Welcome to those who are from our larger churches. Please tell your friends at larger churches to come to gatherings like this. We need your experience and wisdom. Can I also tell you that we need people from larger churches to be ready to go. To go to places in the diocese that are in need of mission, new housing estates for instance. And places where parishes are struggling, desparate for mission but with little idea or people to put it in to action.

I’ve paraphased a little, but this is basically what he said. What struck me about this is that in most of my chrisitan experience there has been a theme of staying. Whether that is in a home group or small group, youth group, congregation, cell and church staying, enjoying the comfort zone of growth and friendship is a clear theme.

Our culture has a different theme, movement, fluidity, flow and movement. It is fairly easy to argue that our much cherished freedom, particularly of movement, has been at the cost of security of place and stability.

You would think that the ‘be prepared to go’ that Bishop Stephen encoraged would fall on easy ears and find churches and people ready to stand up for. However, as the Bishop also noted, we don’t celebate success in other, neighbouring, churches very easily, in fact probably not at all. We like success in our own patch and find it uncomfortable in surrounding places.

And yet at the same time we are a faith that has at it’s core vlaues a ‘go’. Each one of these churches that we feel like we want to stay in was planted by some who left, arrived and planted the Gospel amongst a group of people.

Being someone who used to work in a large church, who considered the idea of sending people out as a resource to other local churches, but who never managed to get to a place were we could do it, I still find the idea of not planting a new church but helping a perhaps smaller one capture and move on with a vision for mission very exciting.

I wonder whether they might be willing to accept such help.

Yesterday, we woke to about 2 inches [4cm] of snow and to much excitement from our children who got dress much faster than I can remember for a while. Despite that, I was out of the door first on my way to morning prayer, therefore the first in our family to take in the full beauty of the whitened South Oxfordshire countryside and the first to crunch my boots down the garden path. It was great, a sight and experience that I have not had for a long time, even I was excited.

However, by lunchtime the landscape was much more colourful and the paths around college were more of a wet slush and unpleasant to walk through. By the time the school bus arrived the kids had to work hard at finding enough snow to fill their palms.

Since I had spent the morning reading about mission it was not surprising that such a parallel as this should occur to me:

Mission by the church is [at least in my experience], a little bit like an English snow fall. Very exciting at first with peoples enthusiasm and willingness raised. It is easy to find the extra effort to over come the difficulties that arise and it is even beautiful to see. But after this initial stage it all begins to fade away until it is more like a damp mess and it is both a source of disappointment and relief that it will all be over soon. By the end of the day we are actually very glad that things are back to normal and ordinary life returns. Glad of the experience, but also relieved that that doesn’t happen everyday! We’ll probably have a few photos embarrassingly showing ourselves over excited that it did snow even if we can’t actually remember it.