May I, on behalf of the staff and leadership team of QPBC (and indeed of one and all), pray that you would know God’s ever-present help in whatever opportunities or challenges 2025 throws your way.
“May you find your way blessed.
… every moment on this journey
may you find your way blessed”[1]
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank you for all that you have been contributing to the life of QPBC over the months and years. Having visited several churches during my sabbatical I return with a deeper appreciation for the warmth of welcome and fellowship we enjoy and the incredibly committed and gifted contributions you all make to our life together. You are part of an amazing church community!
The New Year is a strange moment in time. The march of the planet’s orbit around the sun has no particularly portentous significance and yet we perceive this change of dates to offer a moment of reflection and fresh beginnings. New Year invites us to reflect and learn from what has transpired so far even as we imagine new possibilities that lie ahead.
As I look back, I think of how 2024 brought more evidence of the weariness of our world: political polarisation, the impunity of nation-states acting with violence towards others and the ongoing economic hardships so many people face. I am also reminded of recent conversations with good friends who have endured tough times in this last year. Grief, mental health breakdown, physical illness and family conflict have all been on our prayer list and in our personal conversations in these last 12 months.
So, what of the future? As I enter 2025, I am thinking about our identity as the bride of Christ. It’s an image often overlooked and hard to get our heads around. Nevertheless, it reminds us that we find ourselves caught up in the story of God’s eternal romance. The Father is seeking a bride for his beloved son and wooing us into a life-transforming relationship with him, an endeavour which climaxed in the self-giving of Christ on the cross that he might present the Church/bride to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any flaw. (Eph 5:25,26)
The reality for us is that we are each all too human and need more than a few wrinkles and spots ironed out. The human condition is endlessly complex and varied and church is one of those communities where socially, culturally, preferentially and neurologically diverse people seek to inhabit the same world. (to mention just a handful of us)
I think of some friends and what they and their families are facing. Sadly, church can be the last place people feel safe and accepted when life takes an unpredictable turn. Christian communities can become places of hurt rather than healing as we find it easier to draw a line around ourselves to include people who are like us and blank those who are not.
It seems to me that we need to ask the Lord to make his bride, the church, more generous-spirited.
Lord, would you give us a generous spirit?
I wonder what it would be like for us to be much more intentional about becoming a place where it is “safe” to be myself in 2025, to come as I am without fear of judgment or censure? That is not to say that we will not be changed – indeed the prospect of transformation into a Bride prepared for the wedding of Christ the bridegroom is our great hope. But what if we simply held people in a position of grace in faith believing for the Holy Spirit to work, rather than jumping to condemnation or affirmation?
I suspect that many people in our culture who would seek to find or grow in faith hold back in fear that “if people really knew what I was like” they would reject me, or “if they knew what I was facing in my family context they could not cope.”
I sense personally the pressure to offer the definitive breakthrough answer to my friend’s challenges, yet I know that most of what I can offer is to be a safe and faithful prayerful presence.
So whatever 2025 blows your way, and whoever you find yourself drawing alongside may you find in God the grace to be a faithful companion grounded in hope.
Here’s to a generous-spirited 2025.
Iain
[1] Yvonne Lyon, May you find your way blessed, from album “The Space Between”