Kemsing with Woodlands

Life can be extremely painful. You don’t need me to tell you that. Life is full of difficulty.

All of us face challenges and difficulties. Sometimes massive. Sometimes smaller. But we’ve all stood and looked into the week ahead, or the year ahead, and thought to ourselves: This is going to be a tough one. Who’s going to get me through?

Which of us is not drawn by the desire to be fully alive? To experience life to the full? Not to be missing out on the best that life has to offer?

We all want it. It’s why people party. Take exotic holidays. Climb to the top of the mountain. Swim to the bottom of the ocean. We all want life, with a capital L.

For our combined services we’ve started looking together at one chapter of the Bible, John chapter 17. We only join together like this 4 times a year, and I think we’ll be in this chapter for some time.

I greatly respect our doctors. They work hard. And a good doctor knows how to measure a person’s vital signs. Not every death can be prevented. But if they spot that body temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, breathing are getting weak, quick intervention could save them.

That’s people. What about churches? They die too. How would you know if your church was on its last legs? What could be done to nurse a church back to health?

Let me tell you about a church I’ve got to know, and some of the pressures it faces.

Some people in the town really don’t like this particular church. They’ve had major aggravation from the town council, and from the media. There’s real hatred from a few, but sometimes that’s all it needs to sway public opinion.

It’s a tough place to be a Christian, but they’ve weathered it well. They’ve kept worshipping. “We’re Christians,” they say, “and that’s what we’ll remain however unpopular it makes us.”