Our July break is almost over. Now We are looking forward to resuming regular… http://fb.me/wStR2SzQ

starting August 1st at 4pm.

If you are a friend of AFiM or just curious please plan to join us in August. Watch this space for more details of upcoming events.

Robin

Live in Hope 1 Peter 1:3-12

Live in Holiness 1 Peter 1:13-2:3

Live in Harmony 1 Peter 2:4-10

Obeying Heaven and Earth 1 Peter 2:11-17

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“One early, cloudy morning when I was forty-six,” Sara Miles writes in Take This Bread,

I walked into a church, ate a piece of bread, took a sip of wine. A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans—except that up until that moment I’d led a thoroughly secular life, at best indifferent to religion, more often appalled by its fundamentalist crusades. This was my first communion. It changed everything.

Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I’d scorned and work I’d never imagined. The mysterious sacrament turned out to be not a symbolic wafer but actual food—indeed, the bread of life. In that shocking moment of communion, filled with a deep desire to reach for and become part of a body, I realized that what I’d been doing with my life all along was what I was meant to do: feed people.

Everything in Miles’s two memoirs, Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion (Ballantine, 2008) and Jesus Freak: Feeding, Healing, Raising the Dead (Jossey-Bass, 2010), flows from this moment, and after a cumulative 454 pages, its meaning is far from being exhausted.

From Rejection and Back

All conversions are instances of the same irreducible mystery, and each conversion is unique. Miles’s grandparents on both sides of the family were missionaries. While my own mother was a little girl living in Shanghai with her missionary parents, Miles’s father was born in Burma, where his parents were serving under the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society; Miles’s mother was “carried in a laundry hamper across the ocean to Baghdad” by parents serving with the United Mission in Mesopotamia.

By the time Miles was born, her mother and father had decisively rejected the Christian faith. When Miles herself was grown, she was drawn abroad by the needs of others, as her grandparents had been. But during her sojourn as a journalist in Nicaragua and El Salvador she wasn’t thinking about Jesus:

The power of the cross—the idea that suffering for others can lead to new life—was for me then, as it was for the unbelievers Saint Paul wrote about, and remains for rationalists today, “folly.”

While she was in El Salvador, Miles became pregnant. She and the father, Bob, another journalist, settled in San Francisco, where their daughter Katie was born. Here Miles’s life took on a new domesticity, rooted in one place. Bob, “who had come out as a gay man,” lived nearby. And Miles and Katie—”a luminously happy, talkative child”—began to share their home with Martha, an editor with whom Miles had fallen in love. As she recounts in Take This Bread

Over the next five years, I cooked dinner every night for Martha and Katie at home. And every day, Katie kept talking and laughing and reaching for more. As my life got happier, ease and love began to enter me, side by side with the memories I carried. While the classic conversion story involves desperation, hitting bottom, and a plea for help, I think now it was gratitude, as well as the suffering I’d seen, that made room for me to open my heart to something new.

Each conversion is unique, but something is missing here, something essential to the very notion of conversion: a deep acknowledgment of personal brokenness, sinfulness, and the need for healing. That missing element is restored in part elsewhere in Miles’s memoirs, not so much contradicting as complicating and deepening this picture of a soul awakened by gratitude.

Indeed, part of what makes these books compelling is Miles’s gift for holding in tension the surpassing joy we share in “the great feast prepared before the foundation of the world,” and the weariness, the sadness, the irritation, the sheer messiness we must nevertheless contend with day by day as we seek to follow Jesus. This comes through with splendid clarity in her account of the work that her conversion most immediately called her to: establishing a food pantry at the church where she first took Communion, St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in San Francisco, enlarging the reach of that ministry, and then organizing food pantries throughout the city.

But it is not enough, Miles insists, to serve food to hungry people—though that is no negligible thing—and then return to business as usual. We must be willing to have our lives entangled with the lives of others—people we wouldn’t hang out with of our own volition.

Ignoring Jesus

Miles writes passionately and persuasively on these themes. Alas, running through both of her memoirs are caricatures of the church in general and evangelical Christianity in particular, straw men and women primly sitting in pews or broadcasting smug hate speech. These figures are trundled onstage repeatedly, to be contrasted with Christianity as Miles practices it. At such moments, the generosity of spirit and rueful self-knowledge that otherwise characterize her writing seem to disappear.

But it would be a shame if such lapses kept evangelicals from reading Miles, who has no doubt been at the receiving end of plenty of caricatures (not least, the preposterous claim that living arrangements such as hers constitute a great threat to “the family”). Her books, among their many virtues, have the merit of forcing us to think about the selective way we tend to invoke Scripture (which, of course, applies to Miles as well), including the very words of Jesus. Why do we all cite certain passages over and over while finding excuses to slide past others or explain away what seems to be their clear import? (What was it that Jesus said about the Eucharist in the Gospel of John?)

In the last chapter of Jesus Freak, Miles describes

… the point I used to reach with my secular friends and family, who were fine, intellectually, with the idea of religion. They were broad-minded and reasonable, and agreed there were lots of beautiful stories in the Bible. “But damn, Sara,” said one, finally. “You mean this?”

She does. And she reminds us again and again of a potent truth that we’re in danger of ignoring even as we routinely affirm it: “All it takes to be a Jesus freak is to follow him.”

John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture. From Christianity Today

Come join us next Sunday!

Sharing Jesus Christ is the mission indeed the passion of our community. We believe that Jesus is the word of God, ‘in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the Word was God. All things were made through Him’

We also know that Jesus is the hope of the world for ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself’. Jesus said of himself, ‘I am the bread of life’.

Therefore Church of the Word in Gainesville, is establishing an extension campus in nearby Manassas to help further our mission. read on…

AFiM is an extension campus of Church of the Word, Gainesville.

We meet at 4pm at the Crossway Fellowship Church location on Plantation Lane near Prince William Hospital, in their side chapel which has easy access from the front parking lot.

For directions and a map

Music: So far we have decided to use ‘Renew’ hymnal, described like this, ‘Born in the worship renewal, this songbook brings together the best from traditional and contemporary worship. Following the biblical and historic fourfold pattern of worship Gathering, The Word, Offering Thanksgiving (Eucharist) and Dismissal.’

We are currently looking for a keyboard player in Manassas or nearby who would be available on a regular basis. If you know of anyone please let us know. pastor@churchoftheword.net

Liturgy: Our liturgical worship booklet is drawn from the 2004 Irish Book of Common Prayer because it is the most modern of Anglican Liturgies but yet keeps the integrity of the classical principles of our tradition. We have the service printed on a booklet for easy use. Even if you are not experienced in liturgy you will find this approach helpful in bringing you closer to God in worship.

Participation: Your participation and ideas are welcome. This fellowship is being shaped by those who are becoming involved. Later we will have a more formal launch of the service. We will become more visible in Manassas with local mission projects and fellowship opportunities. look within this website for upcoming events, or suggest one yourself!

We appreciate the invitation from our brothers and sisters in Christ at Crossway fellowship to meet at their excellent facility.

Please feel free to e-mail me Pastor Robin with your questions

To see how ancient christian songs can be given new life check out Glory to God on you-tube a modern setting of the ‘Gloria’ written by our Gainesville team ‘Braeded Chord‘!

To start you thinking an Anglican Archbishop once gave this definition.

Worship is..

the submission of all our nature to God.

It is the quickening of the conscience by His holiness;
the nourishment of mind with His truth;
the purifying of the imagination by His beauty;
the opening of the heart to His love;
the surrender of will to His purpose -

and all of this gathered up in adoration,
the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable,
and therefore the chief remedy
of that self-centeredness
which is our original sin
and the source of all actual sin.

William Temple, 1881 – 1944

i us Sunday April 18th for our next service!

Memorial Day with the Marines

By navy Chaplain Rev Jay Cayangyang

Jesus take the wheel

Greece has been loaned hundreds of billions of dollars by others in the EU because they can’t get favorable terms for the loan elsewhere. If they took the high interest loans now they would default very quickly. The low interest loans buy time for Greece to reform its economy. But will it be enough? Proverbs 22:7, “The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender”. The bible reminds us that you loose control whenever you get into too much debt. This is true on a personal level as well as for nations. We should pay attention to Greece because the USA is the largest debtor nation in the world; at the moment our creditworthiness seems unlimited. But everything has a limit. People are rioting in the streets of Greece at the stringent measures which their government is forced into adopting. You can bet the Greek government does not like imposing strict financial reforms, but they have no choice. The borrower has to do what the lender says.

Meanwhile Iceland, which was a victim and a cause of much financial stress a couple of years ago, has suffered a major volcano eruption. We actually visited this part of Iceland last summer on our vacation. We spent 12 days touring Iceland and saw the remains of the destruction from the previous eruption. What is different this time is the constant outpouring of ash high into the atmosphere. This ash has disrupted air flights over Europe for months. Natural disasters happen, but because we are so dependent on our high tech lifestyle and the world is so densely populated, natural disasters today have a much larger impact. Proverbs 3:25 “Have no fear of sudden disaster or of the ruin that overtakes the wicked, for the LORD will be your confidence and will keep your foot from being snared.” This does not mean that Christians will be protected from famines, drought, plague or war. But the Lord will be with them in the middle of all of those problems. Think of Job who had multiple disasters come after him at once, yet the Lord was with him to the end.

We have all seen the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and know that this gigantic leak will take a herculean effort to fix. Great damage will be done to our environment and some places may never recover. I am not going to argue for or against oil exploration in this letter. I am not trying to enter the political fray but only wish to point out that we humans are not as clever and competent as we think. Complex systems will always fail at some point. I believe one of the most dangerous temptations we will face as a race in the future will be to harness the ability to change the human genome. We will reach a point soon where we are smart enough to alter our own DNA and redesign the very essence of what it means to be a human being. But we will not have the wisdom to make the right choices. Proverbs 16:3 “Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and your plans will succeed. The LORD works out everything for his own ends even the wicked for a day of disaster.” A Christian should have a healthy respect for the environment and human nature as God created us to be. We must learn to function within the limits the Lord sets for us.

Problems from Greece, oil and ash may come and go but as Christians our hope is in the name of the Lord who promises to take his followers through the disaster. Meanwhile it provides wonderful opportunities for witnessing to a broken world who may be more open to listen to the voice of the Lord in the midst of a personal disaster. Ten years ago Ireland was a nation fairly closed to the gospel. They were enjoying the novel prosperity of an economic boom and turning away for the first time from Roman Catholicism. But now the economy is shattered and the intuitional Church discredited, but many of the people are hungering for a lively faith in Christ. One which makes sense of fallen human nature and the complex world in which we live. New church plants are popping up across the country and many are coming to faith.

Proverbs 16: “To man belong the plans of the heart, but from the LORD comes the reply of the tongue. All a man’s ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the LORD. Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and your plans will succeed.”