Stoke Holy Cross

If you read this quite often it probably wouldn’t surprise you to know that some months it feels that there is something obvious to write, and other times a bit less so. You wouldn’t normally get away with not writing about Christmas in December, or Easter in the spring, so at least then you don’t have to decide on a theme, although you do have to work out how to say something a bit different from what you said in the 12 previous years!

Perhaps that’s part of why it is sometimes tricky: 12 ½ years or so, minus three months of sabbatical, adds up to about 150 of these articles, which is at least 60,000 words of content – the lower word limit for a PhD thesis. It’s a lot of ideas.

But maybe October is particularly tricky because sometimes in churches there is a bit less happening. It’s often after Harvest and before Remembrance and then Christmas, so it can feel a bit like normal service – if you can excuse the obvious and awful pun. And because of that, October is when the Church of England counts people. If you want to know who is there week in, week out, not just for special occasions, then October is apparently when to do it.

Some vicar friends and I were talking just the other day about counting. We get wary of it for lots of obvious reasons. Small numbers might make us feel depressed; big numbers might make us complacent: all the obvious things. Like lots of you, we don’t work for an organisation where numbers are the best way at all of measuring success, and most of us in Christian ministry don’t really think success is the best thing to be measuring anyway.

But - and those of you who for some reason have read 150 of these could hear this coming, couldn’t you? – there is a place for counting, I think. When Jesus gathers people – his disciples, or a bigger crowd, or somewhere in-between – the numbers are counted. In the Book of Acts, as we watch the exciting and explosive growth of the early church, someone was there keeping count. It wasn’t meant to be something for a special occasion; every day, every week, every month was supposed to be part of the church seeing God “adding daily to their number those who were being saved.” Even October.

So if you feel that this October might be the month that you want to be counted in that number, why don’t you get in touch and have chat with one of us? We’d love to find time to do it: it’s a quiet month, after all.

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