Well, what an eventful start to the year!
In January, the PCC (church eldership) made a decision which puts us in a really difficult and quite stressful situation (for people who are members of Christ Church, the details of the decision were in a PCC paper that was made available to the church family at the PrayerWorks meeting in February).
Recently, the Children's Worker at Christ Church made the decision to leave her position in order to spend time working as a teacher. The culture of youth and children’s ministry in the UK at the present time means that for many there is a bit of a ‘glass ceiling’ which means that it is often wise to have a secondary career to fall back on. In order for her to be able to fall back on teaching, it was right that she spent some time maintaining her experience in that particular field. Hence, her decision to leave. Please pray for her, both for her work and witness in teaching but also that she might be able to return to vocational children’s ministry soon (good people in children’s work are often hard to find!).
As part of a wider vision of Christ Church, the PCC made the decision at the January meeting to make my post of Youth Pastor and the post of Children’s Worker redundant with effect from the end of August this year, and to create a new position of Associate Minister for Children, Youth and Families. The new position will be advertised shortly in various Christian publications, etc. As the current Youth Pastor, I was free to apply for this new position and to have my application considered with other applicants. After much prayer and consideration, I have decided to not apply for the new position and am therefore currently looking for work as a youth pastor or associate pastor in another church.
As I'm sure you can imagine, a decision like this is a massive one. I'm also sure that the PCC of Christ Church would value your prayers, particularly that God would help them to continue to seek his will and wisdom as they work out this decision. For us, the impact of this decision on our future means that last few months have been a very difficult time for us, especially as we are expecting our second child to be born in mid August. Although we are both really happy that we will soon add another blessing to the family, the prospect of having a baby and then moving two weeks later is not that much of an attractive proposition at the moment!
Therefore, we would really appreciate people praying for the following:
- Pray that we would seek God's will and be fully dependent on him in this situation.
- Pray for wisdom in how to finish well at Christ Church.
- Pray that God would provide a place to live, safety and security for my family, and a new position in which I can serve him from September.
- Pray for wisdom as we think through the various possibilities that God brings before us.
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