Welcome to St Hilda's

18 July Discipleship and Mission. It is impossible to be truly a disciple without mission being part of who we are - 'as the Father has sent me, I am sending you'. We serve a sending God. We follow the Son he sent into the world. He sent his disciples out, and he equipped them by sending the Holy Spirit. Do we have that awareness of our mission and do we act on it? How can we do this more faithfully and wholeheartedly?

11 July Being on the Ball - Discipleship and Scripture. With the World Cup Final later in the day, we considered how we should keep on the ball as disciples (although the phrase on the ball is originally a baseball not football metaphor). Being on the ball is being sharp, ready, poised and equipped to accomplish; we apply the metaphor to some-one who knows what they are about and doesn't miss a trick. What makes this possible when we apply it to Christian discipleship? One of the key things is scripture - the Bible is not only our authoritative text, but should set the shape, be our inspiration and our nourishment for this life. It is not a dry text book but lifegiving and a text to be engaged with eagerly and with excitement, both at the message and that through his word, God speaks to us personally each day. This is what helps us to be sharp and ready, poised and equipped. This means regular reading and reflecting, knowing the contents and the overall plotline, holding the different strands which are present in the text in a lively dynamic tension and continually thinking about our own lives and decisions against this context.

4 July Discipleship Every Day. In our worship for all service (all ages involved/learning/worshipping together), we explored how discipleship is like breathing - it should run through all of every day. It is not something we do for a while and then stop, neither a chore like the washing up, nor a pastime like a game of squash. Discipleship is about who we are and colours everything we are about - it has practical implications for every activity of every day, such as in the family, the workplace, at school/nursery, when out driving the car or spending time with family/friends. It shapes our decisions, speaking and thinking. We need constantly to reflect on and our living in the light of being a disciple asking how the Lord wants us to follow him in the situations and settings of today's world and our personal circumstances.   

27 June Discipleship and Ethics. Too often and too easily we justify what want to do or would do quite regardless of our faith, on the basis of our faith. Being a disciple entails rethinking our ethics in line with Jesus' teaching - sometimes that will affirm the views we hold already, but we must be prepared for this to challenge our lifestyle and decision making and be willing to act accordingly. This is an ongoing process; we may discover in all sorts of areas of our life that we have been getting it wrong, and we will still make mistakes even when doing our best. So there has to be a humility and a teachability about our approach to ethics if we are to be truly Christian, yet at the same time we should always strive to live according to the best understanding we have of what is good and right.

Underlying all this, though, is the realisation that legalistic approaches to ethics are distinctly unlike the way Jesus himself lived, scandalising the legalists of his day - at the heart of the ethics of true Christian discipleship is the leading of the Spirit (a new deeper desire and feeling for what God wants) and so a freedom from the old way of the written code. We need to think through how this works out in today's world, so different from the society of Jesus' day and the early church, but also with much in common.

20 June Discipleship and Fruitfulness. There is a purpose beyond ourselves to being a disciple of Christ, it is not about mere self-fulfilment or personal happiness. Our lives as we follow Jesus are meant to produce fruit; we need to be clear that this only happens if the life of Jesus is flowing into us, if we are living by the Spirit not governed by our flesh, and we should then see growing love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5.23), produced by the Spirit, in our lives.  

13 June Discipleship as Cost. There is so much that makes it worth being a disciple of Jesus, such joy and love and transformation of purpose and life that comes through him. This is all free - there is no ladder of ascent at the top of which we have attained the qualifications to be a Christian, a disciple. Free though it is, yet paradoxically it is not without cost, in fact the cost is incredibly high. A bit like marriage - the vows trip easily from the lips and a marriage is established in a brief moment, but for a marriage to be what it should be, at that same moment a wholly different life begins. This new life costs you your all, and only if you give that cost, wholly give yourself, do you truly receive the full and fantastic rewards of what marriage is meant to be. So it is with the cost of discipleship. 

6 June Discipleship as Love. Love is the centre of the good news of Jesus and the life of the church (although sadly it doesn't always look like this is true). Love must be the fundamental motivating force for all that we are as Christians. Without love, whatever we may be, we are certainly not disciples of Jesus. The church should be a family characterised by an unusual quality of love for each other; and all that we are should centre around the foundational commands to love God and neighbour. For this to happen we need to know and experience the love of God, for he produces love within our hearts, and yet we also need to work at and foster love in ourselves, our character, our decisions, what we choose to forego etc.  

30 May Discipleship as Joy. The word disciple, with its link to discipline, can seem very austere and unattractive; all a slog, hard work. Christian living, modelled on Jesus himself, surely should not be like that! People wanted to be with Jesus in huge numbers; he was a welcome guest at parties and was even criticised for enjoying such things (Matt 11.19). What Jesus described as life to the full should mean that being a disciple is all about joy, not a path of drudgery. And joy should energise and uplift us, and is a crucial dimension even in hard times - we will never persevere as disciples from human effort alone - but the joy of the Lord is our strength (Neh 8.10). 

23 May - Pentecost Sunday. We celebrated with some new disciples being baptised (with full immersion - lots of water and joy!), and others renewed their baptisms. This was a great celebration time, rounded off with some wonderful shared food from various cultures after the service.

16 May Discipleship as Unlearning - letting go of worldly models and perspectives in order to have a consistent worldview drawn from and shaped by scripture and centred on Jesus.

9 May New Government - topical after the election, but thinking through both the new government of God in the life of a disciple and what serious discipleship should mean for our attitude to the state.

2 May Discipleship as Learning - an all age service inviting us to be lifelong learners from Christ - taking his yoke upon us to use his phrase - taking our knowledge and learning our worldview from scripture and building sound knowledge of scripture by learning its texts.