Sunday was Pentecost. Plain Church enjoyed hearing again the readings of the first outpouring of Holy Spirit and found it particularly helpful to be outside where the wind and the trees gave us a real time experience of the sound that was heard at the time of the coming of the Spirit. We then on beyond that to what it means to be a temple of the Holy Spirit as we read in 1 Corinthians 3 v16-17:
16 Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? 17 If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for God’s temple is sacred, and you together are that temple.
We also read how Jesus told the disciples to stay in Jerusalem until they had this new gift, this new tool, to help them with their task of taking the Good News wider in the World. He knew they would need it. He also knew that despite having it there would always be those who descent. We see the early disciples being criticised for being drunk and yet Peter standing up with courage and saying it was only 9am in the morning and so none of them were drunk as some people supposed. The negative voices will always be with us.
The rule of this Celtic Community is “Walk, Worship, Warfare” and we chose to walk alongside each other, we choose to walk on our journey with God and we choose with others in the World who may not be as fortunate as we are in terms of faith. Even those who voice descent are those whom we should walk alongside and, by demonstrating our faith in Christ, we may yet win them for the Kingdom. We talked about some of eth gifting of the Spirit and how this might be seen in a “Kingdom of Priests”. We discussed the roles of different types of Priesthood, or perhaps the different aspects of priesthood. Plain Church would appear to be a Kingdom of Priests along the lines of Chaplains rather than evangelical preachers.
All members of the Church were encouraged to read the Corinthians readings about infilling of the Holy Spirit so that we can pray for this when people are ready.
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