No.26 10th May, 2024
Hi,
Hope this finds you well.
As our church moves into the Free Church of Scotland this month it is worth considering why and how we ended up where we are - it's been an upheaval - is it worth it?? By that I mean, we reflect on what is at the core of what we believe, what we see as vital and non-negotiable as we meet as a company of God's people.
There's a couple of ways we can do this ...
Firstly, we can Think! This week there is part 1 of an overview of the 'Gospel' which is taken from an address, theologian Don Carson gave at a conference. We will serialise it and discover what the bedrock is for any Christian church who wants to stay faithful to God and His Word. Worth taking a moment to read and consider with each weekly instalment.
Secondly, in a very 'feet on the ground' way is to take part in the Starter for Ten event, and discuss what you see as the way forward for the church in the Mearns. All the details for this event are below
Enjoy the mag.
M
Sunday 12th May 10.30am
Rev Scott Kirkland
Reading - Romans ch8:14-27
LARGE PRINT
If you would prefer to have a large print copy of the song words which appear on the screen on a Sunday morning let the door team know.
We don't want to print copies which aren't used so just the team know and we can organise that for you.
If you require a lift to get to church email office@nmnewchurch.org
Letter from the Manse
Dear Congregation,
I am not sure yet of the exact time, but the acceptance of our congregation into the Free Church is planned for the General Assembly on the afternoon of Tuesday 21st May.
I will also be presented that same afternoon to the Assembly for interview and acceptance as a Free Church minister. This will be slightly different as my interview has to be in private. Though I suspect it will be brief, all who are not formal members of the Assembly will be asked to spend these moments in another hall. The result of the interview will then be announced immediately in the re-assembled public meeting.
The Assembly meets in St. Columba Free Church building, at the top of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. If you were free, it would be good if a number of us were able to attend. Anita and I will most certainly be present. Prince Edward, The Duke of Edinburgh, will represent the King as Lord High Commissioner.
You will find details about the Assembly and the timetable here. If I can get more specific details of our involvement, I will communicate these to you.
Mearns Free Church: The next step after the Assembly will be the following Sunday (26th May) at our Belmont School. A few representatives of Glasgow and Argyll Presbytery will join us in worship. They will lead our meeting and appoint me as the Free Church Minister for Mearns Free Church. With the help of temporary “Assessor Elders” from Presbytery, we will then constitute a Kirk Session and appoint our own elders (those the congregation elected on 10th March). We shall therefore create a “Kirk Session”. An initial congregational roll of Mearns Free Church will also be formed. (Some of our elders have prior commitments that Sunday and will therefore be appointed elders the following week by our Kirk Session.)
Congregational Roll: If you are a formal member of NMNC, we need your permission to transfer you across to the Congregational Roll of Mearns Free Church. Lorna Hamilton will have personalised forms for each member to sign on 12th and 19th May.
Congregational Meeting: In addition to the above, could you keep Friday 7th June free at 8 pm. We shall have a congregational meeting at Belmont School. The congregation needs to adopt a Constitution and assuming we opt for the proposed Finance Committee, we shall also elect members for that first Committee. Thereafter, the Finance Committee will be elected annually from the men and women of our congregation.
[The alternative Constitution includes a Deacons Court which has only men ordained for life. It is the view of our elders that the Finance Committee Constitution better suits the gifts of our congregation. See the constitution here.]
At the Congregational Meeting on 7th June, our elders will explain some of the financial and legal implications as we move from being NMNC to becoming Mearns Free Church.
You will understand that the elders are aiming to prayerfully guide us forward. However, we move forward step by step. Each is dependent on the one before.
We are not in any way presumptuous about the above process. We ask earnestly that you pray us through each step. Let’s pray the Lord’s will would be done and to His Glory! If you have any questions, please do not hesittate to contact me or one of the elders.
Warmest Regards,
Scott
Join us for...
Sunday 2nd June, 4.30 - 7pm
A healthy Gospel church in our community.
We as Newton Mearns New Church (soon to be Mearns Free Church) want to be a healthy gospel Church in our community. Healthy in many ways: healthy in mission, healthy in ministry and healthy in training. A healthy growing gospel congregation that can be a blessing to our surrounding community.
We want to be enthusiastic about God growing his church and becoming increasingly healthy in Newton Mearns and beyond. As a healthy gospel church we want God at the heart of everything. We should come together to worship him, to learn from his word and to practise what the Bible teaches us. We should also be an active church not only within our own congregation but also to our community around us, to give them an opportunity to hear and respond to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
And this aim is why we are hosting our Starter for 10 event on June 2nd.
We want thoughts and ideas from everyone in the congregation no matter how long you have been a part of our church family. Whether you are young or old, everyone has a part to play in it.
On the day we are going to have 6 stations.
-
Training & Leadership
-
Mission & social action
-
Pastoral & relationships
-
Praise & Worship
-
Outreach & Discipleship
-
Prayer.
At these stations we want you to share your thoughts on how we can thrive and spread the Gospel.
The plan for the day is
16:30 – Kick off with a talk from our guest speaker and some praise.
17:00 – Dive into themed discussion stations and share your thoughts on how we can thrive and spread the Gospel.
18:00 – Enjoy a buffet tea
18:45 – Final reflections from Scott
19:00 - That's a wrap!
During the hour spending time at the stations we would love you to spend 20 minutes at 3 of them.
Bringing ideas and thoughts and discussing them with those who are manning the stations and others who have come to that station.
If you have any questions feel free to contact Jacob
Supernatural Living
We have been in Romans ch8 for the last couple of weeks and last Sunday Scott quoted from Raymond Ortlund's book "Supernatural Living For Natural People"
“God is promising that you are going to be better than when you were at your best, better by far. You have never experienced yet what you are going to be. You and I have never experienced real life.You and I have seen it, because whatever God did in raising Jesus on the first Easter Sunday he will do to us too.
We will be invulnerable to death and disease and pain and aging…
No more medications, no more walkers, no more arthritis, no more cancer, or headaches or hormone therapy or MS or sexually transmitted diseases.
No need of sleep. No sinful urges raging within. No possibility of injury.
Instead, full energy, full capacities, full intensity, full control, full alertness, acute sensitivity to everything worthy in an atmosphere of unmixed, holy joy forever and ever. That is the triumph of the God’s Spirit in all of God’s children!
God freely and gladly sent to us his Spirit, the Lord and Giver of life, to live within us.
And the Spirit is not going anywhere until he has completed his restoring miracle on that great and final day!"
Cafe Connect
"A legend, a legacy, a lifetime of inspiration."
This is a description of Eric Liddell the Scottish athlete and Christian missionary.
On Tuesday Pauline spoke to us about the life of Eric Liddell and it was indeed inspiring to hear.
Our session ended as Pauline and Sandra played keyboard and violin and we sang Liddell’s favourite hymn, ‘Be still my soul’
Next week we’re looking forward to Brian More, the pastor of Newton Mearns Baptist Church, bringing the Bible Connect message.
Come and join us for tea/coffee, home baking and some good conversation!
Ladybird Book of New Church
WHAT IS THE GOSPEL?
Last week we finished the serialisation of Andrew Wilson's 'Unbreakable - what the Son of God thought of the Word of God' It focussed on what the Bible is.
We are starting a new series looking at aspects of the Gospel. Don Carson has a short booklet based on this exposition of 1 Corinthians 15:1-19 from the plenary address at The Gospel Coalition's inaugural public conference in 2007
You can buy it here.
Many have commented on the fact that the church in the Western world is going through a time of remarkable fragmentation. This fragmentation extends to our understanding of the gospel. For some Christians, “the gospel” is a narrow set of teachings about Jesus and his death and resurrection that, rightly believed, 'tip' people into the kingdom. After that, real discipleship and personal transformation begin, but none of that is integrally related to “the gospel.” This is a far cry from the dominant New Testament emphasis that understands “the gospel” to be the embracing category that holds much of the Bible together, and takes Christians from lostness and alienation from God all the way through conversion and discipleship to the consummation, to resurrection bodies, and to the new heaven and the new earth.
Other voices treat the ethical teaching of Jesus found in the Gospels as the gospel—yet it is the ethical teaching of Jesus abstracted from the passion and resurrection narrative found in each Gospel. This approach depends on two disastrous mistakes. First, it overlooks the fact that in the first century, there was no “Gospel of Matthew,” “Gospel of Mark,” and so forth. Our four Gospels were called, respectively, “The Gospel According to Matthew,” “The Gospel According to Mark,” and so forth. In other words, there was only ONE gospel, the gospel of Jesus Christ, according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This ONE gospel, this message of news that was simultaneously threatening and promising, concerned the coming of Jesus the Messiah, the long-awaited King, and included something about his origins, the ministry of his forerunner, his brief ministry of teaching and miraculous transformation, climaxing in his death and resurrection. These elements are not independent pearls on a string that constitutes the life and times of Jesus the Messiah. Rather, they are elements tightly tied together. Accounts of Jesus’s teaching cannot be rightly understood unless we discern how they flow toward Jesus’s death and resurrection. All of this together is the one gospel of Jesus Christ, to which the canonical Gospels bear witness: the Gospel according to Matthew, according to Mark, and so forth. To study the teaching of Jesus without simultaneously reflecting on his passion and resurrection is far worse than assessing the life and times of George Washington without reflecting on the American Revolution, or than evaluating Hitler’s Mein Kampf without thinking about what he did and how he died. We shall soon see that to focus on Jesus’s teaching while making the cross peripheral reduces the glorious good news to mere religion, the joy of forgiveness to mere ethical conformity, the highest motives for obedience to mere duty. The price is catastrophic.
Perhaps more common yet is the tendency to 'assume' the gospel, whatever that is, while devoting creative energy and passion to other issues—marriage, happiness, prosperity, evangelism, the poor, wrestling with Islam, wrestling with the pressures of secularization, bioethics, dangers on the left, dangers on the right—the list is endless. This overlooks the fact that our hearers inevitably are drawn toward that about which we are most passionate. Every teacher knows that. My students are unlikely to learn all that I teach them; they are most likely to learn that about which I am most excited. If the gospel is merely assumed, while relatively peripheral issues ignite our passion, we will train a new generation to downplay the gospel and focus zeal on the periphery. If in fact we focus on the gospel, we shall soon see that this gospel, rightly understood, directs us how to think about, and what to do about, a substantial array of other issues. T
But for our purposes we shall focus primarily on 1 Corinthians 15:1–19. Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. 2 By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain. 3 For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5 and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. 6 After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep.7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8 and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born. 9 For I am the least of the apostles and do not even deserve to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.10 But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me. 11 Whether, then, it is I or they, this is what we preach, and this is what you believed. 12 But if it is preached that Christ has been raised from the dead, how can some of you say that there is no resurrection of the dead? 13 If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. 14 And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. 15 More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. 19 If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.
Next week -Summarizing words for the Gospel
B.Y.O.C. please
CAN YOU HELP?
it makes such a difference if people bring their own cups rather than using the disposable ones each week - can you help?
You can watch a live stream our services on YouTube each week.
You can find the service
here and don't forget to click SUBSCRIBE
If you have friends/relatives who can't manage out they can simply search on YouTube for Newton Mearns New Church.
Wednesdays 7.15-8.15pm.
Look out for details this week on email/whatsapp
If you need a lift please email office@nmnewchurch.org.
Safeguarding at Newton Mearns New Church
Safeguarding – Ensuring a Safe Church for All
If you suspect or witness harm or abuse, or it is reported to you, you must immediately report it to one of the Safeguarding Coordinators:
Sue Anderson – 07970 261429
Giving at NM New Church
There are a number of ways to support the church financially. The giving page gives details - click here
A number of people have been asking if cash or cheques can now be given. From this Sunday you will have the opportunity to leave offerings in the plate or basket on the table at the back of the church.
If you have any questions please speak to our Treasurer Sandy or email him on finance@nmnewchurch.org
The New Church has a What's App Group for Prayer
See magazine no.4 for an outline of how this Pray Now group operates.
Speak to Margaret Boyd if you would like to be added to this group or email your details to mandmboyd@hotmail.co.uk
You need WhatsApp on your phone to get set up