Thoughts for a new Connexional Year

I was fortunate enough, at the start of this new Methodist Year, to be able to spend some time in a shed at the bottom of a colleague's garden (some of you may know where I mean.) The shed is a space I try and regularly take advantage of, away from my desk, it's piles of paper, the emails and phone to either do a specific piece of work, or simply to slow down and look again at things and allow the Spirit space to be felt.

I took a piece of work and a book, a commentary on the Gospel of John that I and some other Chairs of District are going to be studying together this year. But, as I looked out of the window my reflections turned to the season we find ourselves in, these early days of meteorological autumn and yet also at the start of a new year.

It struck me that these two things may not be easy bedfellows: A new year with all the potential of new beginnings, and autumn, the season for harvests and beginning to lay things down in anticipation of the 'hibernation' of winter. However, as I looked more intently at the garden, I realised that things are not so clearly defined. There were tomato plants with new tomatoes just beginning to ripen and I wondered if they would now get enough sun or if green tomato chutney would be their use. Meanwhile the apple trees were weighed down with fruit just waiting to be picked. A rose bush was simultaneously full of plump round flowers, unopened buds and haws, the ground underneath covered in fallen petals. From one vantage point a cluster of seed heads in the foreground had a backdrop of beautiful purple blooms.

We are told that everything has its season. And so it is true. But I find myself reflecting on the fact that God's seasons are not linear in the way that autumn follows summer and will in turn be followed by winter and then spring. For God it is spring, summer, autumn and winter all at the same time. New beginnings and blossoming and harvesting and laying down.

In The Church we can often get caught up in one thing or another; either the latest new project or the fact that something is coming to the end of it's time. We can put so much time and attention into the new thing that we forget to tend with care the thing which is entering its winter, recognising all the good fruit which it has produced, and the people who have helped produce it. Conversely, and perhaps especially with the latter, we can have the things which are nearing their end so much at the forefront of our vision that we don't see the others things which are just coming into bud.

Perhaps, at the start of this new Connexional year, we should take some time to take a good look at God's garden. To tend the seedlings, encourage the ripening, harvest the crop and make good those things which now need to be laid into the soil to nourish what will come after them.

Wishing you every blessing for this new Methodist year.

Rev Angy