Barnes in Common

the magazine of Churches Together in Barnes
March/April 2005

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A new beginning

Reflections by Veronica Faulks

Well, you can't miss the fact that finally our builders have arrived. The portakabins on the Common (with thanks to Richmond Borough Council for their permission) are a bit obvious. The inside of Barnes Methodist Church is having its long awaited 'makeover', providing us with new flexible worship space and rooms to use for ourselves and offer to the community.

And for the seven months or so of the contract, church life goes on, with worship in the existing church hall. It is for us a new experience – we are much closer to each other than we used to be, and the chairs are not always set out the same way. We are experimenting and discovering a new flexibility to our worship, which we hope will continue when we have a newly refurbished church. You could say we have begun to renew ourselves as well as our building.

By the time you read this we shall be well into the season of the year we call Lent. (The name originally seems to have derived from the 'lengthening' of the daylight as the days grow longer).

Traditionally Lent has been seen as a time of preparation for Easter. It is a penitential season – a space in which to look hard at ourselves and do a bit of internal 'spring cleaning'. It can be quite difficult as we look honestly at the parts of our lives that need sorting out. It may mean letting go of habits we are attached to.

Certainly I guess for all of us, moving out of church and learning to 'be the church' in a new way has had its painful moments, and we are having to take a good hard look at ourselves.

At the end of Lent comes Holy Week, the pain of Good Friday and then the joy of Easter Day. The central, pivotal story of the Christian faith. Death and Resurrection. Letting go and then renewal and new life. There is a sense in which that is what is happening to us as a church – although alongside so many events that happen to individuals and communities it is on a very small scale indeed.

But it does remind me that the pattern of death and resurrection does seem to be a recurring pattern in our world. Elsewhere in this edition you will read moving stories of those who have seen at first hand the effects of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, and are desperately trying to bring new life into devastation on an unbelievable scale.

And the story of Holy Week and Easter reminds us all of two things about our little – or huge – experiences of death and resurrection. First – that there is never an ending without a new beginning. And secondly that God is present not only in the experience of new life but also in the experience of loss and ending.

So – we look forward to seeing you at the Re-opening of Barnes Methodist Church – the Church by the Pond – Renewed for Service.

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