We started the year with Meeting Jesus in John's Gospel.
"What are you looking for?"
These are Jesus first words to John the Baptiser's disciples in John's Gospel. "Where do you stay, bide, dwell?" they ask. "Come and see" a gentle invitation. They spend the day with him. Then Andrew then grabs Simon and gets him along to the Messiah. And Jesus 'Looked at Simon and gives him a new name Peter (Rock).
A beautifully succinct little story, jam packed with lots to ponder: especially Jesus opening one - WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR? It is somewhat haunting to consider - what would I say in return to that one?
We asked it of ourselves as individuals, but also as a congregation - what is Highgate Mission looking for?
Its a question that acts like our vision - live worshipfully, help others and have the habits of faith. These too just jkeep challenging us every time we visit them and they are so interconnected. This is a significant year for us - what are we looking for? Hope it is more walking with Christ than dinosaurs! Learning more about what it means to keep living on the Edge we are placed at! Being hopeful and expectant about what is ahead!
On such notes here are some xtras-
Extra:
Steve Taylor has started posting some Postcards from the Edge. Worthy to keep looking in on I'd say. Good to catch more glimpses of what is going on beyond us.
A Conference in NZ-
Brian McLaren will be in Christchurch at Opawa in March. Steve bringing it all together.
For those back in Scotland/UK I see that there is this conference.
Institute for Theology, Imagination and the ArtsResearch Colloquium, Spring 2006
'Patterns of promise: art, imagination and Christian hope'
27th-29th March 2006St Mary’s College, University of St Andrews, Scotland UK
Hope is an inherently imaginative human disposition.
While securely rooted in something revealed, Christian hope nonetheless also engages our imagination.
In hope, faith reconfigures the shape of what is familiar in order to ‘pattern’ the contours of God’s promised future. In the process, the present is continuously re-shaped by ventures of ‘hopeful’ and expectant living.
In art, this same ‘poetic’ interplay between past, present and future takes particular concrete forms, furnishing vital resources for sustaining an ‘ecology of hope’.
This colloquium will explore our imaginative engagements with the shape of things to come. In particular, we will attend to the contribution that literature, music and painting can make, as they trace ‘patterns of promise’ and so generate hopeful living.
