Adelaide Place Baptist Church are looking for an Associate Pastor/Chaplain to join our City Centre team, taking the church closer to the local business community.

Background to the Post

Adelaide Place Baptist Church have been developing links with the Glasgow business community for nearly 20 years, particularly through Business in Glasgow (BiG) and our own city centre business, Adelaides. We now have a great opportunity, through partnership with Work Place Chaplaincy Scotland, to develop this ministry further by recruiting a person to be our new associate pastor and chaplain.

This will enable us to:

• Develop Chaplaincy work within the Adelaides business, in partnership with Work Place Chaplaincy Scotland.
• Release our senior pastor Jack Quinn half-time to work with Work Place Chaplaincy Scotland in its training, research and development.

Associate Pastor / Chaplain Role

The Associate Pastor / Chaplain role will:

• Develop a Chaplaincy ministry beginning with the church’s business ministry, making contacts with staff and clients of the nursery and guest house, and users of the auditorium.
• Develop the capability of the APBC congregation in their personal ministry.
• Pastor the church and Adelaides business.
• Preach, teach and lead worship.
• Share in the administration of the church (church and deacons’ meetings).

Application Pack

The application pack is available for download here:

• APBC Church Profile: Word  PDF
• Job Description: Word  PDF
• Person Specification: Word  PDF
• Application Form: Word  PDF

• Full application pack as a Zip file (both Word and PDF): APBC Pastor-Chaplain application pack

If you would like a paper copy or in an alternative format, please let us know by emailing jobapps @ apbc . net (remove the spaces).

Further information

If you would like to find out more about the new post or have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us by emailing jobapps @ apbc . net (remove the spaces).

All enquiries will be treated as confidential.

Carols by Candlelight at APBC (photo credit Jonathan Ferry)

Join us to celebrate Christmas 2011…

Sunday 11th December 2011

• Morning Service: 11 am
• Nursery Nativity Service at 3 pm

Sunday 18th December 2011

• Morning Service: 11 am
• Carols by Candlelight: 6.30 pm

Saturday 24th December 2011

• Candlelit Watchnight Service at Renfield St Stephens on Bath Street. Come at 11.00 pm for mince pies. Service starts at 11.30 pm.

Sunday 25th December 2011 (Christmas Day!)

• Christmas Morning Service: 10.30 am (jointly with our friends from Renfield St Stephens just down Bath Street)

Sunday 1st January 2012

• New Year Noon Brunch: 12 noon. Food and worship on the first day of 2012.

You are very welcome at any of these special Christmas events.

(picture credit: Jonathan Ferry)

Do you pray to transform your city?

I like the idea of transforming the city. I like the idea of the city reaching it’s full potential and reflecting the best of what the citizens are.

So last Thursday in the Southside housegroup we discussed how we would want to transform Glasgow. We all enjoy living here, but as with anywhere, there are things that we’d like to see improve. Here are a few of the dreams people have.

• A safer city centre in the evenings and weekends, particularly at night. (We are grateful for the work done by Glasgow Street Pastors.).
• For friends to find contentment in their lives, particularly those with unfulfilled dreams of their own.
• A more healthy city (alchohol, obesity, smoking).
• A less angry city.
• A deeper welcome extended to those who are new to the city, particularly those who don’t have close relationships through work, family or church.
• Less dependence on acquiring shiny new stuff, and more dependence on developing relationships.

As we’re planning for the next stage in the life of our church (more of this later), we want to use our dreams to drive our vision of a transformed city.

Glasgow’s motto is of course “Let Glasgow Flourish“, which is a shorter version of the text on the bell of the Tron Church cast in 1631

“Lord let Glasgow flourish through the preaching of thy word and praising thy name.”

Our dreams are simply a continuation of that desire to see our city flourish.

What are your dreams for Glasgow?

The concert will be in aid of two key charities we support: Glasgow City Mission and Totai Foundation in Bolivia.

If you wish to book tickets, please contact us.

Who Are Father’s Song

“How wonderful… when brothers get along” PSALM 133:1

The Christian faith brings people together, one with another, despite vast differences in life experience and background. Our society is more characterized by break-up, isolation and division, but the wonderful Christian message of reconciliation to God and then to one another through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the essential hallmark of what makes us FATHER’S SONG.

We are a vocal band of over 30 men drawn from a number of different churches in and around Glasgow, and FATHER’S SONG provides a place for the public expression of our thankfulness and praise to God for His love, mercy and grace. We really do want to sing, to shout and to lift up our hands in praise to God!

Being men of faith means that we are convinced that, in today’s tough world, sharing and expressing the truths of our faith is a powerful declaration of what God can do in a person’s life. We celebrate the impact and change that the Christian gospel brings to the lives and priorities of ordinary men from the West of Scotland.

Today, we want to direct attention away from ourselves to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Saviour. Everything we need is found in Him. He is the One!

Photo credit jenosaur on Flickr

The Kelvindale House group had its first meeting of the new session last night.  The way had been prepared by a prior meeting at the home of Matt and Elaine the previous week where we had discussed the way we would go this session.

We began by asking for God’s blessing on our meeting and then listened to a Piano Reflection, music on the CD made by Alan Foggin.  This proved a very helpful introduction.

Next we decided to pray for the members of the church.  We did this by each of us taking a page from the church directory, and after reading out each name in turn we silently prayed for each person.

Following this, several of us took the opportunity to bring a reading, a poem or story which we thought would be helpful to all.  This was good for us.

Looking forward to our next few weeks we had the opportunity to set out our plans for the four-part study in Jonah.  For this we are indebted to the imaginative thinking and generosity of the Southside group who pioneered the study and donated the materials to our house group.

We looked further to the needs of the wider world and we had a prayer time which was based on the excellent book, “Operation World”.  We did this by using W O R L D, using its  five letters as the opening initials of the countries we would pray for.  Thus we prayed for Wallis and Fortuna(where?), Oman, Romania, Libya and Djibouti.  We think we will use this idea again in our coming meetings.

Our final item was a song taken from Morag’s iPod.  Michael Smith sang “Lord, I will lift my eyes to the hills” which seemed a good way to end before the benediction.

Next week we will meet at Ann’s home so come and join us. Talk to me or anyone from the group if you need directions.

Opportunities to Serve

We provide lots of opportunity to get stuck into church life, and there are plenty of ways that you can contribute to the church and the city centre community. A few examples are:

• Joining a housegroup and getting to know others really well
• Playing or singing in the Worship Team, or helping with the tech during the service
• Helping to lead Kids@APBC – Bubbles, Splash and X-Stream
• Contributing content or technical help on our website and other online activities
• Working in our community initiatives – Adelaides, Business in Glasgow
• Working in other community initiatives we support – such as Glasgow City Mission
• Being involved in your university or college Christian Union and keeping us posted on what’s happening there

• How to Pray Scripture
• Building Agreement in Corporate Prayer.

Mission Awareness Day will take place on Sunday 8th May at Adelaide Place. The purpose of the day is to use and extend our main time of meeting on Sunday morning, when we gather for united worship, to discover and stimulate the ‘mission’ awareness of our congregation.

For an average sized congregation I suspect we have a more than considerable interest in mission in all its forms, but we want more than inclinations to guide our mission planning and support.

Our hope is to gather information about individual interest and involvement, to discover how much our church wants to be aware of mission enterprise and to highlight the mission activities that we are already engaged in by using personal reports, Skype contacts with members actually involved in other parts of the world.

Therefore through multi-media, personal stories, Scripture, worship and Communion, as well as a shared meal together we want to really get to grips with this issue in a meaningful and relevant way.

Find out more about our global perspective on things.

Picture credit: Ian Rankin at Christian Engineers in Development (see original set on Flickr)

Today, worshippers at Adelaide Place were treated to a rare experience of choral singing by a twenty six strong vocal ensemble from Kirby-in-Ashfield in Nottinghamshire. Comprising of mostly school children from Ashfield School this hugely talented group of youngsters sang with a vocal maturity and dexterity beyond their years.

Led by their charismatic and warm hearted Director Elaine Guy they contributed magnificently to our service. At the beginning they opened with the much sung masterpiece by Leonard Cohen, ‘Hallelujah’, and much to the satisfaction of Cohen’s greatest fan, Cameron Braidwood who said, “They truly did it justice,” no small praise indeed!

By the end of the service when they sang a blessing based on a Gaelic prayer “May the road rise up to meet you”, you could hear a pin drop, and the minister struggled to compose himself to express the deep appreciation of the congregation for what they experienced. A memorable time of worship.