Please accept our most sincere thanks for the warm welcome that you have shown to us as
a family – it has been and is very much appreciated by us all.
Greetings!
Please accept our most sincere thanks for the warm welcome that you have shown to us as
a family – it has been and is very much appreciated by us all.
It is good to be with you – a tad daunting perhaps, but good. Having been settled in one place for the past seven years, I had forgotten just how disorientating it feels to know almost nothing about a place and even less about its people. Attending meetings when one knows at best only a limited amount of the background to any of the conversations is somewhat unnerving. So life seems more than a bit strange at the mo- ment but then I am sure that it does for you too as you slowly begin to adjust to life with a new minister and with someone about whom you know little or nothing.
I am tempted to help you out by providing you with a short biography of my life so that you at least know how old I am, where I come from, where I have been, what I have done and what I like doing etc., etc., but I am going to resist that temptation and instead keep the playing fields level!
Instead, let me simply say that I hope that, in the months and years ahead, as we journey together, we will be able to tell and share our stories with one another that we might then all be better placed to help each other make connections between those stories and God’s story. Such connections are always there to be made – however uninteresting or unspectacular we believe our own particular story to be – but some- times we need other people to help us to identify them. I look forward to you helping me and in return promise that I will do my best to help you.
Ministry is, I believe, very much a shared task and responsibility and I look forward to sharing that task and responsibility with you.
As we contemplate our journey together, let us borrow a verse from a well-known hymn and pray that we will always be able to say to one another:
Brother, sister, let me serve you,
let me be as Christ to you;
pray that I may have the grace to
let you be my servant, too.
With every blessing
Paul