From the Regional Team  

Rev Paul Kerley

SEBA Regional Minister
 

The often quiet but continuous work of the Holy Spirit

Dear Colleague,

Here we are now in May, getting towards half-way through the year - doesn’t time fly by! Some people say that the month of May lives in the middle. How? Well, as I look out of my study window into the wood, the leaves and blossom are on the trees, but the fruit of those trees is far from ready. The evenings stretch out, but summer has not quite arrived. It is a season that quietly says to me, “Not yet… but soon.”

I think that much of the church ministries you and I engage in often feel like that. We long for the summer months - clarity, breakthrough and visible fruit - yet the Holy Spirit often works in ways that look far more like May -  slow, hidden, steady and not yet! The fruit is not ready! However, we need to remember that roots of plants are deepening below ground level long before anything appears on the surface.

The Apostle Paul reminds us in Galatians 3:22-23 for example that the fruit of the Spirit is grown or produced over time. It is not the result of pressure, strategy or urgency. It is the quiet, gentle, persistent shaping of God, often recognised only by looking back.
 
“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” (NLT)
 
So perhaps the month of May invites you and me to…

• trust the unseen work that God is now creating and bringing into being in our churches, our leadership teams and our wider church ministries.
• release the pressures that are often within us to try to force outcomes before their God-given time.
• notice how God is already moving within us, which is sometimes easy to overlook in the hustle and bustle of every day living.
• allow the Holy Spirit to set the pace, not our anxieties, expectations or desires.

The God who looks after the four seasons of the year also looks after our ministerial seasons and indeed even the seasons within our Association. And remember what He begins, He brings to completion - in His time, often in the His quietness, with His gentleness, with His power and always for His glory.

Paul