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Welcome to the website of
I wonder what image you have in your mind when you hear the word “church”. Pentecost Sunday (May 11), celebrates the descent of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church. One of the readings for the day is 1 Corinthians 12:1-13. St Paul uses his favourite term for the church, “the body of Christ”. That is a grand description: the church is the way Jesus continues to be present and active in the world. Our experience of the reality of the church as we know it may cause us to believe that description is far too flattering! Yet the church, despite its weaknesses and imperfections, is not constituted by all the members that make up the body, but by the head, Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit forms the members into something they would not otherwise be. The church becomes more what it is intended to be when its members remember it’s not by their own efforts, but by the grace of God, that they are what they are. When the focus shifts away from God towards mundanity, squabbles and institutionalism, it loses the plot. This is why, at Bateau Bay, we aim to keep the focus on God. Worship informs and motivates all we do. In our liturgies, or public services of worship, God is centre-stage, not us. Pentecost reminds us that ‘self-help’ doesn’t work. We need a God who acts, intrudes, calls, and saves and does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. Every time we offer the Holy Eucharist, we are confronted with the act of God in Jesus Christ, something that has happened and continues to happen no matter what we bring to it. We can only receive in grateful praise and holy lives.
The Lord be with you. Fr Mark
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