Tabernacle Church Penarth

This series of studies called ‘No Perfect People Allowed’ is based around John Burke’s book of the same name. The sub-title to his book is called “Creating a come as you are culture in the church” and strives to ask what sort of church do we need to be if we are to be truly missionary and reach the vast majority of folk who do not come to church yet?  Whereas 25 years ago most of the people we were trying to reach at least had a notion of what Christianity entailed, now that knowledge is almost completely gone. We are in the exciting position of primary missionary and evangelism. No longer are we trying to convince nominal Christians that they need to make a personal commitment to Jesus. Now we are reaching completely unchurched people who have never heard the gospel. We are essentially in the same situation as the first century church and the opportunity is stunning!

This series of studies will run alongside the Sunday morning services and look at what it means to be a church that has a “come as you are culture”. Some of it will be challenging. Some of it will uncomfortable. I have deliberately been provocative with some of the phrasing of the introductory comments and questions. One thing is certain; the church in the future cannot and will not look like the church of the past or even the church of the present. What is it that God is doing in our day? At Tabs we have already begun this journey and have been on it together for many years. We are the incredibly privileged position of being able to discover and model what church will look like in the future. My prayer is that these studies will help us to reflect together and think about the kind of community we are going to be in the future.

Small Group Leaders’ Handbook

Welcome to the new Small Group Leaders’ Handbook

The Small Group Leaders’ Handbook is an evolving document, and will change from time to time as we discover better ways of doing things. We have sought to bring together our aspirations for small groups with the vision and aims of the church, as well as answering any questions raised by group leaders is recent years.  At the bottom of each page of the handbook you will see the purpose statement of the church.  This is to remind us that the small groups are part of a larger picture, and share the same DNA and purpose as the wider church. It will hopefully, therefore, be a handy reference tool to assist you in all the opportunities and challenges that you face as small group leaders. We are grateful to All Souls Church in Langham Place, London, for their generosity in allowing us to use their fellowship group handbook as a basis for this first publication.

Roger Grafton and Cedric Longville

We all experience anxiety from time to time. Anxiety is part of the body’s natural response to perceived danger – a means of alerting the mind to impending threat and ensuring we stay out of its way. It usually rises up when people feel out of control of some part of their life, or uncertain about the immediate future. Often it will pass in due course, and we wonder what all the fuss was about. For some people, however, anxiety can become overwhelming, continuing for prolonged periods of time and seriously affecting their ability to get on with everyday things. It’s estimated that more than one in ten people are likely to have a ‘disabling anxiety disorder’ at some point in their lives.

It is important to remember that however spiritual or mature we are as a Christian, we all worry or get anxious about something to some degree or another from time to time. For some in our community at Tabs it is short lived and specifically related to one situation which may be going on at the moment. For others anxiety is severe, long term and socially crippling. We worry about public speaking (doing a reading or leading prayers, or maybe speaking at a church meeting). We worry about meeting new people (or being forced to speak to them when we are broken down into small prayer groups!). We worry about ministries we are responsible for; about money; about our homes; about our family and children; about our health; about our jobs and about losing our jobs. We live in a world shot through with worry and anxiety, angst in the deepest and most pervasive sense. We worry about yesterday. We worry about today. We worry about tomorrow. We just worry!

In this series of Bible studies and sermons which will take us through to half term we will be thinking about what the Bible says about worry and how we can cope with it.  We will look at what the Bible has to say about the things that we get anxious about, and hopefully we will have the opportunities to share in prayer those things which trouble us. And, by the grace of God, we will start to understand a little more about the God who has all our tomorrows in his hand – and begin to trust in his unfailing love just a little more!

For Summer 2011, 20 churches from across Penarth and district have agreed to come together in mixed small groups to study the bible, pray together, learn from each other and share in fellowship. These studies have been written by various representatives of the churches and edited by the CYTUN (Churches Together in Wales) chairman, John James, to facilitate this ecumenical venture. The church of Jesus Christ is the family of God. In this loving community there is a true commitment to Jesus Christ and to each other. Jesus was inclusive in his welcoming attitudes to everyone and small groups facilitate opportunities in which everyone should feel at home in our local fellow-ship. (See Acts 2:44-46 and Acts 4:34) Therefore all of our Easter Groups should be welcoming to each other and should be creative in finding ways of allowing every member to share their concerns and to experience the care of a loving community.

This series of Small Group studies follows on from “Songs in a strange land: part 1” which looked at the first 6 chapters of the book of Daniel.  The  book of Daniel itself is divided into two parts.  The first part was written in Aramaic (sometime called Chaldean in the ancient world) and is made up primarily of historical narrative.  The second half of the book of Daniel is less well known by most Christians (the lion’s den, the fiery furnace and the writing on the wall make much better Sunday school lessons!)  As well as being less well known, it is more difficult to understand.  Written in Hebrew this second part of the book is made up of apocalyptic/revelatory material, and it is this section that we will be looking at in our small groups over the next few weeks.  Some of these studies have a lot of questions to get your discussion started.  Do not expect to always be able to answer all of them in one session!  Feel free to pick and choose some of the questions, or extend a study over 2 weeks if necessary.

People often talk of the situation the Church finds itself in today being similar to that in the Book of Acts.  They point out that the Church is in a missionary situation, needing to take the gospel message to a largely non-Christian society.  Whilst this is true, it does miss a major point: Britain is not a non-Christian culture, but a post-Christian culture.  In other words, Christian stories, festivals, buildings, traditions and practices are already in our society as part of the fabric of our culture, but nowadays they are mostly disregarded or considered irrelevant.  It is not that people have not heard of Christians, the Church or the Gospel, but rather they have rejected them as unimportant to their lives.  It is as if they have been inoculated against the Christian message: they have had a little dose of it and think they know all about it (maybe through school, maybe through their family), and now they are immunized from further impact!  Many of these non-Christians will even readily identify themselves as Christians just because they believe in God.

Some commentators are pointing out that a better book to consider when thinking about the situation the Church finds itself in today the Book of Daniel.  Here we read a story of a group of believers who find themselves in a foreign and hostile environment.  Their own religion has ‘had its day’ and is now in a state of decline.  They find themselves in a foreign place, surrounded by people who don’t share their beliefs or value system, but who show some interest when exposed to the story of our creator God.  The key questions for Daniel and his friends are ‘how do we worship God in this strange new land?’ (Psalm 137), and ‘how do we maintain our spiritual integrity when the dominant culture we find ourselves in is trying to pull us in a different direction?’ (Daniel 3:4-5 and 6:10-12)

Last year we delved into the Book of Daniel, a book which spans the whole of the exile period, including the defeat of the Babylonians by the empire of the Medes and Persians. Now we'll pick up the story as the people of Judah begin to return to Jerusalem in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries BC. God had promised that the Israelites would return. Ezekiel, one of the prophets who lived during the exile, recorded this promise:

"This is what the Sovereign Lord says… , will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land…You will live in the land I gave your forefathers; you will be my people and I will be your God‟? Ezekiel 36: 22, 24, & 28.

Two books in particular tell us about the return ‟The Book of Ezra tells us about the rebuilding of the Temple, and the Book of Nehemiah tells us about the rebuilding of Jerusalem‟ walls. Our Small Group studies for the Spring Term centre on the Book of Ezra, but we will also be looking briefly at the writings of two Old Testament prophets who are mentioned in Ezra's book: Haggai and Zechariah. We'll also take a one week foray into the Book of Nehemiah where we'll discover Ezra reading the Law. And towards the end of the series we'll dip into the Book of Esther, because without her courageous action there would have been no Ezra and no Nehemiah.

 As global communications become more widespread, the internet moves into every home, the number of telephones that people have increases and more people carry mobile ‘phones and ‘blackberries’ with them at all times, the world is facing a growing problem—loneliness. Rather than improving relationships between people, modern communication technology is isolating us more and more.   As our community changes and this sense of loneliness increases, Tabernacle has Good News to share with our neighbours. God never intended us to live alone, and has offered a life changing pattern to solve the problem of loneliness. Indeed, right at the beginning of the creation God said, “It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18). The Trinity itself reveals that God lives in a community of three in one. The Church, God’s blueprint for community, has been given to us as a place of mutual support, love, recognition and protection. 

These studies seek to address an age old problem: how do you see God?  One thing can be said with absolute certainty about your image of God—it is completely inadequate. This is not meant as a criticism of your view, but rather an acknowledgment that God, in all his fullness, is beyond human understanding. "For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the LORD. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)

However, Paul reminds us that in Jesus we see the image of the invisible  God. (Colossians 1:15) If we want to begin to understand the creative God of Genesis, the Holy God of Deuteronomy, the vengeful God of the Old Testament,  the God of Grace in the New Testament or the God who is coming to earth again at the end of time, then we need to read our Bible through the perspective of knowing Jesus.