Blog
I have never before been associated with a church that welcomes as many outside visitors onto its property each week as we do here. This last week has seen many additional new faces on the property with the large memorial services taking place here, but each week we also host numbers of our own internal groups, various mission projects (soup kitchen, sewing lessons, sew and sews, adult literacy, computer classes) and a host of outside groups (including ballet, yoga, Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous, and others), not to mention the pre-school and gym on our property too.
Our son Thomas has been performing in a school play over this last week. Highbury put on a wonderful show – Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows – full of music and lots of local South African humour.
One of the things that spiritual directors are taught to look out for in conversation with others relates to our image of God. We may all say that we believe God to be loving and gracious, but often the way we speak about God suggests that what we actually believe is quite different.
This is the prayer written by Anselm of Canterbury that we read at the start of the services this last Sunday:
Do you have any New Year’s resolutions that reappear every year but never get ticked off the to-do list? I was so struck by an interview conducted years ago with the late Johnny Clegg where the interviewer commented on Clegg’s ability to cross boundaries – to deeply appreciate and connect with another culture. The interviewer asked Clegg if had any advice for others wanting to do the same and he replied that for anyone serious about building bridges and appreciating another culture the very best thing to do is to become a student again – to learn a language.
This week we’re launching a cellphone app for WMC. The app basically gathers together all the content that is published through our website (as well as some additional resources) and makes it all easily available from your phone.
Our home group and morning men’s group have recently had conversations about the Enneagram. If the term is new to you, this is a remarkable model of the human psyche which helps us to see how people are so different from one another, but in very similar ways. The model traces its roots all the way back to Christian mystics in the 4th century, and saw a resurgence in use in the last century (particularly by Jesuit spiritual directors), but it is now exploding beyond the church and into wider society.
After a break of three years we are once again going to witness something incredible on Sunday as thousands of runners make their way from Maritzburg to Durban in the 2022 Comrades Marathon. And inspired by what we see, maybe some of us will be lacing up our running shoes before the sun comes up on Monday morning with visions of what will be in 2023 :) After all, when we see people of all ages and shapes and sizes crossing the finish line, it seems very do-able doesn’t it?
Kym and I have been in a course this week – the penultimate module in a two year Spiritual Direction training programme offered by the Jesuit Institute of South Africa. This week the course has focused on leading retreats. My experience of retreats over the years has been a quiet morning here and there, occasional ministers’ retreats where much of the time was taken up with talk and admin, and a couple of multi-day private retreats. But not much of any of these in the last couple of years.
I spent some time this week reflecting on the open meeting we had a couple of weeks ago to dream and plan together for our church. We began that meeting with a group exercise which asked how we would like others to describe our church community. Three broad themes emerged from that process – they reveal some of our core values as a church