“I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings….” Philippians 3:10

 Maunday Thursday

Agape Meal @ 6:30pm: We will share a simple meal at Small Ritual, read the story of the Last Supper, sing a few hymns, and share communion. After dinner, we will walk to a nearby garden and read the story of Jesus’ time in Gethsemane. We will leave the garden in silence. If you are planning on coming, please RSVP to Anne. Please bring bread, fruit, or cheese to meal.

 Good Friday

8:30am at the Water Tower (Softball City): The churches of the peninsula are joining together for a service of thanksgiving. You can get a shuttle bus to the service at Life Church.

Experiential Space for Remembrance @ 10 am: Brent is preparing a creative sacred space for prayer and quiet in the Shiloh Shelter on Kingfisher Farm. The families of Kingfisher Farm are creating the Stations of the Cross which you are welcome to use as well.

 Holy Saturday

Waiting in the tomb @ 10pm: Silent prayer vigil at Shiloh Shelter on Kingfisher Farm from 10pm–midnight. Silence broken @ midnight with sharing, readings from scripture, and a midnight feast (older children welcome).

Easter Sunday

Service of Celebration @ 10am at the Leisure Centre

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PLEASE NOTE! We will not have church at the Leisure Center this Sunday. Rather, we will be Church in the World. For this ALL OUT, wear work clothes and gather at A Rocha Brooksdale Environmental Center for a unique Lenten discipline. Start time: 10 am. Feel free to bring a pack lunch and linger in beauty afterwards for a true Sabbath break.

Categories: All Out, Church, Community
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“Be still and acknowledge that I am God” (Psalm 46:10).  These are words to take with us in our busy lives.  We may think about stillness in contrast to our noisy world.  But perhaps we can go further and keep an inner stillness even while we carry on business, teach, work in construction, make music, or organise meetings.

It is important to keep a still place in the “marketplace” even if the marketplace seems to invade our spaces of worship and prayer.  This still place is where God can dwell and speak to us.  It also is the place from where we can speak in a healing way to all the people we meet in our busy days.  Without that still space we start spinning.  We become driven people, running all over the place without much direction.  But with that stillness, God can be our gentle guide in everything we think, say, or do.

In this week of Lent gently take  a moment to name and recognize the uniqueness of your own busy poverty, think of Jesus stopping on his journey to the Cross to help clear the temple for you, to make a place of stillness for you. Think of him driving out the noise, chaos, unfair demands and grasping hands reaching out to rob you of your ability to freely enter the Holiness of his Human presence. See him turn to you to say, “There. It’s done. They’re all gone, relax, breath. Now you can enter and be with me my Father.”

An intertextual mash up from Henri Nouwen, Jean Allen (http://mannagathering.blogspot.ca/) and Brent Unrau

Categories: Lent
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Notes from Anne’s Sermon (Feb 19, 2012):

God brings us to the river. But God also allows us to have experiences of the desert. Both the river and the desert contain consolation and are necessary for our growth. In the river, God gives us an overwhelming feeling of his faithful presence and teaches us that we are loved. In the desert, however, God teaches us how to love. The importance in the desert is NOT what we are feeling, but what is COMING INTO BEING within us. The gift of the desert is a kind of solidity, a spaciousness of soul, a strength and fidelity that grows quietly within us in this harsh landscape. God teaches us how to respond with fidelity and faithfulness, even when we don’t have our needs met. Both are forms of blessing.

This learning to love with fidelity in both the river and the desert is a process. We vacillate back and forth between consolation and desolation, between hope and despair. We are like a small child learning to ride a bike, and we swerve emotionally all over the place. Here are some ways which Margaret Silf offers us in her book, The Inner Compass, which can help us maintain our equilibrium.

In Consolation:

1. Tell God how you feel and thank him.
2. Store this moment in your memory to return to when things get tough.
3. Add this experience to your life map.
4. Use the energy you feel to further your deepest desires.
5. Let the surplus energy fuel the things you don’t like doing, and do them.
6. Go back to 1.

In Desolation:

1. Tell God how you feel and ask for help.
2. Seek out companionship. Don’t go back on decisions you made in consolation.
3. Stand still and remember your inner map. Recall a time of consolation, and go back to it in imagination.
4. Look for someone who needs your help, and turn your attention toward them.
5. Go back to 1.

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Centennial Leisure Centre

Southpoint has a new home! Starting Sunday, Jan. 29th 2012, we will be worshiping at the Centennial Leisure Centre in White Rock: 14600 North Bluff Rd.

Services will start promptly @ 10. See you there for our first ALL IN intergenerational worship service in our new space.

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On Sunday, January 1st 2012, we will be meeting at the Centennial Arena in White Rock for our service. This is a trial run of their facilities as a possible new meeting location for Southpoint. Come out for the family public skate from 12:30 to 2:30 ($2.75 per person), and then have some hot chocolate before the service which will start at 3pm! The address is 14600 N. Bluff Road, White Rock. Also, please bring some change for parking at the arena.

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Monday night, Adam confessed, amidst lots of tears, his homesickness for Sterling and the sadness he’d been hiding in his heart.  He had so been hoping to go home for Christmas and was disappointed to learn that we weren’t.

Struck by the intensity of Adam’s desire to connect with a world dear to him, we looked up flights on Tuesday. To our surprise, we found a great deal flying from Seattle to Denver, leaving Thursday night.  Adam and Johanna’s final day of school was Thursday, so we purchased tickets for Craig, Adam, and Johanna to go home for an early Christmas and surprised Adam and Johanna with the news. They were overjoyed! I was overjoyed, too, knowing the delight they would feel, as well as the joy it would bring to my Mom and Dad.

On Thursday, dear Katie stopped me at school and asked why I wasn’t going.  Lenin called and encouraged me to join my family.  Leah stopped by and said she’d look after the dogs. My Dad called and said he’d cash in visa points to help with the cost of the ticket.  I hemmed and hawed, feeling torn between my desire to go back and my desire to be at Jason’s film night, the Christmas party, the leadership team meeting, and all the other fun things I get to do with you wonderful folk at Southpoint.  On Friday, I made my decision and booked a flight to Kansas. I leave Sunday morning, and I’ll return on Saturday.

I’ll miss you all at the Christmas party, and I will look forward to being together again to celebrate the fourth week of Advent, the Week of Love.  However, as we enter into the Third Week of Advent, the Week of Joy, I can’t help thanking God for his tender mercies.  After months of longing and waiting for a time to return, God gave us this opportunity to connect to a world so dear.  I wonder if that is how God the Son felt, waiting for the time to be right for him to come and connect with a world so dear to him.  I wonder about the joy of God the Spirit, releasing the life of the Son into the womb of Mary.  I wonder about the joy of God the Father, watching as the Son “tabernacled” himself, the Creator finally one with the Creation.  I wonder about the joy in the heavenlies as Mary grew great with child. I wonder at the marvel of it all, that we, too, are pregnant with the presence of God.

Rev. Anne Smith

Categories: Advent, Christmas, Church
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Stillness

One day, while sitting beside a swimming pool, I watched a small boy alone in a hot tub as he played with the bubbles scuttling across the water. He would reach out his arms and gently draw the bubbles into himself. He calmly sought to embrace these bubbles, over and over again. Finally, after seeing that the bubbles continued to elude him and would not be contained, he altered his movements. He began to lay one hand, ever so gently, right amidst the bubbles. He then moved his hand outwards across the surface of the water, traveling this time with the bubbles, matching their speed and direction, until they disappeared. He repeated this motion, again and again.

The boy was lost for minutes in this process of gentle reverence. Every now and then he would look over the side of the tub. Once, he climbed out of the pool to look around and when his body collided with the cold morning air, steam rose off the surface of his skin. He then sat down and followed the bubbles with his hand, calmly and silently.

I myself have a son. I know his propensity towards movement. I found myself in awe of this boy’s capacity for stillness, his ability to stop moving long enough to pay reverent attention to something beyond himself, and his playful surrender of his movements to the object of his reverence.

This memory bubbled up into my mind yesterday, and I find myself captivated by it. It seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to the invitation “Be still and know Me”, which I believe God is extending to us as a community. When it comes to God, our first instinct is to spread our arms wide and attempt to gather God into us. But what if, for a change, we just stopped moving? What if we became still and watched how the bubbles are moving? What if we placed ourselves within the stream of those bubbles, and let ourselves be moved, rather than trying to move them?

What if we stopped trying so hard to hold onto God? What if we began to notice where God’s presence is bubbling up around us? What if we were to simply lay ourselves in the midst of that presence and move along with God? Where would this take us? Who would we become? Where would we go?

Invitations require a response. In response to God’s invitation to “Be still, be attentive to me, so that you might know me”, we will be pausing as a community to simply attend to God. This will be our focus on Sundays for the month of November. We will take the time to stop and look at the images of God we have within us, and the images of God in scripture that are deep wells of encounter and healing for us.

However, I’d like to deepen our response to this invitation. I would like to carve out some time in our communal life this month to practice the discipline of “Stillness”. I propose we experiment with pushing the pause button. I propose we playfully and collaboratively attempt to stop moving and increase our attentiveness to the movement of God in and around us. Here are two options I’ve come up with, but please let me know if you can think of others:

“Stop and Go” – Since it is almost impossible to get little kids to stop moving of their own accord, this option allows people with small children to “stop” and then “go” together, praying and listening along the way. We will gather at Kingfisher Farm on Thursday mornings @ 10 for the month of November and take a walk to the beach and back, praying as we go.

“Stillpoint” – On Tuesday nights from 8-9, at the Shiloh Shelter on Kingfisher Farm, there will be space for stillness and prayer. We will begin and end the time with a brief liturgy, but the time in between will be yours to do with as you please. We each pray differently. There will be music, images, things to touch and move, scripture, and prayer suggestions available. You may use all or none of them. The space is yours.

I leave you with this invitation from the book of Revelation:

“The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let them who hear say, “Come!” Whoever is thirsty, let them come; and whoever wishes, let them take the free gift of the water of life.” Rev 22:17

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OnFriday, October 28th, Southpoint kids, parents, and kids at heart are going to the  Wave Pool in Rootin Tootin Newton! Join us for an evening of fun in the surf, starting at 6:30pm.

Newton Wave Pool: 7190 137 St

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When Adam and Johanna were small, we lived for four years in a little flat above some friend’s garage out in the countryside around Bristol, England. At that time, we were also a part of a church plant in Bristol that intentionally reached out to folk on the margins. Through this church, I developed deep friendships with folk who would not be considered successful or accomplished by the culture around us. Yet in this church, God was gathering us up, and God was making something beautiful out of our lives.

One autumn, as I walked with Adam and Johanna down that country road, I noticed a damson tree covered in fruit, with even more fruit lying untouched on the ground. As I walked past the fruit, trampled and wasted, I sensed God’s compassion for people whose lives appear to be wasted, broken, and trampled. I saw how God longs to gather them up, claim them as his own, and make something beautiful out of their lives. I saw how the act of gathering up that which is overlooked, abandoned, and labeled “Without Worth”, is a powerful characteristic of the Kingdom.

This past Sunday, we gathered as a church at Brooksdale to make apple cider for Small Ritual. We cut and mashed and squeezed a small mountain of apples. Most of the apples were drop apples, bruised and spotted and wormy, but they made glorious apple cider! All those apples became 50 gallons of apple cider. 25 gallons went to A Rocha, 20 gallons went to Small Ritual, and five gallons I canned so that we can give it away to folk visiting our church family, or folk within our church family who need a bit of TLC.

Thank you for helping create this living parable of the Kingdom of God. Thank you, Paul, for searching out the apples. Thank you to Brent and Denise, Paul and Rick, Zoe and Jared, Johanna and Adam, Stacie and many more A Rocha folk, for picking the apples. Thank you to Katie who planned crafts and games to make it fun for our children. Thank you to Rick who supervised the transformation. And thank you to each of you who came to chop, mash, squeeze, and clean-up the mess. Finally, thank you to Ryde and Valerie who completed the transformation. (I had a cup of the finished product at Small Ritual yesterday! It was wonderful!)

My prayer, however, is that we would not stop with apples. My prayer is that we would have the courage to bring our own beautiful, yet bruised and broken lives to the table every week. My prayer is that we might have the compassion to seek out, gather up, and welcome those whose lives are beautiful, yet bruised and broken, around our table as well. This is what it means to be human, bruised, broken, yet made beautiful by the hidden Christ.

Deep peace and blessings,

Anne

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