1st February 2026
Hearts for the Community
I enjoyed lots of things about last Sunday (not least eating Pepperoni pizza, not something I'd normally choose, at Pizza & Games), but something that especially stuck with me was the wonderful, enormous map of the local community (plus Hawaii) produced by the children in Blaze and explained by them as "all the places where we can be kind and show God's love." I was fascinated to see the places that were significant for them, and very impressed by the level of accuracy on the map. But more than that, with the wisdom of children, they had cut right to the heart of what it means to witness.
A couple of days later, I was with Year 4 on their visit to church, thinking about images of the church in the New Testament. In our initial conversation, they were talking about church as a place that you go to, but very soon, we were looking at pictures of the church as being much more about people, gathered together and sent out, with different gifts and different passions, being God's heart for the world. One of our activities was to make a body with paper fasteners for moving limbs (huge thanks to Betty for the cutting out!) and to think about what unique gift we might bring as part of the whole.
When Paul speaks of the body of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12, he speaks of many members being part of the one body. And this is church - not the building where we gather, but the people gathered there, all of us, in our uniqueness, bringing what only we can bring, going out to be kind and show God's love in our community in a way that only we can. God's call is for every age and every person. Samuel and David were children. Mary was probably a teenager. Abraham and Moses were old.
On Sunday, we will celebrate Hopeton, and commission him for ministry as an Anna Chaplain. If you're not sure what an Anna Chaplain is, come along to our service at 10.30am and find out! As a little spoiler, Anna Chaplains have a heart especially for older people. Their ministry can take many forms, working with individuals or groups, in church, people's homes, or care homes, but it's about remembering that older people, just like the young and those of us in the middle, are a gift to the church and a gift to the community and, therefore, worth cherishing.
In Luke 2:22-40, which we will be reading on Sunday, we will encounter Anna. We don't know much about her except that, having married, presumably as a young woman, even a teenager, she was widowed seven years later and lived as a widow until the age of 84. We will see how, at the age of 84, Anna's encounter with the infant Jesus invites her into a whole new calling, a whole new adventure, a whole new way of showing God's heart for the community around the Temple.
Whether we consider ourselves old or young (or somewhere in the middle), I wonder where we are called to use our unique gifts and show God's heart for our community?
