Year of Growth 

A message from Paul and the Leadership Team regarding our Teaching Series:

I write to commend to you the attached PDF, which details our teaching series through until the Summer, under the broad heading, ‘Year of Growth’.

As a leadership team, this is the phrase we have sensed is on the Lord’s heart for us all. It arose from our study of 1 Corinthians 3, and especially v. 6, where St Paul writes

I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God has been making it grow.

The Lord has used this text to remind us – as leaders, teachers and church family – what is and what is not our responsibility. God has said he is responsible for our growth. We as leaders and each of us as members of the church family are responsible for creating the optimum environment in which God can grow us.

As you will see, we will be teaching under a number of themes over the coming months, each of which falls under one of two broad headings

• Foundations (blue)
• Freedoms (green)

We’re conscious that although our Large Gatherings provide excellent opportunities for ‘planting’, we can’t do much ‘watering’ in them.

So we are delighted that our Small Groups will be following this teaching, enabling that ‘watering’ to take place as we all seek to discover what the Lord wants to do with the teaching as the Holy Spirit brings it alive in ways specific to each of us.

We’ll be providing regular resource material – much of it on video by way of Introductions to the various series and Recap on each talk – to enable us all to take responsibility for setting ourselves in the optimum environment – it’s the Lord himself who promises to grow us! The verses below provide a snapshot into what St Paul understands by growth:

⁹ For this reason, since the day we heard about you, we have not stopped praying for you. We continually ask God to fill you with the knowledge of his will through all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives, ¹⁰ so that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God, ¹¹ being strengthened with all power according to his glorious might so that you may have great endurance and patience, ¹² and giving joyful thanks to the Father, who has qualified you to share in the inheritance of his holy people in the kingdom of light. ¹³ For he has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, ¹⁴ in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.              Colossians 1

Love and prayers,
Paul and the team