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Spring Message from the Vicar
Wednesday 25th April 2012 11:28 AM
"What a huge harvest! And how few the harvest hands. So on your knees; ask the God of the harvest to send harvest hands." Luke 10.12 ( The Message )
As I look at our All Saints' harvest in 2011/12, I'm thankful for all he has done, and the harvest hands who make it all possible. Our range of activities is broad, ranging from supporting international mission to caring for the poor and ill on our doorstep. We are fully engaged in at least a dozen relatively new initiatives and our week to week worship and commitment is wonderful.
Yet when we look around with Jesus' eyes, we see that the harvest fields are huge and there's much more to be done. Only this
week I've attended a meeting of our Children and youth team, and heard that our teenagers desperately needs new leaders. Also this week, talking with our Cluster leaders, I'm aware that we need new small group leaders, so that people new to All Saints' aren't left without a welcoming and supportive place to belong.
I believe God has provided the harvest hands, and all the resources in skills and finance that All Saints' needs, but it's not someone else more skilled, more outgoing, more experienced, it's you, walking behind Jesus, with the rest of the team, learning as we go, and gradually getting it more right than wrong!
The harvest truly is huge, so I hope you'll be joining me 'on my knees' to pray for disciples who are thankful for all God has done for us in Jesus, and are prepared to step out in faith and get stuck in.
Your Friend in Christ
Steve
Posted 11:28 AM | 0 Comments | Permalink
Prayer: 24/7, now and then, or never?
Monday 16th April 2012 7:34 PM
A really good article taken from the New Wine magazine 2012
by Ian Nicholson
What do Christ's Soldiers in Kenya have in common with Churches Together in Ilkley or the Millersville Intercessors of Pennsylvania? Is there a link between Elhogar Cristiano in Madrid, Crash Japan and the Generating Station in Malta? What could connect a caravan in Guildford, with a hotel room in Turkey, a school classroom in Uganda or a tin shack in a South African township? The answer is that they have all participated in an unprecedented movement of continual 24-7 prayer, which is expressed through various networks, and is building in momentum year by year. All boundaries of class, culture and style are being crossed as the global church prays continually, night and day, as never before.
In my hometown, Guildford, we have now hosted about 50 weeks of 24-7 prayer during the last decade in many churches, but also shops, cafés and schools. Within 24-7 Prayer in the UK and Ireland there has been a rapid growth in the number of prayer rooms in the last two years, partly triggered by years of continuous prayer in Scotland and Ireland. During 2012, as the Olympics and Paralympics bring the nations to
our door, thousands of churches will be uniting in a giant, unbroken year-long prayer meeting, Kingdom Come UK (KC:UK/KC:IRL).
As we embark on this exciting and unpredictable journey, I want to highlight three keys for keeping our personal prayer lives fresh and alive.
'I am both aware of the power and necessity of prayer but also how fallible and ordinary our prayer lives can seem'
1. Keep it simple
As a leader in a prayer movement I am both aware of the power and necessity of prayer but also how fallible and ordinary our prayer lives can seem. Life is frantic, work is relentless and it can be frequently disheartening when Sunday morning's good intentions seem to dissipate by Monday!
IAN NICHOLSON FROM 24/7 PRAYER GIVES SOME SIMPLE STEPS TO HELP PUSH PRAYER BACK UP OUR LIST OF PRIORITIES
TEACHING
Jesus recognised this struggle in warning his disciples that 'the spirit is willing but the body is weak' (Matt 26:41) - but they still failed to stay awake to pray for the critical hour in Gethsemane, as the future of humankind hung in the balance.
We should not be discouraged that it is frequently a struggle to maintain a regular prayer life; infact, perhaps we should take it as an encouragement that small steps in prayer can bring extraordinary changes to our relationship with God. The most common barrier to 'ordinary' believers participating in a 24-7 prayer room is that they have never prayed for a whole hour and don't think they could ever last that long - it seems too daunting! The reality is that prayer is the simplest, most accessible and life-giving activity known to humankind - you are ready and equipped! Prayer can be a few minutes on the train to work, a regular walk in the park at lunchtime or a few minutes of quiet at home once the children are asleep.
A growing number of friends set their alarms for midday in order to take a few moments to pray the Lord's Prayer. Bob from Northampton emailed recently to say, 'I had recently taken up the idea of programming in the Lord's Prayer at 12 every day on my phone, when I found myself talking to a street fundraiser outside Marks and Spencer. She was a student and mentioned that she used to be a Christian before going to university. We started chatting about Jesus and prayer and the problem of evil, when the alarm on my phone beeped. I explained what it was and suggested we could pray together. So we prayed for God's kingdom to come. Celia now wants to return to God and she will let
me know what happens!'
Don't be daunted or discouraged by the demands of prayer - see it as a journey of discovery and keep it as simple as possible. Small steps will make a significant difference.
2. Seek friendship
'What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us' AW Tozer.
How we view somebody determines our relationship with them. No-one wants to spend an hour with a hypercritical tyrant, or a patronising and self-centred bore. When I was a new Christian, God usually felt distant and impersonal. However, after a time of seeking God and encountering his Spirit, I found my prayer times transformed; they became times of friendship with my Father, who loved me just as I was, not how I thought I should be. As I considered Jesus' teaching and parables relating to prayer it became clear that his priority was relationship. He took time to be alone with his Father and only did what he saw his Father doing. He commanded would-be pray-ers not to babble with many words or put their religious credentials on public display (Matt 6: 5-13). In response to the disciples' request to 'teach us to pray' (Luke 11:1), Jesus' first word of instruction was simple: Father.
'The reality is that prayer is the simplest, most accessible and life-giving activity known to humankind'
Prayer is,
first and foremost,
an encounter with our Father.
In Finland recently someone commented that 'The presence of God was so intense that I almost couldn't keep away from the prayer room.' A young person in the UK made a simple but life-changing discovery: 'I am seeking God and he is speaking to me!' The most common stories from 24-7 prayer rooms around the world are simply that people have felt God close to them, and been changed as a result.
Recognise that God's priority for you is to be friends with him; ask him to reveal more of himself to you.
3. Express yourself
One of the most encouraging discoveries about prayer for me over recent years has been an appreciation that different personality types can express their prayer life in different ways. Some people respond well to having a very fixed and solitary routine while others prefer variety and creative stimulus. 24-7 prayer rooms often have zones with different emphases such as minimalist and simple areas, or a paint-strewn and messy creative space.
The New Testament has examples of prayer alone and in groups, loud and bold as well as quiet and reflective. There are daily prayer disciplines and patterns, spontaneous prayer encounters, prayer in rooms, on streets and roof tops, in prisons and in the marketplace. Being a fairly spontaneous person, I find I need variety and stimulus as I pray, but also benefit from the constraint and commitment to pray regularly as part of a prayer room.
Prayer is about relationship and it is also about expressing who you are. Think of fresh ways to pray that fit with your lifestyle and personality.
Encounters and adventures
'This, then, is how you should pray: Our Father who is in Heaven, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come, your will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven...' (Matt 6: 9,10).
If we are honest we all struggle
at times to pray, but as we spend time together with the Father his kingdom will come, as seeds of faith, compassion, mission, justice and renewal are planted in our lives. You can spend an hour in prayer, pray the Lord's Prayer, prayer walk, get students praying, unite prayer across cities or plant a prayer stake - the opportunities are endless. As we embark on KC:UK/IRL there are a host of online resources available to help you get started: www.247prayer. co.uk/kingdomcome. The Father is ready and waiting - keep it simple and enjoy yourself!
For further information email kingdomcome@24-7prayer.com.
You can also Tweet about your experiences using #KingdomCome2012, @KingdomCome2012
or find us on facebook: KingdomCome2012
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Connected Easter Service Report
Tuesday 10th April 2012 12:51 PM
Although the day began like the middle of winter under several inches of snow, by 2.00p.m. the snow had gone and the pavements cleared the way to our multi-media Easter Service reflecting on why Easter happened.
We thought about how God had created us in his own image, how everything was very good and the way that human selfishness had subsequently separated us from God. Through poetry, song and extracts from Handel's Messiah, we focused on the price Jesus paid to give us a way back to God.
Later, we enjoyed time talking together over tea and cakes in the lounge.
Posted 12:51 PM | 0 Comments | Permalink
Untamed
Tuesday 3rd April 2012 12:23 PM
Our new term of study for 9.00am and 10.30am services based around the book Untamed by Alan Hirsch
Discipleship is costly. Are we willing to critique and even challenge much we've been taught for the sake of the kingdom? For this is the radical nature of the discipleship to which Jesus calls us. He did not allow the outside culture to hold him captive; instead he established the kingdom of God and turned the world on its head. Jesus was untamed, and he calls his church to be the same.
In this provocative and compelling book, internationally known missiologists Alan and Debra Hirsch overthrow culturised understandings of theology and culture, and cast a vision for a distinctly mission-shaped way of living the Christian life. Written for any Christian serious about issue of discipleship, Untamed covers such topics as church, humans as bearers of the image of God, family life, culture, and sexuality. Through it all they seek to answer the question, how are we to think and live day to day as followers of Jesus?
Having been believers and ministers for over 25 years now has given Debs and I an appreciation for just how hard it is to be an authentic follower of our Lord and Saviour. To be an authentically radical disciple requires a relentless evaluation of life's priorities and concerns-together with an ongoing, rigorous, critique of our culture-to ensure we are not adopting values that subvert the very life and message we are called to live out. For true followers of Jesus, discipleship is not simply the first step toward a promising career of being a Christian, rather it is itself the fulfilment of our destiny. So, Debs and I have decided to write a book on what we call "missional discipleship." Appropriately called Untamed, it is meant to be a penetrating look into the things that keep us from becoming all we were made to be and has many practical suggestions about how to become wild followers of Jesus again.
The truth is that discipleship, at least the way the Bible understands it, cannot be limited to a personal exercise in personal spirituality. There are much greater, perhaps even global, consequences at stake in our becoming more like Jesus. So much so that we have actually come to believe that discipleship is a frontier issue for the people of God at this time in history. Why? Because most commentators would now agree that the Western Church, because of its deep embedding into the prevailing consumerist culture, has all but lost the art of discipleship. Reggie McNeal has concluded that "church culture in North America is now a vestige of the original [Christian] movement, an institutional expression of religion that is in part a civil religion and in part a club where religious people can hang out with other people whose politics, worldview, and lifestyle match theirs."
If this is indeed the case, we should be clear that this is not what the church is called to be, and is, in fact, directly caused by a failure in discipleship and disciple-making. And it will have to be addressed if we are to give faithful witness to our century. Therefore, rediscovering what it means to radically follow Jesus is now an area of strategic-and definitely missional-concern. To recover mission we are going to have to take discipleship seriously again, but the reverse is also true; to rediscover discipleship we are also going to have to take mission seriously. We cannot be true disciples without also being missionaries (sent ones) to our worlds.
The gospel is the power of God for the salvation of the world (Rom. 1:16), and God wants to redeem the broken and lost world around us and through us. Our lives, individual and corporate, play a vital role in the unfolding of the grand purposes of God. The gospel cannot be limited to being about my personal healing and wholeness, but rather extends in and through my salvation to the salvation of the world. To fail in discipleship and disciple-making is therefore to fail in the primary mission (or "sentness") of the church. And it does not take a genius to realise that we have all but lost the art of disciple-making in the contemporary Western church. No wonder Dallas Willard calls the systematic non-discipleship of the Western Church "the great omission" in his book by that name.
There is much talk about missional church in our time-and we completely agree. The church must become missional or fade into increasing irrelevance in the 21st Century. But we simply cannot get there from here without factoring discipleship into the equation. We can't have one without the other: if there be no mission there can be no discipleship, and if there is no discipleship there will be no mission. And there can be no missional church if there is no disciple-making church-it's as simple as that. If ever there was a time to recover the true meaning of the Great Commission to make disciples of the nations it is now. The future health and viability of Western Christianity is at stake. We must not waste time.
Posted 12:23 PM | 0 Comments | Permalink
PrayerNet
Thursday 1st March 2012 9:23 PM
For many years at All Saints' Church we have understood the power of intercessory prayer. Prayer requests have been received and disseminated by word of mouth, by telephone and in recent years, via email. We are now offering an additional opportunity to broaden access to prayer in church and amongst members of the wider community by creating a prayer request page on the church website.
By clicking on Prayer Request, a page will open in which anyone can type a prayer request which will then be sent automatically by email to the intercessors. The initiator will have the option to remain anonymous or write their name and email address if they would like some feedback. It will be made clear on the webpage that the people praying are all trusted members of the church who pray in complete confidence.
If you are a member of All Saints' church and feel you have a ministry as an intercessor, you have time to pray and would like to be part of the website prayer group, would you please email the church office admin@allsaintshalifax.org.uk so we can add you to the recipient group. If you are already an email intercessor and want to be included in the new service, please also send an email to the above address. When you have sent your email address to the office, you will receive a reply which includes information about the necessary PrayerNet protocols.
The PrayerNet service can offer prayer for church members and local people alike and means that there are always people available to pick up prayer requests, regardless of holidays etc. and gives us another opportunity to show our intention to serve the community.
Many thanks
Margaret Binns
Posted 9:23 PM | 2 Comments | Permalink
New Wine Summer Festival
Tuesday 27th December 2011 12:30 PM
Why not consider coming and joining us for 5 fantastic days of fun, fellowship, teaching and worship. There is always a great gang who camp together, or if camping isn't your thing come and stay at the local travelodge. For more information contact George Smith or Linda Maslen or look on the New Wine Website http://www.new-wine.org/summer
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All Saints Facebook
Tuesday 27th December 2011 12:09 PM
Why not look us up on facebook All Saints Halifax and find out what All the Saints' at All Saints are saying
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The Bishop comes for tea!
Thursday 3rd November 2011 5:17 PM
We marked the beginning of Advent this year with a special service where we welcomed Bishop Stephen to our celebration in the Parish Hall. Leyland Smith gave a thought provoking talk about the time of waiting and preparation before Christmas. Everyone received the gift of an advent candle to symbolise the way in which we need to take our light into the world.
The Bishop spoke to us about the gifts older people have to share in the community and thanked the Connected Cluster for the things that are happening in the parish. When the service was ended, we tucked into gorgeous buns, cakes, biscuits and shortbread provided by members of the Cluster.
We're now looking forward to the Christmas Service at All Saints' Church on Wednesday 14th December at 2.30p.m. We hope you can join us.
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Peace - Christmas Communion
Wednesday 2nd November 2011 1:39 AM
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Silver Threads Celebration
Tuesday 1st November 2011 1:52 AM
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Hope - Worship & Reflections
Tuesday 1st November 2011 1:35 AM
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Lord of the Breakthrough
Thursday 6th October 2011 8:21 PM
"He has sent me to bind up the broken hearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and realease from darkness the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD's favour" Isaiah 61
Journey with us to look at the pormises God gives us about feedom, the obstacles that get in our way and the strongholds that sometimes reamin even though we are disciples of Jesus. Using Isaiah 61 a backdrop let us breakthrough to be the women that God wants us to be through our Lord of the Breakthrough.
£6.00 (But if cost is an issue let us knwo) includes lunch and refreshements
Contact Linda Maslen linda_maslen@hotmail.com or Sheila Sharp 01422 259011 for more information
Posted 8:21 PM | 0 Comments | Permalink
Fathers Heart V
Wednesday 5th October 2011 1:59 AM
Join us for our Father's Heart V, a church service with a difference
des-per-ate (dspr-t)
adj - involving or employing extreme measures in an attempt to escape defeat or frustration
- undertaken out of extreme urgency or as a last resort
-extremely intense
The next in our series of informal, contemporary services where everyone is welcome just as they are. Whether church is your thing - or not - we'd love you to join us and check out what's happening at these special services.
FHV looks at the lengths God is willing to go to just for a chance to have us back with Him. He is deeply in love with us and longs for a closer relationship with each of us. Imagine - the Creator of the universe is desperate to hear you say "I love you too". Desperate for you to be His.
Free coffee&cakes from 6pm!
Free meat&potato pie afterwards!
Posted 1:59 AM | 0 Comments | Permalink
Light Party 2011
Sunday 18th September 2011 5:20 PM
Showing there are much better things for children to do on October 31st than tramping the streets, the annual All Saints' Light Party once again proved a great success. More than 40 children, with parents watching and helpers leading them through the activities, enjoyed an active, noisy and fun-packed evening in a church cleared of chairs.
The youngsters were split into two teams "Flames" and "Sparkles" which competed against each other in a range of games - some needing mental agility like Match the Pair, a number requiring physical effort, and others requiring the ability to make a lot of noise!
Also there were competitions to find the best pumpkin head and the best costume, and everyone joined in singing and dancing. Light featured heavily in the proceedings, many people sporting reflective bangles and necklaces or carrying torches (and a couple of mini-miners turned up complete with headlights). There were three short sketches showing how light can reveal truth, change the way we see things, and overcome darkness; and a short talk on how we can all be lights in the world.
Tablesful of fabulous cakes were waiting for everyone when the activities finished and party bags for all completed the wonderful event.
Congratulations are in order to all involved and praise God for the inspiration.
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Harvest Celebration
Saturday 17th September 2011 8:20 PM
Connected Cluster, Harvest Celebration
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Myers Briggs Training Days
Saturday 17th September 2011 8:17 PM
If you feel you would like to know more about your personality and how to work with different personalities from yours then this course is for you. If you lead in any area of church life or at work then this course run over two Saturday mornings could prove very valuable
All Saints will be running the Myers Briggs course led, by Liz Lovell an accredited practioner and church leader, on Nov 19th and Jan 14th, both mornings run from 9am to 1pm, attendance at both sessions is important as the second session builds on knowledge gained in the first session.
How will Myers Briggs help?
- It helps people learn about themselves, in a framework that describes personality in a positive and constructive way.
- It aids appreciation of important differences between people and how different "types" can work together in a complementary way
- It can improve working relationships, help develop leadership style and improve communication and problem solving strategies.
- It can help people to manage change and understand reaction to stress
- An understanding of your personality profile can be very helpful in all areas of life
- If you would like to attend this course, please email /phone the office to let Margaret know. There will be a small cost to of £10 to cover both mornings and refreshments
Posted 8:17 PM | 0 Comments | Permalink
New Wine Womens 3rd March
Monday 8th August 2011 12:41 PM
Ladies come and join us at the fantastic New Wine Womens day, great worship, great teaching and great fun for the the All Saints' girls to be together. There are usually pleanty of cars going to Harrogate and there will be sign up sheet at the back of church if you would like to come.
For more information contact Andrea Lees or Linda Maslen
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