Beckenham Baptist Church

  Dear Friends, Each year at harvest time we support the charity Operation Agri (OA), a Christian organisation run mainly by volunteers and which had its beginnings in the Baptist Men’s Movement. The focus of this year’s appeal is called Vital Vegetables for Mozambique and OA is partnering with Oasis Global whose ethos is ‘a vision for community – a place where everyone is included, making a contribution and reaching their God-given potential’. Mozambique is a beautiful country with spectacular beaches, but it is very poor: ninth from bottom in the UN Human Development Index. 80% work in agriculture, but malnutrition affects many, with 50% below the poverty line. OA, whose strapline is ’Christian love in Action’, is helping women’s groups to learn market gardening, which means the vegetables they grow help them to feed families and earn money in communities that suffer from poverty and climate change. Women like Maninha Eusebio who says, ‘After training, we got seeds and started to

  Dear Friends,  ‘It has felt like we’ve been on a pilgrimage together’ was the comment made from the group of friends who I had made during the ten hours of waiting to file past the coffin of the late Queen Elizabeth II in Westminster Hall last week. And indeed on reflection that is exactly what it felt like. One definition of ‘pilgrimage’ is ‘a devotional practice consisting of a prolonged journey, often undertaken on foot or horseback, toward a specific destination of significance’. We had come to this sacred place where the body of the late Queen lay in this grand and imposing hall that has seen many historical events. In the group I travelled with there were a collection of people of differing nationalities, including a retired Anglican vicar. She and I wondered what had made people come out and queue for hours to walk past the coffin of a deceased monarch. Curiosity, fascination, gratitude, a feeling of being swept along by the emotion were all suggested, and I guess there were

  Dear Friends,  I’m sure like me, you will have been saddened to hear the news of the death of HM The Queen on Thursday 8 th September. Queen Elizabeth II reigned for 70 years and in that time saw many changes and advances in her lifetime. She has been described as the constant presence in all our lives for so many decades and it seems strange to think that she will no longer be there as this stabilising but also much loved figure in our public life. As I reflected on the news my overwhelming sense was one of gratitude and thanks for a woman who dedicated her life to the service of this nation and the Commonwealth and who, even as her health was failing, continued to faithfully carry out her duties as Queen. In the book entitled Our Faithful Queen published for the Platinum Jubilee which we celebrated earlier this year, there are various quotes and reflections for the young queen to consider as she approached her Coronation in 1953, the first of which was a prayer from the Bible,

Dear Friends,  September 1 st to October 4 th is designated in the church calendar as the ‘Season of Creation’ or sometimes called ‘Creation Time’. It gives an opportunity for us all to renew our relationship with our Creator and all creation through celebration, conversion and commitment together, joining with sisters and brothers in the ecumenical family in prayer and action for our common home. It was in 1991 that the Ecumenical Patriarch Dimitrios I suggested that 1 st September, the first day of the Orthodox Church’s year, be observed as a day ‘of protection for the natural environment’, and this was later widened by the European Christian Environmental Network to the season we know today recommending that it be a period ‘dedicated to prayer for the protection of Creation and for the promotion of sustainable lifestyles that reverse our contribution to climate change’. We can often think that information about the changing climate is something of a recent phenomenon say within t