The first blog of 2019 – on the new website!
Resources
You will already have noticed the design of the new website. I do hope you will click through the menus and see what resources I have managed together. I really would appreciate it if you have any favourite links that are not included that you would let me know so we can share them. Please also let me know if you find a link that does not work or goes to the wrong place.
Safeguarding
2019 heralds a new season of safeguarding training and I think we as Readers (licensed Lay Ministers) have a huge role in changing attitudes. If our congregations are to ‘buy in’ to this important part of discipleship following the notion that whatever one does for the least of others one also does for Christ then we must set the tone and be enthusiastic about it- even when our hearts sik and we think to ourselves, “oh not another safeguarding course / form / assessment/ report etc”
I have a number of sessions of various levels lined up to lead or assist with including a C0/C1 taylored for the Redruth Benefice for all new to safeguarding and those beneath leadership to refresh their knowledge. We are trying a Benefice evening with food to see if it will help! One of the churches has been especially reluctant t get involved and I suspect this is partly because they discuss it at DCC level as a box ticking exercise that does not concern them. Hopefully this might strategy might help.
Vocations
I note that Jonathan Aitken, the MP who has served a prison sentence for perjury, is working as a prison chaplain having been ordained in his mid seventies. See the Daily Mail 21st December. How good it is that someone can turn themselves around and find a love of God and a vocation and that we worship in a denomination that appears not to discriminate against age or past criminality.
At 66 I was quite content in thinking that I need not think about any further stages to vocation – hmmm besides I am too busy! (mid 70s good grief!)
I have put a Vocations page on the menu with links for people to look at all sorts of vocations although understandably the main focus is on a vocation to Reader Ministry.