Here is a short video from one of our pastors, Stew, as he talks about life at SCPC this week.
Below is the text from the video.
Welcome to The Pastors’ Post, an update about life at Southern Cross.
One week to go until ‘Celebration Someday’!? Isn’t it devastating that we can’t come together after the challenges of this year. I heard about some members of our church family this week saying it was about now they would be thinking about what sort of decorations we would be using at the High School to set up in the main hall for Celebration Sunday. And yet like so many things from school, to sporting clubs, to work places we have had to cancel and postpone and bring wide-scale change.
However, we can be thankful that next Sunday the 20th September we will be able to begin our Celebration Week. We will meet across our four locations on Sunday morning, joined also by those from our 6pm gathering, as there will be no 6pm gathering next week 20th September. In those four locations, we will look at the life of the Visionary Jim Packer and his excitement of the hope of his adoption as a son of God. We will explore Matthew 6 and remind ourselves of the fatherly care of God, even in the midst of a pandemic. We will contemplate and explore what it means to be a daughter to be a son and to find rest in our Father’s care in COVID-19.
Then at 3pm on the same day, that afternoon, we will have a ZOOM webinar where we would have had a live baptism, but at this point we’ve had no one step forward for baptism. However, we will be emailing and posting new members an invitation today about joining our Gospel Community Vision Coordinators from 3-3:30pm at Park Ave in person, so that we can formally welcome them to our church family.
As I said, we will Zoom this welcome as a webinar but invite the new members present at Park Ave to answer two simple questions about life at SCPC. Then, we will personally provide them a gift from our extended church family, and our staff team will also provide a gift to our Vision Coordinators for their heroic endeavours across this year, and particularly through term 3 in serving our church family in these gathered, but multiplied locations and the way in which they’ve encouraged us to find rest in our Father’s care. Finally to end the webinar that afternoon, we will show the photo montage of our year at SCPC. So the webinar will be one not to be missed!!
Let me say we contemplated an epic ZOOM room with the gallery view of ZOOM to screen shot our church family for 2020 and our ‘good life’ on ZOOM, but it all seemed a little chaotic our best bet might be to craft our own version using crosswires photos!!
In the week that follows, from Sunday 20th September until Saturday 26th September, we encourage you in your Gospel Communities to celebrate how we find rest in our Father’s care in COVID-19. Gospel Communities will receive their Celebration Packs on Sunday 20th September that can be distributed across the week in whatever creative ways your Gospel Community plans. If you are not in a gospel community or linked to one and would like to be part of one, please contact our staff team at the office next week. WE also hope to prepare some devotionals from the Psalms for every day of Celebration Week on our website that even though apart we can together celebrate the love and care and protection of our Father God, and that we might find rest in our Father’s care. That’s sure something worth celebrating!
Let me read from Psalm 131:
1 My heart is not proud, Lord,
my eyes are not haughty;
I do not concern myself with great matters
or things too wonderful for me.
2 But I have calmed and quieted myself,
I am like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child I am content.
3 Israel, put your hope in the Lord
both now and forevermore.
Thanks for tuning into The Pastors’ Post
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