One Year On - An Interview with Martin Hodson One year on from the start of the disruption to all our lives during this global pandemic, we thought we would interview our General Director, Martin Hodson, to hear his thoughts on the last year. So Martin, we are almost...
If you haven’t heard me speak about innovation in the last year then you probably haven’t heard me speak. I know I’ve been going on about it. That’s because I’m convinced it is a deeply important word for churches seeking to follow Jesus faithfully in these changing times (along with transformations and generations, which you may also have heard me mention)…
Based on the model of action learning sets used at the pre-accredited conference, I’ll be honest and say I wasn’t sure what it would be like. Any time I undertook an exercise like this, I usually spent more of my time trying to think up what I might share rather than engaging well in the exercise. I quickly realised this was different though.
We have all faced so many ‘firsts’ over the past 11 months – some reluctantly foisted upon us; others embraced enthusiastically. This year’s January pilgrimage to Fishers Hotel in Pitlochry was re-engineered as one such ‘first’ for me, by being mapped onto a digital, virtual space.
In March 2020 many things changed, including the way we connected with our church fellowship and worshipped together. We started Zoom church, which has been a greater blessing than expected.
We also started a project called13:10 last March, which was initially intended to be an encouragement for our church fellowship.
I have been greatly inspired by our National Prayer Live gatherings over 2020 and we will be continuing this on a monthly basis into 2021. It is so good to unite together in prayer for our churches, our nation and our world.
Carols by Candlelight would normally be a highlight during Advent for many people within in our community and church family but like many things in 2020 it just was not possible to have such an event within in our building. Rather than being discouraged we felt enlivened to create something new and different that everyone could participate in outside of the building and so Carols by Torchlight began to take shape.
Our children’s group at church is normally called Kidzone, but we are now ‘Kidzone in the Garden’ and have been operating entirely outdoors in our church grounds since Sunday August 16th. We originally decided on this because, as we all know, it is safer to meet people outdoors, but now, even as winter approaches, our children and parents do not want to come indoors anymore! Why?
Fuelling Creativity for God’s Glory If you attended Canopy recently, then you will have seen video animations and visual media created by a team called Hopefuelled Design. Many of the design team are from around our network of Baptist churches, so we recently caught...
Lockdown Blessings By Simon Dennis, Minister of Sheddocksley Baptist Church Like everyone in the UK, the 23rd of March brought a sudden closure of everything familiar, including our newly renovated church building. We quickly discovered that His ways are always...