Topsy Turvy Kingdom

I was stood outside The Gathering's premises recently when this rather nice Bentley pulled in to the service station for fuel. Like everyone else, I stood and admired such a beautiful car but then I stood back and watched the bigger picture unfold.

But first, a bit of context...in South Africa it is against the law to serve yourself at a fuel station, you must be served by one of the attendants. It's a nice touch and the attendants normally go beyond their basic duty and clean your windows and offer to check your oil and water, invariably this leads to a nice tip for the attendants.

Slideshow

We put this short slideshow together for our Renewal of Vows service at St. George's back in July.

The photos start back in 1985 when we started dating and go right through to this year.

We hope you enjoy it.

Silver Wedding Anniversary

We seem to have been celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary for a while now, but then again, why not?! It's quite a milestone and one the world would like to have bet against. We often laugh about the fact that someone (who shall remain nameless) gave us six months when we announced our engagement. 24½ years later we hope they feel differently.

In many respects we always believed we would hit this milestone and carry on way past it, but in other respects we're more than amazed that we've gone the distance so far.

To say that we'd have gotten this far without our faith would be foolish, all honour must go to our Lord for sustaining us!

So we've renewed our vows in St. George's, the church we were married in all those years ago. We've been to Paris for a week to celebrate on our own in style and now we're enjoying some special time at home with our boys, who think we're ancient because none of their friends' parents have been married for anywhere near as long. Oh the joys of being older parents!

Servant Leadership

Here's a thought for all my church leader friends...

At your next leaders or elders meeting, forget the business side of things and rather, give each person a mop, broom, duster etc. and get stuck into cleaning the premises.

If any of your leaders complain or refuse to get stuck in remove them from the leadership team.

You'll be doing yourself and the church a huge favour!

Paris

We've never done this before but thought it would be good to share our September prayerletter on the blog. We hope you enjoy it...

We can’t quite believe that we’re writing this having just celebrated our Silver Anniversary in Paris. We’re feeling incredibly blessed and privileged to have been able to celebrate in such spectacular fashion!

However, there is a story and testimony behind this which we want to share...

Make The Salt Water Fresh

This morning it was Paula's turn to share the word and minister to The Gathering and what a great job she did!

Paula spoke about the River of God using Ezekiel 47:1-12 as her main text. We all felt like we'd been served up a full banquet as she faithfully expounded the Word and opened up the simple mystery for us.

I particularly loved the point about salt water becoming fresh water, something that is impossible for man but effortless for God.

The word was followed by a powerful time of ministry which picked up on the word and a prophecy shared earlier in our gathering.

God was clearly moving and speaking to us as a church and we're thankful for his presence!

Half A Lifetime

2016 has been a great year so far, and to be honest it just keeps on getting better and better!

It was prophesied in The Gathering early in 2016 that this year would be a "year of blessings" and this has certainly been our experience and we're deeply grateful to God for the blessings poured out in our lives.

Today marks another major blessing for me as I've been married for exactly half my life today.

Happy Place

It's great to be back in my happy place making soup on a Thursday morning for our Soup Kitchen later this evening.

Today's soup is a butternut, carrot, tomato and beef sausage offering and so far it's tasting delicious, even if I say so myself.

We've been blessed by a family who have been providing the soup for the last few months and we're thankful for the blessing that they were. However, we felt it was time to take control again and reclaim the Soup Kitchen as an outreach of The Gathering.

I hadn't realised just how much I had missed making the soup until today!

Partner Schmartner

As we approach our Silver Wedding Anniversary next month I'm going to post some thoughts, reflections and anecdotes about marriage...

Back in the day when I was still a practicing social worker for the local government in Blighty, it was deemed politically incorrect to refer to one's wife or husband as wife or husband. Rather, we were encouraged to be more inclusive and refer to our wife or husband as our partner.

Greatest Joy Pt 2

A while ago I posted about my Greatest Joy in ministry which is quite simply releasing others into ministry.

This morning at The Gathering we had the utter joy and privilege of hearing Errol preach for the first time. Errol was excellent. He'd been incredibly dilligent in his preparation, he'd spent ages reading the scriptures and delving into commentaries and he dealt with a "curved ball" (to quote Errol) with aplomb.

Errol recently graduated from college with a law degree (LL.B) so he's more than capable of doing the necessary research, and then seeing an argument/point through to its logical conclusion and we weren't disappointed this morning at The Gathering!

Also on Saturday Linda was sharing testimony at a women's event organised by a local counselling service as part of their Women's Month Celebrations. It was a great joy to release Linda into this and we just know that she was a genuine blessing to some very hurting women.