would not be able to see it.  Her Gran, Phyllis Hampshire, moved out to Canada fifteen years ago and she couldn’t travel back for the service. 

However the church was able to set up a link over the internet that meant that the whole family was able to enjoy the service together.  Phyllis, who had to get up at 5 a.m. to watch the service, was delighted to be able to watch the ceremony and talk to her family afterwards.  “It was amazing to see it and I really felt I was a part of it”, she said.  “It was very special and great to be involved.”

Church minister, Steve Ayers, was pleased that the all technology worked.  “We’d never done this before but it worked out really well.  I was really pleased that Phyllis could share in the ceremony with us from Toronto.  It was a particularly special day for me because I baptised my daughter, Becky, at the service too.”   

The Baptism Service was followed by a sit-down meal for 125 people.

Thanks to Steve Ayers for sending us this story, and to Drew Lawrence for the wonderful photos.

Home Mission Giving News

On Tuesday this week WEBA tried to hold its AGM.

Unfortunately there weren't enough church representatives present to vote, and so we're going to stage a re-run at the final 3 in 1 Event at Clarence Park Baptist Church on Sunday 19th June.

I felt a little sorry for those who had given up their evening for a meeting which will have to happen again, but we went through the substance of the agenda anyway, and one really useful bit was Gordon Hindmarch's summary of where WEBA is in regard to Home Mission.


All Baptist Union churches are encouraged to give at least 5% of income to this fund so that mission can be enabled across the country.

Recently, WEBA has been one of the highest giving Regional Associations. This May WEBA churches gave £22,228, which we think is brilliant considering the financial climate and the uncertainty faced by so many. There's really only one explanation: you, our churches, trust God, and you really believe in the growth of his kingdom.

What's really interesting, which Gordon pointed out on Tuesday, is that the 2010 total for Home Mission Giving in WEBA (£258,742) was so very close to the total we received that year ( £ 257,431 ) in terms of grants for ministry, projects, special grants to church planters and chaplains, and to the Association itself. So, as your church gives to Home Mission, mission in this region moves forward. A big thank you is due to all of you who make and approve the decisions to give. If you want to find out more about giving to Home Mission, please contact Gordon Hindmarch via the WEBA office.

This is what WEBA is for

On Monday, WEBA Regional Minister Alisdair Longwill and his friend Don Yeomans tackled Day 4 of their Lands End to John O'Groats cycle ride.

This took them from Weston-super-Mare to Stroud - more or less from the bottom of WEBA to the top, so they invited cyclists from WEBA churches to join them along the way, raising money for the WEBA New Churches Initiative which is helping a small group to re-plant a church at Painswick. Others turned up just to cheer us along.

It was a very rainy bank holiday Monday, and everyone involved got very wet indeed, but if you were to ask me why WEBA exists, I think the ride provided the perfect picture. Cycling 60 miles in the rain was so much easier because of the people who joined in for a while or just waited for us with their umbrellas. Surely the journey we undertake as individual churches is likewise better, easier, and more fruitful if we are there for each other at different times along the way.

Thanks to everyone who turned up on Monday, especially to Mary Thomas and friends from Pill, Cath Brown who led the way from Avonmouth to Almondsbury, and the crowd from Minchinhampton. Thanks too to those who've supported either the WEBA cyclists, or Don and Alisdair, by sponsoring them. You can see a little bit of the day on this video:

To give to Operation Restoration, go to

http://www.justgiving.com/Alisdair-Longwill

To give to Cotswold Care Hospice, go to

http://www.justgiving.com/Don-Yeomans


And for the rest of the ride:

Follow Alisdair and Don's blog: two 50s do LeJog

WEBA New Churches Initiative: The Cycle WEBA Challenge

We've renamed the WEBA New Churches Fund because 'Initiative' is a better description of what it is. The dream is the same, though: to plant 10 new churches in 10 years.

On this video I ask Alisdair Longwill (who will be cycling from Lands End to John O'Groats in May and June) how WEBA people can get involved and help raise some money for this year's focus.

Stockwood in Fair Trade Bunting Record Attempt!

 I thought you might like to see  some pictures of what Stockwood Free Church (Baptist) did for Fair Trade fortnight this year.

Fairtrade’s theme this year was ‘show your label’ with a focus on cotton.  Our Adventurers had a lot of fun learning about Fairtrade by decorating cotton triangles and putting them together as bunting to hang in the church.

The children also decorated a banner with the words from Proverbs 22: 22, “Do not exploit the poor”.   Last Sunday morning, the children taught the church about the importance of Fairtrade cotton and how even a small thing such as buying Fairtrade tea instead of our usual brand can make a big difference to people in places such as West Africa and India.

The bunting the children decorated is to be sent to FairTrade.  Stockwood Free Church’s cotton bunting will be sewn together with others church’s and organisations cotton bunting in an attempt to break the world record for the longest continuous piece of bunting.  

Christine Crabbe

WEBA 3 in 1 Events

This year's first WEBA 3 in 1 Event takes place at Counterslip Baptist Church in Bristol on Sunday 20th March. There are four 3 in 1 Events this year, and they're simpler, no AGM or seminars, just a chance to worship and share stories together and hear from Nigel Coles on our focus for the next two years, Encouraging Missionary Disciples.

The WEBA staff team met on Wednesday to see which church stories we might want to highlight at each event. I think we all went away uplifted because we could think of so many good news stories - but there will be others we don't know about. If you've got an interesting answer to any of these questions, we'd love to hear from you:

• How are you seeing people coming to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ?
• How are you integrating these new Christians into the life of your church?
• How are you discipling people in your church?

Please don't think that your story isn't big or impressive enough, often the little stories that encourage others the most. Please get in touch with the WEBA office (0117 965 8828 or office@webassoc.org.uk) and we'll put you in touch with the Regional Ministers.

For more information about the 3 in 1 Events, please go to news and events on our website.

Home Mission Giving News

By now your church should have received a certificate to say thank you for giving to Home Mission during 2010. Please make sure it's on display somewhere! As we've now said many times, giving during 2010 was fantastic and we are extremely grateful for the faithfulness of our churches in difficult times.

Figures for giving in February 2011 have now been published. The good news is, we're still the highest giving association, with gifts for the month totalling £16,010. This is, however, short of the average of £20,000 per month we need in order to provide the support we have planned for. It's extremely helpful for us if churches give regularly by standing order throughout the year so that we can plan realistically - perhaps this is something your church could consider.

Home Mission Giving: Gordon puts up the flagpole

Regional Minister Gordon Hindmarch is very excited about our final total for giving to Home Mission in 2010. I can't resist copying his email to the office here:

Even without the one-off of £10,000 from Emmanuel Trowbridge WEBA churches would have achieved the Association's highest ever total at £258,738 (now confirmed by BUGB), which is £19950 (8.3%) more than the 2009 total figure.
This means December's giving was just over £31,000, which was our highest monthly figure in 2010..
Also our 2010 HM Giving/member was £37.85 (£32.47 in 2009) which makes us the highest givers among the 13 Associations in BUGB.
If we were feeling a bit triumphalistic, it might be worth investing in a flagpole for The Old Forge so we can hoist the Premiership Flag, which was previously held by the South West Baptist Association.

Take care
Gordon

Thank you again, WEBA churches. We can't get over your generous giving and hope we will be able to let you know more about what your money is doing in this region over the next year. A certificate thanking your church for its gifts will be on its way to your church secretary in February - make sure it goes up on the wall!

Your Giving - at an All Time High

We think that WEBA churches gave more to Home Mission up to the end of July 2010 than during the same period in any other year.

The year-to-date figure of £141,704 did include an unusual one-off gift, but even without that we would have topped our previous record of £131,336 at the end of July 2008.

What's really exciting isn't breaking records (or being, as we are at the moment, the second highest giving Association in the Baptist Union) It's not even about surviving the recession without losing what we have - the exciting thing is that our churches are taking mission seriously, supporting those churches who need a little extra help to follow their dream of connecting with their communities and being Christ among their neighbours.

Please pray for everyone who will have responsibility for using this money wisely, when there are still so many more dreams than grants available.

And if you're involved with budgeting for your church this year, please take the time to ask these questions:

• Is your church giving at least 5% of its income to Home Mission?
• Is your church giving regularly to help us with our planning?
• If you're in Pastoral Vacancy, could your church consider giving a month's stipend to Home Mission?
  

Thinking Big at Radstock

"We're a small church but we realise we've got to think big and expect big!" said Andrew Stammers, Minister in Training at Radstock Baptist Church in Somerset. In the run up to the World Cup the church went all out to let the community know that they were showing matches on their big screen. They had 1,000 flyers professionally designed and printed; they festooned the church with flags and inflatable footballs, and also got attention from the local newspaper.

"You've got to think like companies think" says Andrew, " find ways of attracting attention - I don't see anything wrong with that. The press are interested in why a church would show football in its main sanctuary - we've got to take advantage of that. The amount of people who say, yes, you're the church who showed football. It's been a big profile builder, if nothing else."

The matches themselves presented lots of opportunities for bonding, as older church members debated team formation with teenagers. The popularity of the matches tailed off after the England team came home, but the challenge, says Andrew, is to build on the community links they have begun to build.

The church have secured a Home Mission 'Mission through Project' grant to build a new kitchen.
"Our mission strategy is pretty much orientated around food" says Andrew. They already run 'jam' sessions for local musicians on Tuesdays evenings and on Sunday mornings, when a full fry up is included, and there are plans to use the 'Table Talk' resource as a way to invite people in for good food and discussion. (www.table-talk.org)

Andrew Stammers' energy is infectious when it comes to mission. "Give it a go!" he urges. "What's the worst that can happen? Tens of thousands of people don't know Christ, that's what."