No.13    13th September, 2024

Hi, 

Hope this finds you well.

There is a wide range of articles in the magazine - ranging from theological courses to increase your knowledge and deepen your faith...right through to what sort of soup and toiletries you can get for those in need at Harvesttime. And if you think that these are two things which are unrelated then it is time to stop and think again.

Reading Christian books is important - a friend once told me if you don't read you will become boring and slow. Can't remember what I replied.
Anyway, both books mentioned this week are worth getting - look out for the one which is to be a focus for us all at Mearns Free... and I've given another extract from 'God of All Things'. 

Jack G was in touch this week asking me to put something into the magazine about a bad score  - I thought, 'It's now becoming so bad we are praying for them!'
It was in fact something to do with the chairs in the hall - there is a couple of chair related articles below - I know, and people say the magazine's not exciting!

Enjoy the Mag.
MB

Sunday 15th 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
If you are able to offer to be on the rota for giving a lift please speak with Sandy McDougal.

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Letter from the Manse

Dear Congregation, 

There is another great magazine below, I pray it will be of blessing to you.  

Next Sunday’s service (22nd September) will include an element of Harvest Thanksgiving. Many of us are well blessed by God and want to share that blessing. I have included (below) a list of food items that The Lodging House Mission is happy to receive for their work in supporting those going through tough times. 

From the “Starter for 10” day a few months ago, we generated over 100 ideas on how we might use our gifts to increasingly become a healthy gospel church for our area. We have been prayerfully discerning, how and when to take some of these forward. In regard to “Outreach” we have created a “Core Team” and we shall work on involving others in various initiatives in the coming days.  

However, this Sunday we shall begin selling a book by Sam Chan called “How To Talk About Jesus”. This is a straightforward and very helpful read. Please get a copy from Stewart Anderson over the coming Sundays (£12).  

We want to create a culture of outreach across our whole congregation at Mearns Free Church and so we would also like to talk about this book and how we might help one another to put into practice. We are therefore planning 4 Sunday evenings at Belmont for this purpose. These will begin on 6th October. The dates will go onto our website Calendar. 

We are also working on developing our pastoral care for one another. As part of this initiative, if you are a formal member of Mearns Free Church, you should have received recently an email informing you of the name of the elder nominated to you. 

If for some reason you did not receive this communication, please check your SPAM or Junk box. If you still cannot trace this, contact the office and we shall resend the communication. 

Someone asked if the role of elder varies in the Free Church from that of The Church of Scotland. Actually, the function is very similar which is one of the reasons we came into the Free Church. Like the CofS, The Free Church draws the remit for the elder from the bible and especially from Acts 20:17-38 (verses 28-32), 1 Timothy 3:1-7, Titus 2:1-9. 

An interesting feature of this biblical understanding is that when the bible speaks “elders” and oversight of a local congregation, it always means local elders (not distant bishops) and the word “elder” is always used in the plural. A congregation should never therefore (ordinarily) be ruled by one man. There is an additional implication. The “authority” of an elder never lies individually, but only in the decisions of the gathered elders – we call this “The Session” (or sometimes “The Kirk Session”).   

The Free Church has a number of documents pertaining to elders and the Kirk Session. One of these, you can see here.  

In the days to come, we hope to extend ways in which we care for one another pastorally. Our prayer is that as we continue to delight in serving our wonderful God not least as we serve one another with joy. 
With warmest regards,  
Scott 

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Take a seat...

A polite note from the Set Up team. 

Each week, when putting out chairs for the Sunday service, we use over 100 chairs in the gym cupboard - we set these out and then need to go and get more from the classrooms. 
It is great that we need to do that of course - it means more people are joining us at worship.  
You might have noticed some rushing about between 10.28am - 10.34am as the Door Team realise that not everyone has a seat.

However, it often the case that there ARE seats in the hall just not being taken - gaps are being left. 
The team are happy to get more seats if they are needed however, it is upstairs and a bit of hassle...and then need put back again - so they only want to get more if needed. 
Please can you help by not leaving unnecessary gaps!
Yes, you might actually sit next to someone you haven't spoken to before - counselling will be available after the service!!

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Don't take a seat?...

We have been blessed with our relationship with Belmont School and we have been very good at keeping the areas of the school we use clean and tidy. Recently however a small score in the floor was noticed in the gym hall. This came from us moving the "furniture" around, so please be very careful if you are moving items, especially do not drag chairs along the floor - there are a couple of trolleys for moving them safely. 
Jack G.

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Take a book!

 

"How To Talk About Jesus" - For Reading and Practicing
 

Sam Chan was born in Hong Kong but brought up in Australia. He was a medical doctor but now ministers as a speaker/evangelist.
Sam has written a very helpful and practical book called "How to Talk About Jesus".  We are eager to have us read this book as a congregation. It would be great if over time, as a congregation we increasingly became comfortable simply speaking about Jesus to our family, friends and neighbours.
We plan to arrange 4 Sunday nights at Belmont to discuss the book and encourage one another in how we might put it into practice.
(Please read the book even if you cannot make the Sunday night gatherings.)

Stewart Anderson will have the books at the back of the church from Sunday 15th (£12).

About the book it says,
"...recent studies confirm that the majority of Christians rarely evangelize, worried they might offend their family or lose their friends. In How to Talk About Jesus (Without Being That Guy), author Sam Chan equips everyday Christians who are reluctant and nervous to tell their friends about Jesus with practical, tested ways of sharing their faith in the least awkward ways possible."

Scott

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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 you will see the Bible text, 'Big Truth' and memory verse for each week 
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 2 - A Very Bad Day

Bible passage: Genesis chapter 3

Big Truth: Sin, suffering, and death came into the world because Adam disobeyed God.
Memory Verse: I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. Genesis 3:15

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Ladybird Book of Mearns Free

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Harvest Thanksgiving

Sunday 22nd September

We shall have part of our service on 22nd September given to thanking God for the harvest - indeed all the way he provides for us. 
We have traditionally supported the work of the Lodging House Mission on Harvest Thanksgiving by bringing in food stuffs. 

Find out more about LHM here and read about their aims and wider work.
Hizkidz, PrimeTime, Youth, in fact all of us whatever age are invited to bring supplies for the LHM.
Please see this list of items required (and even those not required below and on their webpage)  - Scott
Cereal
Corn Flakes/Crunchy Nuts, Weetabix, Rice Crispies
Sugar Puffs, Frosties, Coco Pops, Cheerios
Jars/Pastes
Pasta bake sauces, Curry Sauce/paste, Tomato paste
Dried Goods
Mixed herbs, Garlic powder, Ground turmeric
Chilli powder, Crushed chillies, Ground coriander
Pasta, Long grain rice, Salt
Toiletries (all types)
Tinned Fruit (URGENT!)
Peaches, Pears, Pineapples
Mandarins, Fruit Cocktail
Rice Pudding, Custard
Other
Full Fat UHT milk, Coconut Milk
Small juice cartons, Diluting/fresh juice
Coffee, Biscuits, Crisps
Kettle Foods
Pot Noodles, Cuppa Soups, Tinned Potatoes,
Sachets dried mash potato
Ring Pull Ham tins, Breakfast bars, Cereal Bars
Individual packets sweets
Tinned Food
Tuna/Salmon, Corned beef, Ham
Baked Beans, Spaghetti in sauce
Tinned Soups – tomato, vegetable, chicken, lentil, scotch broth, minestrone,
pea & ham, chicken noodle
Other
Brown Sauce, Tomato Sauce, Vinegar
Porridge oats, Dried peas
Lentils / Broth mix, Olive oil, Vegetable oil
Bisto, Veg Stock cubes/ bullion
 Jelly, Sugar, Jam

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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. 

This week's is perfect if you are enjoying a bacon roll on a Saturday morning reading the magazine.
 
If you are looking for a good read you can get the book here. and the other usual places.
PIGS
THE WELCOME OF GOD
“The pig, though it has a divided hoof, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you. You must not eat their meat or touch their carcasses; they are unclean for you.” —LEVITICUS 11:7–8 NIV

 I like to call it the pig paradox. On the one hand, no animal is dirtier, smellier, or uglier than a pig. The unfortunate combination of snouts and snorts makes them deeply unattractive. They roll around in mud and eat their own feces. They have become a byword for mess (“her room is a pigsty”), infidelity (“he is such a pig”), ignorance (“pearls before swine”), disaster (“a pig’s ear of it”), overeating (“greedy as a pig”), and unappealing facial features (“pig-nosed,” “piggy-eyed”). When they are clustered together, you can smell them from miles away; I once had a night’s sleep in Yorkshire ruined by the stench from a nearby hog farm.

More than a billion people avoid eating or touching them, on religious grounds, considering them filthy and untouchable. You can see why. On the other hand, they taste sensational. Pork belly, pancetta, honey-glazed gammon, prosciutto, nduja sausage, crackling, ham, barbecued ribs, salami, trotters, hog roast: it is hard to believe that such a wide range of cuts and flavors could come from the same animal. And that is before mentioning the smell of sizzling bacon, which is surely the most delicious aroma there is (with apologies to coffee, fresh bread, and baked cookies). Bizarrely, if you were to create a smell spectrum, from the vilest stench to the most enticing aroma, pigs would find themselves at both ends of it, depending on whether it was before or after they died. How can something that smells so bad when it is alive smell so great when it isn’t? How can death transform something from filthy and untouchable to aromatic and delightful?
Hold that thought for a moment. Pigs, under the law of Moses, were off-limits to Israel.

Both Leviticus and Deuteronomy command that they are not to be eaten or touched, and although various reasons have been suggested for this (their smell, their habits, the danger of eating them uncooked), the reason given in the law is simply that they have divided hoofs, have cloven feet, and do not chew the cud. It can look a bit arbitrary to us, but God simply declares that some animals are clean and some animals aren’t: cows, sheep, pigeons, goats, and scaly fish are fine, but camels, shellfish, snakes, birds of prey, and animals with paws are not.5 And the most detestable of unclean animals—the ones Isaiah mentions to show just how depraved people can be, even to the point of eating swine flesh (Isa. 65:4; 66:17)—are pigs. As gentiles, by nature unclean and separated from Israel ourselves, we can feel a certain sympathy for them. That is not where the similarity between pigs and gentiles stops.

The first person who ever preached the gospel to gentiles was the apostle Peter, and he did so only because he saw a vision of a sheet full of unclean animals (Acts 10:9–16)—a vision in which, we may assume, pigs played a starring role—and heard a voice telling him to eat them, since “what God has made clean, do not call common” (v. 15). Non-Jewish people like me got baptized only because Peter saw a bunch of pigs and other unclean animals, and then saw a bunch of gentiles, and then saw the resemblance. “You yourselves know how unlawful it is for a Jew to associate with or to visit anyone of another nation,” he explained to the gentiles who had invited him over for a visit, “but God has shown me that I should not call any person common or unclean” (v. 28). That’s a nice way of putting it. Even Peter, not always the most diplomatic of the apostles, had the good manners not to mention that his hosts were the equivalent of a sheet full of pigs, scallops, and snakes.

The result of that vision was extraordinary. By the end of Acts 10, the first ever handful of gentiles had been baptized in water and filled with the Spirit and were speaking in tongues and praising God (vv. 44–48). Now there are upward of two billion of us: formerly unclean, cloven-footed, cud-chewing gentiles who have been washed from our dirt and purified from our sins and now offer ourselves as fragrant offerings to the God who makes common things clean. It is the pig paradox again. Death—in our case, the death of Christ—has taken that which was filthy and untouchable, and made us aromatic and delightful by the grace of God. The most famous pig-related incident in Scripture is the moment when Jesus delivers a demon-oppressed man, only to send the demons into a herd of two thousand pigs, who all promptly charge down a cliff and drown in the sea. You can read it in Mark 5:1–20, and it’s just as bizarre as it sounds. Generations of interpreters, seeking to make sense of a baffling story, have found all kinds of tenuous principles in the passage, such as one person is worth more than two thousand pigs, you should always ask a demon’s name before casting it out, and so on. But when we bear in mind what pigs and gentiles have in common in Jewish thought, we start to see ourselves in this poor, broken, demonized man. He is unclean, impure, an outsider, surrounded by pigs, and unable to access the presence or the people of God. As gentiles, so were we. He lives among the tombs, with death all around him, naked and ashamed, without hope and without God. So did we. He is oppressed by the powers of darkness, crying out in pain and harming himself, beyond the reach of any human power. So were we. Then he meets Jesus. The Saviour not only sets him free from the devil’s tyranny but humiliates his enemies (and ours) by driving them, and all the uncleanness and impurity they represent, down the cliff and into the sea. The man is restored to his right mind and clothed in new garments. He is visibly transformed by the encounter, such that those who have known him before come to fear the power of Jesus. He is desperate to follow his new Master and Savior. As the story closes, he is given a new mission: to return to his community and “tell them how much the Lord has done for you, and how he has had mercy on you” (Mark 5:19). The pigs have died, but in their death the man has found new life and has been thoroughly delivered from the powers that oppressed him and the uncleanness that tainted him.

So have we. Like the prodigal son, we stumble toward our father, desperate for more than pig pods and reeking of swine, and we are as surprised as anyone when he hugs us, kisses us, and dresses us in a fresh set of clothes before inviting us in to a feast. In Christ, pigs become bacon. It’s the welcome of God. Those whom you wouldn’t have wanted in the garden, for all their stinking and snorting and snuffling, experience death and find themselves welcomed into the kitchen for everybody to savor. Stench dies, impurity is washed away, and we who were once unclean become a pleasing, crispy, tasty, aromatic offering to God. Therefore “what God has made clean, do not call common” (Acts 10:15).

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Please Subscribe To Our YouTube Channel 
You can do this by going to the channel here, and simply pressing the tab with the bell that says “Subscribe”.

There is no cost. You will find all videos produced by Mearns Free Church at this location.  There are today, 120 subscribers. Let's see if we can boost that number significantly. 

If you "Subscribe", when we post new videos on the channel, you may get a notification.
This will help you stay in touch with all our news/worship. Since we rarely post videos more than once a week, you will not get inundated with notifications! The more subscribers we have on the channel the greater potential online visibility we shall have.

You will also notice that below each of our videos, there is a little tab with a "thumbs up". if you appreciate being in worship at Mearns Free Church each Sunday or participating in worship through the YouTube Channel, please press the “thumbs-up” icon. This also helps encourage online visibility.

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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

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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.

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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