Our starting place is our ‘purpose statement’, which is as follows:

“The purpose of Rochford Community Church is to love and serve God, one another and the community:
We love and serve God through worship and building relationship with the Lord.
We love and serve one another through caring fellowship and encouraging spiritual growth.
We love and serve the community by demonstrating God’s love and leading people to Christ.”

What we intend to do is brainstorm ideas of how we can go about fulfilling this statement above.

The Art of Spiritual Brainstorming

The following is what we intend doing: Between now and your group meeting, please will you pray for the Lord to open our hearts and minds to catch His heart for our future. At your group meeting we will pray together for God’s guidance. Then we will brainstorm ideas of things we might do or become in the days ahead – these are whatever comes to mind, however apparently crazy they may appear; everything is valid. We will write down EVERYTHING that is called out to be processed on Sunday.

Focusing the Vision

This Sunday our morning Service will be a Pick ’n Mix style, part of which will be for us all to process the results of the groups. We will have produced a master list of what all the groups have said, (the teens have already done theirs), and after we have prayed we will each quietly read those lists and ring things we feel especially stand out. Then in our small group we will share what we feel are the key things that stand out in the process. These things we will collect together and they become the focus of the further deliberations of the Leadership Team.

Please, please if you are able to make the house groups and Sunday morning do. This is an exciting time in the life of Rochford Community Church as we seek the future vision for the church.

It seems that when we approach corporate worship we have an opportunity to bring to God so many things. Our corporate prayers, our thanks, our desires, our dreams, our hurts and praise.

So this coming Sunday, what will you bring? How can we encourage each other? What will our praise to God be?

Some quotes on worship to provoke you…..

Marianne H. Micks
“When we worship together as a community of living Christians, we do not worship
alone, we worship ‘with all the company of heaven.’”

Charles H. Spurgeon
“God is to be praised with the voice, and the heart should go therewith in holy
exultation.”

Max Lucado
“Worship is the thank you that can’t be silenced”

Michael Catt
“If we are going to worship in Spirit, we must develop a spirit of worship.”

Graham Kendrick
“Worship is first and foremost for His benefit, not ours, though it is marvelous to
discover that in giving Him pleasure, we ourselves enter into what can become our
richest and most wholesome experience in life.”

As much as our Christingle service is starting to become a bit of a tradition so is the Wednesday night before!  Wednesdays is our Teens House Group, Fusion, and each year they give me a hand making the packs that we give out.  So this year we:

• Rolled 80 strips of ribbon
• Put 960 sweets on cocktail sticks
• Added 80 glow sticks to the packs

Without the help of our teenagers I would probably have to start this in May to get it finished! It is a reminder that without people, and their generosity, things don’t get done.  If you are coming on Sunday to our Christingle Service please take time to thank them.

This year Rochford Community Church will again be running a 1 hour Christingle Service as a way to start the season of Christmas in a really positive way. This will be a fun and interactive time that is suitable for the whole family. If you’re not sure what a Christingle is here is a section from Wikipedia:

One Christmas time back in 1747 in the estate of Marienborn near Eckhartshausen in Germany, Pastor Johannes de Watteville sat at home in front of his fire. He was thinking how he could explain the love of Jesus, and what Christmas really meant to the children in the church. He decided to prepare a simple symbol to help make the message of Christmas fresh and lively for them. Pastor Johannes de Watteville gave each child a lighted candle wrapped in a red ribbon, with a prayer that said “Lord Jesus, kindle a flame in these dear children’s hearts”. This was the first ever Christingle service.

The Christingle consists of:
•    an orange representing the world with
•    a red ribbon around it representing the blood of Jesus (i.e. his death on the cross for our sins, in our place)
•    fruits and sweets (commonly dolly mixtures) are skewered on 4 cocktail sticks which are pushed into the orange representing the fruits of the earth and the four seasons
•    a lighted candle is pushed into the centre of the orange representing Jesus Christ, the light of the world.

We’ll all have the opportunity of making a Christingle that you can take home at the end of the morning. Children love it and their attention is kept for the whole service.

The service starts at 10:30 (please feel free to come earlier for a coffee)
We meet at The Freigh House in Rochford click here to find us.

There are two areas where i would like us to focus:
first is simply giving thanks and praise to God,
second to to pray for us to be moving in perfect step with God. Not just in a Sunday morning but a wider and bigger view than that. This will probably be different things to different people; an obvious move of God’s power (again this will mean different things to different people), healing, salvation, our involvement within our community or a building for RCC to dedicate to Rochford.

Whatever this may me be, the goal is for us to seek God, to see Him moving in his Kingdom and for us to be in step with Him.

The challenge therefore is for you to bring somthing on Sunday. This could be prayer or bible verse that can help focus our prayers. Ultimatly though I am excited about the possiblility of our worship being transformed and our focus on God being firm.

Sadly our Joseph actor was unable to join us on this shoot, we like to think that he was down at ASDA’s getting nappies for baby Jesus. (Perhaps not)