SUMMER 2004

LIFE AND WORK of the Oxford Place Methodist Centre is published quarterly: Winter (January), Spring (April), Summer (July) and Autumn (October) by Leeds Methodist Mission
Correspondence and contributions should be addressed to:
The Editor, Life and Work, Oxford Place Methodist Centre, Oxford Place, Leeds LS1 3AX. Telephone: (0113) 245 3502 (office hours) or may be sent by e-mail to kenneth.tait@btinternet.com (Attachments are preferred in plain text, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Publisher, or RTF)
Please visit our web site at www.oxfordplace.org.uk

Local Preachers
1984 Mr R K Lolley
1986 Mrs P Goacher
1991 Mrs E Waller
1993 Miss J Oliver
1993 Ms E Day
1994 Ms J Aitchison

LIFE AND WORK

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Sensitive to the demands made on those taking on the responsibilities of being a Church Steward, a number of other people have agreed to take on the supporting role of Vestry Steward.
While the Church Stewards continue with their traditional roles and duties across the whole life of the church, Vestry Stewards work alongside the Church Stewards assisting in the preparation for Sunday Worship -  preparing the sanctuary, dealing with collections, looking after any administrative tasks -  enabling the Church Steward to devote his or her time to the wider responsibility for the Church Family.
At the moment, a team of six Vestry Stewards have been appointed with one of the team being present each Sunday to support the morning Church Steward. At the time of writing the system has only been in operation for a few weeks, but the indications are that it is working well.

Angela Tait

Lent Love Boxes

An excellent total of £594.90 was raised and a cheque has been sent to the Methodist Church in London.

- Mavis Freeman

LIFE AND WORK

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LEEDS METHODIST MISSION

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LEEDS METHODIST MISSION

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In the Spring 2004 edition of Life and Work Neil reflected on the debate about Mel Gibson's film The Passion of Christ.  Like Neil, I have not seen the film.  From the descriptions of it, I don't want to see it, but I feel that, in today's world situation, it is important to reflect theologically on the suffering of Christ and to contemplate the desolation he experienced on the cross that is so vividly recorded in Mark's account of the passion.
The experience of two world wars, the Sho'ah (commonly referred to as the Holocaust), many other genocides, worldwide hunger and poverty, violence and terrorism, confronts us with the problem of suffering and evil with a new intensity and urgency that challenges any preaching of the gospel which bypasses the cross of Jesus as the scene of divine suffering or which dismisses as inconceivable the suffering of God the Father.
Good Friday and Holy Saturday embody the reality of suffering, death and doubt, the world's abandonment, the collapse of faith and despair, all that is godforsaken and godless. The only way to reach out to a suffering world is through a suffering God. The passion of God in the cross of Jesus was his entering into the human experience of death in its most dreadful sense of godforsakeness, opening a way into communion with himself for all the broken, marginalized and rejected of the world.
Easter Day never cancels out the cross of Good Friday and the grave of Holy Saturday. They remain reminders that the resurrection faith in the raising of Jesus Christ is only an anticipation of the final consummation.
The resurrection of the crucified Christ proclaims a hope grounded in suffering and death and that while pain and loss still characterise the world as it awaits its promised restoration, that restoration will come. As God's Easter people, the Church's calling is to be a community willing to engage with the world, to share in its pain and grief, its godlessness and godforsakeness with a compassion which shames the worldly ego and leads it into full communion with God.

Patricia A Goacher

LEEDS METHODIST MISSION

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Michael our Chairman writes...

May 2004

My first word must be to express my grateful thanks for the many cards and letters, above all for the assurances of prayer support, which have come to me from around the District following my heart attack in January.  There were far too many to reply to personally, but please be assured that I have been strengthened and upheld by them.  Perhaps it is only at such times that we fully realise what a loving and caring Christian community we have in the Methodist Church. This has meant a great deal to me over the past few weeks. 
I have been easing myself back into public ministry since the third week in March, and it feels good to be back!  I have, of course, been reflecting on what has been happening in the District whilst I have been off. I am particularly grateful to John Sadler, the Deputy Chair, to taking on additional responsibilities on top of an already heavy workload. Some things had to be cancelled or postponed, but for the most part people simply got on with what needed to be done. 
This is how things should be.  Each of us, lay and ordained, and whether we hold office or not, has a part to play in the life and witness of the Church.  Our personal contribution is important and valued. There may even be some things which only we can do.  But we are not indispensable and we make our contribution in partnership with others who also have their particular and distinctive gifts and graces.  This is true for the life of the local church as well as within our Circuit and District.  We must value one another and always work together in the Church's mission which is, of course, God's before it is ours.

Recently newspapers and television news programmes have been filled with images of prisoners of the coalition forces in Iraq being subjected to degrading and inhuman treatment. By the time this is read the pictures will no longer be on the front pages, but the issues they raise will certainly not have gone away.
We have been reminded of how thin the veneer of civilized behaviour really is.  We are saddened and shocked whenever and wherever people treat each other in a brutal and inhuman way. But what has been so very shocking about these particular pictures has been that the perpetrators have come from our own Western culture, founded as we like to think, on Christian values. It disturbs and unsettles us that people from the United States and Britain could behave like that

LIFE AND WORK

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LEEDS METHODIST MISSION

LIFE AND WORK

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LIFE AND WORK

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   2003/4  2002/3
March  £1489.69  £1493.30
April    £1366.39  £1373.51
May   £1247.26  £1213.11

TOTAL  £4103.34  £4079.92

LEEDS METHODIST MISSION

LIFE AND WORK