Thought for the Week - 17/1/2021

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Dear Friends,

January 18th-25th marks the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It is an ecumenical event that we have taken part in for a number of years, including, welcoming someone from a church within Churches Together in Beckenham on a pulpit swap Sunday, hosting a Taizé service, and going along to various prayer events put on by different churches. The week was first observed in January 1908 and celebrated in the chapel of a small Atonement Franciscan Convent of the Protestant Episcopal Church, on a remote hillside fifty miles from New York City. This new prayer movement caught the imagination of others beyond the Franciscan Friars and Sisters of the Atonement to become an energetic movement that gradually blossomed into a worldwide observance involving many nations and millions of people. Each year a different group is invited to put together resources for the week and this year it comes from the Sisters of the Monastic Community of Grandchamp in Switzerland and focuses on John 15 and the theme of ‘Abiding in Christ’. What does this mean for us? Abiding in Christ means that we believe that Jesus is God’s Son, that we receive him as our Saviour and Lord, that we commit to and follow what God says, that we believe the message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that we seek to be known by the love we show for each other, the community of believers, the body of Christ. In that sense, this love is not only for our own church family, but our local network of churches, and indeed the church worldwide. It is a reminder that Jesus pray to the Father for all future believers, saying, ‘The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one. I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me’ (John 17:22-23).  

Grace and peace,

Neil     

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