adelaide place baptist church

After the disappointment of failing to get funding from a Foundation, Signpost International and CED have scraped funds together themselves and I am off to Rwanda on 14th November to run a workshop to make cement tanks.

Since the genocide the church has gathered groups of children and formed a couple of settlements of around 30 houses, each with a social worker to support the children, many of whom are still traumatised. We plan to work with the older children to build tanks to catch rainwater from their roofs.

The project should help build their confidence as they learn new skills and should save a significant amount of the time they spend each day collecting water from puddles.

I’ll expect to get a blog going at http://www.rankin6.blogspot.com/.

As mentioned before, I met today with the core leaders of the Baptist Union and the Glasgow Mission Networker Neil Young, to explore the potential of developing a new expression of church which could be offered to city centre workers.

This is an important step in the direction of Adelaides future ministry within the city centre of Glasgow, and would involve the co-operation of the church with the Baptist Union, other churches and Christians who are already engaged in similar efforts to engage with city centre workers.

The meeting was an honest exploration of the need to relate in as many ways as possible to the demands of 21st century living. It is good to be in partnership with such forward thinking people.

The Baptist Union are now considering our proposal and we hope to hear back from them in the next few weeks.

The series of evenings we have had over the last month were a useful stepping stone in the process of developing our response to the Consultancy lead by Neil Young.

The next stage is for the Deacons to try to draw together all the comments, ideas and the suggestions into a draft action plan, which should be ready early in the New Year. The whole church will then discuss and consider and we will move forward from there.

Linked to this of course is the suggestion that we develop the work of Business in Glasgow by releasing me to work on that part-time. If that happens we will need to invite someone to assist with the church part-time. This idea depends on the Baptist Union releasing core funding for 3 years and I will be presenting our proposal to the BU on Thursday 9th November. I would value your prayers that we may sense the leading of God in this matter.

These are challenging times but we pray that as we open ourselves up to the leading of God he will both supply the financial and the spiritual resources to complete the task. Continue to pray for the consultancy process so that we may be confident in our core mission in the future.