Harvest Weekend

Like many other churches this weekend we celebrated harvest, beginning with a church family supper on Saturday evening – meat and potato pie, red cabbage and gravy for the carnivores, vegetable lasagne for the vegetarians (obviously). Our friend from Oldham Roundthorn, Major Anthony Colcough came to provide a quiz and our church musical leaders, Graham and Jacqui Hamlett led a “Sound of Music” singalong and brought some items from “Jonah Man Jazz.”

On Sunday morning, Lynley left very early for specialling at Crewe corps, so I was left to lead our family service, which also included our harvest altar service. Harvest thanksgiving gives us all an opportunity to take our focus away from ourselves and all that would distract us, and enables us to reconnect with our Creator God and His gracious provision to us each. We used the 1957 Panorama spoof film, “Spaghetti harvest” to illustrate how disconnected we have become from the source of our food – often not knowing where our food has come from or how far it has travelled. Our Scriptural emphasis came from Luke 12:13-32 (building a bigger barn) and Leviticus 19:9-10, which speaks of God’s desire that His generosity towards us should inspire generosity from us towards others. Our thanksgiving to God comes with the responsibility to make His agenda for social justice and transformation our agenda. In an all-age, interactive, messy “sermon” we walked through Psalm 65 and thought about the grandeur and intricacy of creation, and all the variety of God’s provision – not just for our basic needs but also providing for our salvation – our inclusion in His family. Drawing a parallel with our disconnection from the source of our food, our response time encouraged people to be intentional about living in relationship with God and being connected with Him, recognising that so many of our problems have their root in our natural tendency to live life independently.

In our evening service it was good to have Lynley back, and she led a really helpful time of sharing and encouragement (testimonies). We continued the themes of Kingdom justice, picking up on The Salvation Army’s published theme of “Glocal Harvest” which my friend Major John Ager has written about here. We also featured the same Powerpoint meditation, using Tim Hughes’ “Whole world in His hands“  as accompaniment. We looked at the Kingdom parables in Mark 4:21-33 considering how what we may consider to be small acts can have big impacts in God’s economy.