10,000 Voices

There are two stories floating around basically. The story of God, and the story of you (well, all humanity actually.) And the interesting thing is that they are connected.

Many of us struggle to share our faith because we think it has to be a pretty sophisticated and convincing explanation of the doctrines of the Christian faith—the exhaustive story of God, where I understand absolutely everything about God and dazzle people to the point that they become disciples of Christ. Yes, that’s so going to happen! Consider changing the word ‘faith’ to the word ‘trust’ and suddenly it becomes a bit easier; we’re not explaining our faith, but sharing where we have trusted in God recently. Telling our stories, but not leaving out the bit where our story intersects with God’s story.

If you look at the end of the account of Pentecost in Acts 2, there in verse 41 is one pretty impressive statistic: ‘about three thousand were added to their number that day.’ Well that’s depressing; we must be doing something wrong. However if Pentecost is a unique unrepeatable event, which it is, the life of the Spirit isn’t; so is there anything you and I can learn from that first Pentecost, which we celebrate today? ‘Peter stood up...and raised his voice.’ (Acts 2:14) Peter said something. Basically, Churches grow, when people tell other people about God. Or put it this way: what would be our strategy for the church not to grow at all? Saying nothing; exactly.

So the Diocese of Bristol is after us. It is challenging everybody to share the story of them and God, for 10,000 voices to be raised, in the hope that 500 will be baptised in the next year. You can find out more about this at www.bristol.anglican.org/voicesAnd the challenge is coming in your direction locally, right now, in that I am asking every member of Malmesbury Abbey to share their faith with a non-Christian between now and when the Archbishop of Canterbury visits on September 13th. At all our services we’ll be grabbing people out the front to hear how it’s going and praying for those who have heard something of the Christian message. And then we can invite a lot of people onto the Alpha Course this September. Church is about to get messy.

In the power of the Spirit, Peter raised his voice. Let’s raise ours.