Category: Thoughts

A few weeks back, as part of our Sunday morning series on ‘The Marks of a Healthy church’, I mentioned a vision that had come to me while preparing a sermon. The sermon had been about the need for us, as a church, to listen for what God was wanting us to do, and the vision was of the Wilson Hall as an ‘upper room’, where, like the first Christians before Pentecost, we could gather to wait for God’s guidance.

Afterwards I expressed my hesitancy about this vision, and asked people to tell me whether they thought it was of God, or whether it was just me doing some wishful thinking. I was surprised and delighted by the number of people who wrote to me or spoke to me in the days that followed, expressing their enthusiasm for the idea of setting aside some time on a regular basis, and making the ‘upper room’ available for people to come and listen, on their own or together, for what God might be saying to us.

As a first step in this direction, we have agreed to designate the Wilson Hall from 3pm-9pm on Thursday 11^th December as a place of prayer and meditation. The time until 7pm will be a flexible time, where people will be able to come and go when they have the time. The hall will be organised into a number of different ‘prayer stations’, with themes for you to explore in your own time, but always listening to what God might be saying to you. Then, from 7pm-8pm we are planning a joint time of praise and prayer, when we will be gathering all our thoughts together and offering them to God. The half day will end with seasonal refreshments and fellowship from 8pm-9pm.

The whole event will be designed to be relaxed and informal, allowing people to come and go when they can and listen to God in their own ways. How it goes will give us a direction as to how to take the whole idea forward. In so doing we will be following an age old pattern of discernment that has been part of church life since the days of the Apostles. So, please come along and join in.

JNY & the Prayer Team

January 2015 marks the 200th year since the foundations of the current building of Liberton Kirk were laid, and we are planning to have a whole year of celebrations to mark this. A small group has been meeting to discuss this for over eighteen months, and a wide range of events and activities has been planned.

One of our projects has been to produce a book about the people who have contributed to the character of the church family and wider community over the years. Richard Purden, a local author and journalist, has been commissioned to undertake this task, and for the last twelve months he has been enthusiastically immersing himself in our community and its history.

As I write this, the full text is being finalised before it goes to the type-setter. The book will be entitled “Liberton Kirk – a good place to be”, and will be made up of the collected memories and writings of a number of well-known local characters, with specific chapters focussing on the contributions of our most recent ministers.

As I have been reading Richard’s proofs, these are the chapters which, personally, I found myself most drawn to. In the church there has always been the danger that we put our leaders on pedestals, but, like the characters in the Bible, we have all been shown to have our flaws and failings. The amazing thing is that God is still willing to use us, and, reading Richard’s rich prose about the lives of Campbell Fernbach and John Cameron I have been surprised and impressed by all that they achieved.

The book, however, is not just about the ministers of Liberton. It is also about the everyday life of a community which lived through times of great change and world conflict. In addition to some memorable events, we will be able to read about the contribution of a number of well-known characters, about the long tradition of good youth work, and about how our relationships with other churches have developed and are developing still.

Richard’s writing is reflective as much as it is factual, and his book will give us much insight into the character of our church family, and our strengths for the future. Our hope is to have the first copies ready for sale in December of this year – just in time for Christmas.

Much love
John

What was remarkable the way Jesus did things was the people he chose as potential leaders. He seemed to disregard things like intellectual ability, knowledge, experience, status, and charisma – all the things we would tend to look for in a leader today. The only thing he seems to ask is that they be willing to follow him and learn on the job.

In the last few years here in South East Edinburgh we have seen a remarkable rise in the number willing to answer that call. The huddling process which was begun three years ago has resulted in several people stepping into different forms of leadership – some teachers and pastors, and some apostles, prophets and evangelists. These were people who, if you had said what they would be doing in just a few years’ time, would have looked at you in dis-belief and said ‘Who me?’.

One of the great encouragements has been the growing number of people willing to be trained in preaching. Over the past year Ruth, David and I have found ourselves in a mentoring role with fledgling preachers, coaching them in their content and delivery. These include Alan Perry, Roger Barlee, Nikki Kirkland, Anna Krabbenhoft, Kay Haggarty and Rachel Willis. If you check the Liberton Kirk and KLM websites, you’ll find their names popping up with surprising regularity, so much so that we are now in the process of planning our second ‘preacher’s workshop’, when about a dozen people will be gathering to share and learn from each other.

To me, however, the most surprising and encouraging development of all has been the growing interest among our teenagers from non-church backgrounds. Bradley Laing is one such individual. He first got to know Alex and Andy several years ago through their detatched youth work programme, and is now, himself, one of our local student youth workers, learning on the job.

Another familiar face is that of Erin Howieson. Erin, who did not have the easiest of up-bringings, became a Christian through her contact with Sarah Beach, whom she still works with up in Gracemount. She got involved with Liberton early on, and was bowled over last year at our response to her plea for help in funding her through her leadership training apprenticeship. I’ve asked Erin to give us a report on how her first year with the ’20 Schemes’ programme has gone, and you will find it in the pages of the October magazine.

You will also find another, much shorter report from a young girl called Siobhan. Siobhan’s story is just as remarkable. She really struggled with behaviour issues at home and at school until she met Ruth Rankin through the Dramatiqui Drama Club. Not long after that she started to turn up at the morning service at Gracemount, and, within a few months, she was asking to be baptised. She is now an active member of the church there, helping to lead worship on Sunday morning. More recently, Siobhan has started to talk about becoming a minister. Her father, (not himself a church goer), having seen the change his daughter’s faith has made to her life, is fully supportive of this, and has pushed hard for us to give her some work experience. This is what Siobhan writes about in the pages of the October magazine. She still has a long way to go, but, with good support and lots of encouragement, I know God will find a role for her in the church of the future.

We live in a time when the media is quick to prophesy the end of the church in Scotland, and when the talk is of growing numbers of congregations without a minister. Maybe, instead of worrying, the best thing to do is to start working out new ways of doing ‘ministry’ using the growing number of potential ‘ministers’ on our doorstep – people who need your support and your prayers.
Much love
John

Jesus and his followers were companions on a journey which was as much spiritual as it was physical. They were a mixed bunch of individuals, travelling together in the presence of their master. Over the course of their time together they grew in faith and understanding, but also in friendship and trust. They got to know each other really well, they shared in each other’s struggles and they looked after each other’s needs.

On the day of Pentecost the number of Jesus’ followers grew into its thousands, but the pattern did not change. In the early chapters of Acts we were told that, as well as gathering together in larger numbers at the temple, the Christians also continued to meet in each other’s houses, where they ate, shared, learned and prayed together in smaller groups.

This pattern is also repeated here at Liberton Kirk today. Sunday tends to be the day when we gather together in large numbers, but during the week groups of us meet together in each other’s houses. It is here that real friendships can develop, as the small numbers allows us to share, learn and support each other on their faith journey.

Back in January 2011, the Kirk Session (our leadership team) agreed that everyone at Liberton Kirk should be encouraged to get involved in a house group. To help this happen, the Kirk Session also agreed to hold an annual ‘Whole Church’ Study’, when the themes of Sunday morning worship were adopted by the house groups, so that people would have a chance to discuss and apply what they had heard*. The Whole Church Study is an opportunity for those who have not yet experienced the small group discussion to give it a go. Because the series is for a set number of weeks, it means that involvement is time limited if you discover this sort of thing is not for you.

The Theme for our next Whole Church Study will be ‘The marks of a healthy church’. Following extensive research into a number of successful churches, it has been discovered that, although they were of different sizes and theological backgrounds, they all had certain characteristics in common. We will be asking ‘What are these characteristics, and how evident are they in our church’s life here in Liberton?’

Why am I telling you this? My main reasons is simply to encourage you, if you haven’t already done so, to get involved in one of the small groups meeting throughout September and October to discuss and reflect upon these things**. It will be an eight week commitment, but I can promise that it will be time well spent. As well as helping to focus on the things that matter most in our church’s life, it will give you the chance to experience first-hand what the companionship of following Jesus is all about.

Much love

John

* Past Whole Church Studies have included J. John’s ‘JUST10’ series, the ‘Green Bible’, and ‘The Provocative Church’.

**There will be sign up lists at the Welcome Desks, and, for more details of the groups – see the ‘What’s on’ page of the Website, or contact Rink on 664 2178 / rink@talktalk.net

Heart and Soul is the name given to the annual gathering of the Church of Scotland in Princess Street Gardens on the Sunday afternoon of our General Assembly week. It’s an event where you can find out what is going on in the Church in general, and in individual churches (who are encouraged to hire their own tents and tell their own stories). It’s also a good place for bumping into people from all over the country and beyond, and a marked improvement on the old Garden Party, replacing the formality and the queues for tea and cakes with the atmosphere and ethos of a carnival. I have to admit that my experience of Heart and Soul was somewhat tarnished a few years ago when Lindsay and I found ourselves wandering its length behind a bunch of Hearts supporters. Their team had just paraded the Scottish cup down Princess Street in an open-topped bus, and they were a bit the worse for wear. As we listened to their bemused comments, we began to wonder who it all was for, and whether it really was of any relevance to non-church goers who happened to wander off the streets.

This year, at the request of various people, we decided give it another go. I remember having a chat with David McNeish, our assistant, about the sort of thing we could do with our tent. We wanted it to be something that would be accessible to anyone who happened to be wandering past – even a worse-for-wear football supporter. We thought about a music tent, but we didn’t want to compete with the other musical events and performances that were going on. In the end we decided that something that had really helped following the tragedy at Liberton High School might be of wider value. Our tent was to be a safe place. Somewhere passers-by could stop and spend time with God. We also wanted to keep it simple – a table with a basket full of candles, some background music, paper where people could write prayers, a tray of sand for their regrets, and some verses from the Bible around the walls (all of which David now keeps in the boot of his car). Add to this a small team of volunteers, to explain what it was about and encourage people to make the most of it, and we were set to go.

The result, for me, was a very humbling experience. In the course of the afternoon I watched dozens of people of different ages, backgrounds, and beliefs going through the doors of the tent. The most moving encounter was when a young woman with no living church connection came out in tears, having recently lost two members of her family. A team member was on hand to listen to her story and to offer to pray with her in a quiet place – an offer that was welcomed.

And what have I learned? That God can make his presence known in the unlikeliest of places – even in a tent in Princess Street Gardens. If you have any stories to share of the places where you have encountered God over the summer, please let me know.

Much love
John

South East Edinburgh is well known for the good relations that exist between its churches. This has come about because our shared ideal has been to consider ourselves part of the one body – the body of Christ on earth. As Paul says (1 Corinthians 12), when one part of the body suffers, we all suffer, just as when one part rejoices, we all rejoice.

Five years ago our unity bore fruit in the linkage of Liberton Kirk with neighbouring church of KLM. (No! We don’t mean the church of a Dutch airline company, we mean Kaimes Lockhart Memorial Church, serving the people of Gracemount, Southhouse, and Burdiehouse). The aim of the linkage was not to close down another church, but rather to revive it and build it up again. So, when Dave Rankin was appointed as the new KLM minister, 12 members of Liberton went along with him to help.

Since then, the revived KLM church has been making steady progress, and not without setbacks. One of these happened within weeks of Dave’s appointment, when the KLM building had to be demolished. The congregation continued with Sunday worship, meeting first in St Catherine’s Hall, and now in the Libertus Building, opposite the Leisure Centre, as well as meeting at the old KLM Manse for midweek fellowship. They also run a toddlers group in the Community Centre, homework clubs, after school clubs and holiday clubs, and their members are involved in a number of other community initiatives in the area.

Dave Rankin’s appointment was for five years, and he has done a good job. On an average Sunday morning you will find between two and three dozen people worshipping together at the Libertus building, and many of them also meet up during the week. Numbers are slowly growing, mainly in the area of families with young kids due to all the connections being made. The average age of the congregation is now lower than we have here at Liberton Kirk.

Bearing all this in mind, Dave’s announcement, last month, that he had been called to serve the congregation of Riverside church, in Perth, caused much sadness and concern. What would the future hold for the people of KLM?

The news, however, is good. We are being given the money to appoint a replacement, and we hope to start advertising soon. In the meantime the KLM leadership are going to be thinking and praying about their vision for the future, and particularly their vision for the plot of land in the heart of Gracemount where the old KLM building once stood. The vision that results will then give them a good idea of the sort of leader they will need to appoint.

So, how can we help? Here are some thoughts –

• We can keep praying – that God would make this transition time a time of real blessing
• We can support – why don’t you give up one of your Sunday mornings at Liberton, and join with the people worshipping at the Libertus building
• We can volunteer – The one area where KLM really needs our help just now is in looking after the children who have begun to come on a Sunday morning.

We say we are all part of the one body. Now’s the time to show it.

Much love

John