What kind of church do you want to be part of?

Much of my time working in church has been as part of a team at the City Temple a large church in the center of Cardiff, and that has been a great learning experience. Now that I spend much of my time leading a smaller local church one of the questions I have been thinking about now is "what kind of church do you want to Beacon Church to become?"

A few weeks ago on Sunday morning I spoke about the kind of church that we want to become:

A Well Grounded Church—a church that is built on strong spiritual foundations. And as a church we have spend quite a bit of time looking at how we can strengthen those foundations as we looked at the Fruit of the Spirit and the learned from the early churches experiences in the book of Acts.

A Welcoming Church – A church that is open to all! We want to work hard to welcome those that come through the doors of this church. Those that know Jesus and those who are still on a journey to discovering his love

A Worshiping Church – A church that is known for lifting up Jesus. We know that as we lift up Jesus He will draw people to Himself. Let us worship him when we come together and as we live our lives day by day.

A Witnessing Church—our church mission statement is:

“Touching the Heart of Man,
with the Heart of God,
Through the Heart of His People”

We constantly want to remind ourselves that we are called to reach out to those who have not yet come to know Jesus, with His Good News.

A Whosoever Church - all ages, all backgrounds and all races. We are privileged as a church to have people of all ages and nationalities amongst us. This is exciting because this a picture of the church across the world. Let us pray for open hearts to all who join with us and that we will always seek to be a “Whosoever Church” that welcomes whoever comes to us.

We know that Beacon church is far from perfect but we are excited about the future and all that God has planned for us. I wonder what type of church you want to be a part of - My prayer is that we will be moving forward to achieve the goal of being a local church that Jesus is proud to be known as the builder!

Spell Checker

Any of you who know me well will know that when it comes to writing I am quite creative but my spelling and grammar leave a lot to be desired.. (Thankful I often have the editing assistance of my wife to set me straight.)

Some one set us this and it seemed to sum it up!

I halve a spelling checker,
It came with my pea see.
It plainly marks four my revue
Mistakes I dew knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye is wrong oar write
It shows me strait aweigh.

As soon as mist aches is maid
It nose bee fore two long,
And eye can put the era rite
It's rarely ever wrong.

I've scent this massage threw it,
And I'm shore you're pleased too no
Its letter prefect in every weigh;
My checker tolled me sew.

Pastor's Blog

As you know I am a big fan of the internet so I thought it was about time I had a blog.

So here it is and because I am old enough to remember the original Star Trek I thought I would give it the rather corny name of Pastor's Blog...

Life as Pastor of a church is never dull and although as you can guess there are plenty of things that happen in a day that will never make it to a blog there are still some things that I hope you will find interesting.

Friday for me is often a day of preparation for the weekend and particularly Sunday services. At present in Beacon Church we in a time called "Preparing to Advance." After being with the church now for just over 10 months it is a time when we want to make some really important steps forward.

Pastor Paul and Evelyne did a fantastic job over the last 12 years building up the church and the churches home the Beacon Centre. So when Myra and I joined the church to help Paul out in a time when he was completely worn out after 12 years of hard work it was a challenge but a privilege to come to the church to help out for a season but God had other plans and so now here we are to stay!

St Mellons is an area of Cardiff with a population of about 12,000 people and the church has about 80 children and adults on a normal Sunday so there is plenty for us to do.