No.12 6th September, 2024
Hi,
Hope this finds you well. As usual there are a number of articles with activities and events going on at Mearns and around the country - at 'home' the Hizkidz are starting their series (just the 3 years!) as they walk through the Bible. The material looks amazing and really importantly everyone can get involved. All the details are below and look out for Pauline sharing more on Sunday.
Looks like a sunny weekend ahead - just in time for me posting a chapter from Andrew Wilson's book on RAIN!
Timing is everything. I wanted to highlight this book and I will put a few chapters in to whet the appetite over the next few weeks, but it's really worth getting a copy of.
Enjoy the Mag.
MB
Sunday 8th September, 10.30am
Scripture - Romans ch16
Rev Scott Kirkland
Wednesday 11th - 7.15pm
PULSE prayer meeting at McDougall's
LARGE PRINT - SONG WORDS
If you find viewing the song-words on the screen in Sunday worship a problem, we currently print a limited number of large-print song sheets for specific people.
We don't want to print unnecessary copies so please speak with the door team and we will begin to make these available for you each week.
LIFTS TO CHURCH
If you require a regular lift to church, please let us know by emailing the office: office@mearnsfree.org
and if you are able to offer to be on the rota for giving a lift please speak with Sandy McDougal - see below for details.
Staying after the Service
Having the opportunity to wait after the service to enjoy a tea or coffee and fellowship together is a part of 'doing church' too.
Big thanks to John and Sarah who make sure that everything is ready to go after the service and for being so willing to serve folk each week.
And thanks too to Emily who makes the sweet treats each week which get such rave reviews!
B.Y.O.C. please - If you have a re-usuable cup you can bring, that always help with costs.
Hizkidz and YOU!
Our Hizkidz are beginning a 3 year series working our way through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation using a curriculum which goes along with the book The Biggest Story.
Written by Kevin deYoung and beautifully illustrated by Don Clark it is designed to point us to Jesus as we discover the Gospel connection in every story. Find out more here.
We would like to invite you to join with us as we go through the sessions and so each week I'll post the passages we have looked at along with the 'Big Truth' and memory verse for each week too.
We are never too old or too young to grow in our understanding and appreciation of the overarching story of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation!
You can also watch the storybook videos here
The Bible Storybook is available to buy from a few Christian online bookshops in the UK. Eden, 10ofthose and The Good Book. The cheapest I've found is linked here but you'll need to add delivery too (or buy something else to get over £25!)
Story 1 - And So It Begins
Bible passages: Genesis 1 and 2
Big Truth: A very good God makes a very good world, with humans as his very good image bearers.
Memory verse: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis chapter 1 verse 1.
There is also a podcast for kids - 1 for each story. This is the link to story 1.
You can also watch the storybook videos here
Plans are in hand for the next season of Home Groups - they meet at various times in the week, so if you are not involved in a group yet, please speak with your elder or Scott and get plugged in to a group - they meet fortnightly.
Drivers still(!) Needed
CAN YOU HELP?
With the new season of church activities starting it would be good to have a larger number of drivers available to call on to supplement the existing team.
Drivers are required for:
-
Sundays (pick up 10.00 -10.15) and take home after coffee etc
-
Tuesdays (pick up 1.30 -1.45) for Café Connect located at the Baptist Church. This is a 2.00pm start and take home is at 3.30pm.
Your commitment can be on a weekly, fortnightly, once-a-month or just to be called on in an emergency.
Those being transported vary in mobility and frailty. Extra time may be needed for some.
There is disabled access at both venues.
This is a very worthwhile ministry as more people in the congregation are no longer fit or able to drive.
If you consider this to be part of your ministry at Mearns Free Church please let Alastair McLellan know at office@mearnsfree.org.
(It is a requirement that all drivers have safeguard training and this will now need to be to Free Church of Scotland stipulations.)
Sandy H
Migrants as a means of grace
Catherine sent a link to this interesting article about how we see Migrants in our country and community - it was written just around the time of the general election hence the quote below referencing that.
"Before an election when migration, and therefore migrants, are being kicked around like a political football it is good to remember that we are not only involved in a complex economic and political issue, but are talking about our neighbours whose lives and experiences should be approached with reverence and respect, and who offer us gifts at the very heart of our faith that we should treasure and internalise" by John Root
Migrants as a Means of Grace.
Marriage is described as ‘a means of grace’ – it is through an intimate, life-committed relationship with someone of the opposite sex that God can grow us in depth of character and godliness. Marriage in some churches is regarded as a sacrament – in Augustine’s words as ’a visible form of an invisible grace’. In this blog I want to suggest that people who are migrants – no longer living in their country of origin – are to the rest of us a ‘means of grace’; even, in a wider sense, sacramental.
Read the rest of the article
here.
WEEK OF PRAYER
Join us in prayer
Week of Prayer: 9-13 September 2024
Join us on Zoom to hear stories from mission partners and to pray into these situations.
Each weekday there will be two opportunities to come together via Zoom at 12.30-13:00, and 19.30-20.00 (repeat of the first session). There will also be an email sent out each morning introducing the prayer theme for the day.
By registering, you'll be added to the list of recipients for the daily email including the links to the Zoom events. Thank you to everyone who has registered so far.
Vance Havner said: "vision must be followed by venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps - we must step up the stairs." Someone else said: "vision without execution is hallucination!"
But what creates vision that then leads to action?
Click here to go to the page with all the details
The Pulse
We call our weekly prayer meeting at Mearns Free Church "The Pulse".
You can see where we meet each week on the
calendar.
“Prayer is subversive activity. It involves a more or less open act of defiance against any claim by the current regime.... [As we pray,] slowly but surely, not culture, not family, not government, not job, not even the tyrannous self can stand against the quiet power and creative influence of God's sovereignty.”
― Eugene H. Peterson,
Ladybird Book of Mearns Free Church
Andrew Wilson's book God of all Things takes the reader through the every day things of life (Bread, Dust, and Rain etc) to let us see how God not just created the world, but did it to reveal his glory and to remind us of his character.
It was while I was having my picnic in the car on Lewis I thought that the chapter on RAIN could be the right one.
If you are looking for a good read you can get the book here. and the other usual places.
RAIN
THE GRACE OF GOD “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.” —MATTHEW 5:44–45
My drive into work is among the most beautiful in the world. From the moment you take the A267 at Hailsham, right up until you join the dual carriageway toward London on the far side of Tunbridge Wells, you meander through a twenty-five-mile stretch of avenue lined on both sides with deciduous trees of deep green and liberally festooned with impossibly pink rhododendrons and azaleas. The villages are evocatively named: Horsebridge, Cross-in-Hand, Five Ashes, Mayfield, Mark Cross. Oast houses abound. So do bluebells on the forest floor, and village greens, timber-fronted pubs, houses with grand names and long driveways, and farms that sell logs, eggs, or cherries.
Occasionally there is a break in the woodland, and you are surprised to find that you can see for miles, with nothing but undulating fields and hedges until the next church’s bell tower. When you drive it in June, the color palette is so vivid, it’s hard to believe. There is something profligate about the way God has distributed beauty in the world. So far as I know, the people of the Sussex High Weald are not unusually godly, loving, or generous. The houses I drive past are just as likely to contain adultery or domestic violence, drug abuse or racism, as any others in the country. The expensive properties may be owned by people who work hard, pursue justice, love their neighbors, and give to the poor, or they may be owned by complete scoundrels who hoard wealth, exploit the weak, cheat on their taxes, and cheat on their partners.
Yet God makes the sun rise and the rain fall on them just the same. They don’t deserve to live in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty any more than I do. The beauty comes because of the sun and the rain, and the sun and the rain come because of grace. It hits me every time I land at Gatwick Airport. When I look out of the airplane window as we circle around Sussex, waiting to land, it strikes me again how lush England is, in contrast to wherever I have just come from. (My wife, Rachel, finds it very tiresome that she cannot get through a simple descent without my “look how green it is” speech.)
Often I am returning from a nation whose believers are far more numerous, joyful, humble, and prayerful than I am and whose governments have invaded and colonized far fewer countries than mine has. If rain were allocated on the basis of righteousness, then many of my brothers and sisters should be living in a verdant paradise and many of us should be living in an arid dust bowl. But it isn’t, so we aren’t. “He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matt. 5:45).
On my commute a few days ago, I was thinking about all this while listening to my playlist, and it occurred to me how exactly the same thing is true of human abilities. I get to marvel at a wide range of enormously talented people on my journey: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sting, Rihanna, Eva Cassidy, Kurt Cobain, Madonna, Prince, Adele, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra. I don’t know any of them personally, and I hear that some of them are (or were) absolutely charming. But some of them are (or were) plagued by arrogance, greed, infidelity, bullying, smugness, anger, abusive behavior, and who knows what else. Apparently, there is no correspondence at all between the quality of someone’s character and how gifted they are, hence the plots of movies like Amadeus, The Social Network, Steve Jobs, and numerous sporting films. If we were to discover that Shakespeare was a murderer, it would not make his plays any less brilliant (even if it made us less keen to perform them). Michael Jackson and Kevin Spacey do not become any less magnetic on-screen when their behavior off-screen is exposed. It feels unfair somehow. Talent, like rain, is showered on the evil as much as on the good.
The church has historically called this “common grace,” and it is one of the great scandals of Christian theology. If I were God, I would allocate ability according to merit: good people would be gifted, bad people would not be, and an increase in righteousness would earn an increase in talent. In my world, all the most gifted artists, intellectuals, musicians, and writers would be Christians, culture would be entirely shaped by honorable people, and Nobel Prize short lists and Oscar ceremonies would be populated by the ranks of the selfless. It would be a world of fairness, scrupulous evenhandedness, and ultimately—as uncomfortable as it might be to admit it—legalism.
God is different. He is a bountiful Father who lavishes excessive goodness on his creatures whether they like it (or him) or not. He scatters gifts like sunshine, and grace like rain. Nobody gets what they deserve, and it’s just as well, or none of us would be here at all. This world is not set up to reward the righteous with nice weather, good looks, and quick minds; it is set up to proclaim the abundant goodness of the God revealed in Jesus, who loves his enemies and prays for those who persecute him. If you love and pray for your enemies, Jesus says, then you will take on the family likeness. You will be sons and daughters of your sunshine-giving, rain-pouring, grace-raining heavenly Father. God’s gracious gift of rain is the surprising punch line of the shortest and oddest evangelistic sermon in the New Testament. Barnabas and Paul are in Lystra, in modern-day Turkey, and they heal a man who has never been able to walk, which convinces the crowd that they are gods in human form. Horrified at the misunderstanding, they tear their clothes and plead with the town to turn from idols toward the living God. “In past generations he allowed all the nations to walk in their own ways,” they explain. “Yet he did not leave himself without witness, for he did good by giving you rains from heaven and fruitful seasons, satisfying your hearts with food and gladness” (Acts 14:16–17). End of sermon. Even with this, Luke says, they barely stopped people from sacrificing to them. The first dozen times I read that story, it made no sense to me. How could Paul, of all people, preach a message like that? You should turn to the living God because of rain? What is he playing at? But the more I think about it, the more appropriate it becomes. No doubt this is a short summary of what they said, and they may have explained the Jesus story in far more detail off camera. But when meeting pagans for the first time—pagans whose concept of deity is based on Zeus, whose temple and priest are central in their community (v. 13)—the apostles’ first priority is to preach the goodness and benevolence of God. The Creator of all things is not like Zeus, they say. He is not a petty, vindictive, tit-for-tat, irascible tyrant who scratches your back only when you scratch his. He is a God who gives good gifts to everyone—rain, sunshine, fruit, harvests—whether they worship him or not. “The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made. . . . The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season” (Ps. 145:9, 15). Jerusalem serves Yahweh and Lystra serves Zeus, yet they both get rain from the same sky. We call it common grace because it is plentiful, but theologically speaking, it is as rare as they come. As a natural legalist, I find grace difficult. The concept of just deserts runs deep in me, and I struggle to get my head around unmerited, incongruous favor. You may too. If so, then the next time you see dark clouds gathering overhead, stand outside and wait for the rainfall.
Every droplet of water that splashes onto you or onto me is preaching to us that no matter how ungodly we are, our heavenly Father will continue to drench us with grace like rain. He does not divert the water toward only those individuals or nations who have reached a sufficient standard of justice; he pelts it over us indiscriminately, soaking us with his kindness, whatever sort of life we’ve led, gods we’ve worshiped, or day we’ve had. Stand there for a few minutes, and soak in the unmerited and unilateral goodness of God. You may even find yourself singing in the rain.
Please Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel
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Safeguarding in Mearns Free Church
Our safeguarding team is here to help ensure Mearns Free Church is a safe place for all. However, this ambition must be embraced by all of us if it is to be successful.
Let's get our PVGs in place, get ourselves trained and put safe practice into place week by week.
Free Church’s Safeguarding Training
Our Safeguarding Team (including Sue Anderson, Ian Forgie, Marlene Smith and Sue Amery-Behr) have so far processed the safeguarding paperwork for 63 folk in our congregation;
Disclosure Scotland have issued PVG certificates for just over half so far and we expect their task to be completed soon.
All who have applied for PVG certification need also to engage in the Free Church’s safeguarding training. This is currently provided online from the comfort of your own homes, and takes a couple of hours.
The next training session for congregations is Thursday 31st October at 19.30.
You can sign up for the training sessions through this link to the registration page: Safeguarding Training Booking – Free Church of Scotland
Office Bearers can sign up for their training on Tuesday 24th September.
Thank you for embracing safeguarding.
Doing so is essential to ensure that Mearns Free Church is a safe environment for all who worship with us and for all who engage in our ministries to children, young people and vulnerable adults.
Alastair McLellan
Mearns Free Church has a What's App Group for Prayer
Purpose: A platform to share information regarding a sudden and crucial need for prayer.
How to connect: Speak to Margaret Boyd if you would like to be added to this group or email Margaret at: mandmboyd@hotmail.co.uk
What tech do I need?: You need to have a Smart Phone with WhatsApp to get set up.
Email Addresses For Mearns Free Church
Please make sure you change your email address list now we are part of the Free Church.
Tom Brown (Office): office@mearnsfree.org
Scott Kirkland (Minister): minister@mearnsfree.org
Sandy McDougall (Treasurer): finance@mearnsfree.org
Pauline Forster (Children and families worker): children@mearnsfree.org