Aug 28, 20212 min read

'A fight to the finish'

We are sorry but this week we are unable to bring you a full video of the service. For those that had attended you will have seen that the service was taken by streams of worship with young children being a key part of the service. It was felt that it was not appropriate therefore to put this on youtube. This may be the case for our Harvest festival as well as it includes a parade service for the girls brigade and boys brigade. We are sorry for any inconvenience.

Below is our best effort to bring the service to those that missed it.

Welcome and call to worship

Let us build a house

Reflection – Roman Army

“..Keep your eyes open. Keep each other’s spirits up so that no one falls behind or drops out….” Ephesians 6 v13-18

At the first sensible opportunity this year we went to Cumbria for a weekend away with my sister, we had chosen a house a few miles from Hadrian’s wall. Lots of opportunity to have fun outdoors as they hadn’t seen us for over 6 months. As we approached Hadrians wall for a day out I started thinking, oh gosh how do you make this interesting for a three year old? You can ask my mum later about the irony as I’m ashamed to say as a teenager I had a definite opinion about how ‘interesting’ stones in field were. Due to covid of course anything remotely interesting to Maisie had either been removed as an unnecessary touch point or taped down. So, we decided to make a big thing about Marching.

We are going to be looking at the Ephesians passage about the armour of God throughout the service. When I think about the romans and their armour what strikes me is how they used it as a team.

The children demonstrated how a lone solider isn't as well protected by his armour as a whole army with the use of a cardboard shield wall and some bean bag ammunition.

I don’t own the message bible but whenever we do a service, I always read it as I think it can help us understand if we read different versions of the bible. I was completely struck by the message version of this well-known passage in particular this verse, “Keep your eyes open. Keep each other’s spirits up so that no one falls behind or drops out….”

Quite rightly over the past 15 months we’ve been socially distancing from each other. Keeping each other safe. But with that much open space around me I’m not surprised that I’ve had to deal with a much larger spiritual attack coming at me especially on my anxiety. Can you imagine British history if the Romans fought the celts whilst being asked to keep two metres apart? I’m still standing shield at the ready but I’m going to treasure this verse and I’ll be Keeping my eyes open. Trying to Keep each other’s spirits up so that no one falls behind or drops out….”

We are marching in the light of God