This Week@Wesley

 November 9, 2018

Hi All

Tomorrow I will be attending the very last full meeting of the Quebec Presbytery! With the structural changes to the United Church which were enacted by the 43rd General Council this past July, the four courts of the church become three effective January 1, 2019.  That means that we will no longer have Presbyteries and Conferences, with them being replaced by  will a new entity, called Regions.

So what does this all mean for us as a congregation?  We will still be meeting on Sundays for worship, Sunday school and fellowship.  We will still offer our open Wesley welcome to whomever comes through our doors. We will still enjoy the social and educational events and we will still offer our support and generosity whenever we can.  Of course there will be some changes. We will no longer need a Presbytery Representative and so we offer our thanks to Sarah Cunningham who has served in that capacity for the last couple of years. We will no longer have an assessment to pay to Presbytery each year, but it will be replaced with a new assessment to General Council.

So why the change if nothing changes. Quite simply, the change was needed for one reason and that is a scarcity of resources. Some think that means money and there is truth in that, but there is also an ongoing and growing shortage of people willing to donate their time to the work of the church. With these changes there will be a consolidation of much of the work and a more centralized way of functioning. Of course, this raises a bunch of questions; How will it work?  Will it Work?  Will the church survive?  How will we find God in all this change and transition? I do not have all the answers and the ones I do have would take too long to answer here. However, I do have faith that God is at work through this change and transition and that we will find God in new ways, through new opportunities. We are only left to discover what that means.

This week at Wesley it is November 11 and the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended the Great War or WW1. We will be marking this day with a Service of Remembrance, including a children’s time about Smarties and M&M’s, two minutes of silence at 11 o’clock, a dialogue sermon between myself and Selina titled, ‘Questions of War and Remembrance: a conversation on Remembrance Day’ and a candle lighting litany to remember and reflect on the cost of war.

I hope you will plan to worship with us on Sunday.

Heather