Curate Conundrums

The way what we speak and comoonicate say a lot about us dunt uht? From the southern drawl of the United States to the rounded vowel sounds of Yorkshire, you don’t need me to tell you that we all communicate in very different ways. Today is Pentecost , a high feast day of the church year. When the Holy Spirit was given to the disciples. It’s the birth of the church! Pentecost is about Communication, God’s communication with us, and God’s anointing of all of us to do His work in the world. I trust and believe that God has given us what we need within this congregation, not just to grow numerically, but spiritually and in our love for one another. I don’t buy into this language of poverty we use about ourselves sometimes. Have you noticed that the only time the word ‘dwindling’ is used, either in the media or elsewhere is about churches? Oh we’re all so old, oh we’re so small and we can’t do it, we’ve not got the resources to do this or that. We may not be Soul Church (good as it is), ...

The Holy Spirit can be quite hard to describe, and it’s something that I often find myself thinking about. What exactly is the Holy Spirit and what does it mean for us to have it? The Holy Spirit has been described as being a little bit like the force from Star Wars, an energy which binds the universe together, that flows in and through all things. Whether this is a good description or not I’m not sure, in fact I could be committing an act of great heresy, I’ll leave that up to you and Ian to decide. The one thing we do know about the Holy Spirit is that it turns up, in all sorts of unexpected places. It is the creative and spontaneous energy of the trinity, and is one of the forms in which we recognise God’s revelation to us. That is a way in which God reveals God’s self to us.   The Holy Spirit isn’t, for a start, part of God, it is God and it is indivisible from the Father and the Son. We know that the spirit isn’t into partiality, and we know what the fruits of the sp...