adelaide place baptist church

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.

At our last church meeting on Wednesday 28th June we agreed to set aside four Thursdays in the autumn to consider in detail the results of the consultancy conducted by Neil Young of the Baptist Union. We will use these meetings to prayerfully consider the issues raised by the church consultancy, create an agreed vision and identify what actions we need to take to realise the vision.

We have booked the following four Thursdays, at Adelaides:

• 28 September – The need for action
• 5 October – Identifying actions
• 19 October – Creating the vision
• 26 October – Setting priorities

Housegroups have agreed not to meet on these Thursday evenings, to allow as many people as possible to participate in the discussions.

We will take two hours (7:30 pm – 9:30 pm) on each of these evenings to spend a little more time in depth over some of the results of the consultancy, and to reflect, to pray, and to seek God’s leading in how we will benefit from the consultancy.

The expected outcome of the evenings will be a draft Action Plan containing detailed proposals for specific activities to support the vision. This plan will be submitted to the church for approval, and will also be reviewed and updated regularly.