Together…

Hi All,

I hope and trust that you have had a good week! I felt prompted to write to each of you this week as I have been particularly reminded of the strength of who we are ‘together’.

My guess is all of us have different aspects that we love about Oasis, for me one of them is that Oasis church is never about an individual or a specific group but rather is always about who we are together. That we have found that there is a multicoloured richness in who we are and what we are able to achieve and celebrate as we come together. I know this particularly struck me last Sunday morning as different individuals shared their stories of what God is doing in and through their lives as I reflected on the fact that each of the stories were ‘our’ stories collectively rather than just individuals stories.

With this thought of together in mind I wanted to highlight two aspects of church life over the coming week that act as an opportunity to celebrate and stand together!

The first is this coming Sunday when we have Adrian Holloway with us and we get to meet for the first time in the ‘Big top’ aka the marquee. I wanted to encourage as many of us to be there both morning and evening not just to support Adrian Holloway but also to celebrate a moment for us as a church. I know for me when I stood in the ‘big top’ (which by the way has plastered walls and carpet – not much like a tent) I was filled with this sense of excitement of what it would look like one day for us to be gathering filling rooms like this! Of the richness of diversity that would continue to be revealed as we gather together. Of your friends and mine who might be there of people we don’t know yet being there of the way we will be transforming the city we are in.

I guess what I am trying to say is as we gather this Sunday let’s gather with eyes that see what we will be as well as who we are, and the excitement that both bring! An that we get to enjoy it together!

The second is the prayer week, as always I am not asking for commitment to 10 sessions but rather to encourage as many of us as possible to participate as it has to be one of the most privileged setting we have where we get to gather together to stand in the gap between God and our friends, family, city, nation and the nations. And to ask this God who can do more than we could ask imagine to come and change everything!

Thank you for taking the time to read this mail and thank you for privilege of being able to stand together!

With much love and peace,

Adrian

Life rhythms

Life rhythm from Oasis church on Vimeo.

Newfrontiers vision…

Hi guys, the enclosed is worth a watch and shows how what we are about as a local church fits into what we are about as a family of churches…

Newfrontiers UK Vision Video 2009 from Newfrontiers on Vimeo.

Famine in Kenya

Famine in Kenya from Newfrontiers on Vimeo.

Here is a short blog post by Nigel Ring interviewing Edward Buria explaining what is happening in Kenya at the moment, what this current crisis means and somethings to pray about.

New Frontiers blogs – Faminie in Kenya

The Well – Training Opportunities

The Well is a peer support group for women around the time of childbirth (before and after the birth of a baby). This means that women get together to share their experiences and to support each other in their roles as mothers. The Well is about community and provides opportunity for women to talk about things that cannot necessarily talk about with anyone else, share problems and share solutions to those problems.

The Well has been successful in gaining funding to expand the project to train up volunteers as befrienders to visit ladies in their houses to do what is known as ‘listening visits’. A befriender spends the first few weeks mainly listening and building up trust and friendship with the aim to help a lady to access the main support group where she can then build up her own circle of support.

The Well is therefore looking to take on 7-10 new volunteers to train either as: befrienders to go into people’s homes OR provide support at the main group.

Here we need people who can: do arts and crafts, provide refreshments, help with admin and welcoming, provide crèche support

Training will be taking place in the new year: 12^th and 19^th January.

This will run at Jubilee Hall, Ladypool Road, Balsall Heath.

Training is free and refreshments, lunch and crèche will all be provided.

The project is women only.

Women 18+ are very welcome to volunteer at the group, but befrienders should have some experience of parenting or supporting parents.

For more information or any questions please see Alison Stunt.

Bridge House News

Many of you would have heard Adrian share last Sunday about the Bridge and the current situation we are facing which if you missed it in summary is…

The Bridge is an outreach of Oasis Church to people living on the margins of society.  We are currently focused on working with people struggling with addictions.
A large chunk of our funding for this work currently comes through the council from a government initiative called ‘Supporting People’.
Recently this funding has been taken away, both from us and many other organisations working with vulnerable people across the city.
This has little to do with the quality of support we offer, as our service was recently awarded an ‘excellent’ rating by the Supporting People team themselves.
We now have a gap in our annual budget of approximately £132,000 once this funding is officially removed. We therefore need to find some alternative means of filling this gap and funding what we do.

…in light of the situation we wanted to give an opportunity to respond and become involved.

What can we do?

We’d really like the wider church to pray with us.  Most immediately, we do need to find replacement funding to continue running our valuable addictions-focused work, but that is not the full story.  We also feel it is right to be looking to expand what we are doing to support other vulnerable people.  We certainly do not think that we are already doing all that God has for us to do, or that our work has reached any sort of natural end…If anything, what we are doing now at The Bridge is the most effective and life-changing work we have ever done.

We’d love to talk to you more about the full details of everything we do at Bridge House, but for now here are some recent comments from our residents about the value they place on what we do here:

“Without this project I would definitely be homeless and living on the streets, or at least in prison. This project is run like a family…we all enjoy living here and owe a big support and thank you to the staff and supporters of this project.”

“I’d lost everything; a daughter, a family, a home, and a good job. I jumped from hostel to hostel and in-between lived on the streets.  Just as I was ready to give up the last thing I had (which was my life) I found The Bridge, or it found me.  Because of their constant support I have realised I can have a life in the future and hopefully live like a normal, free person.”

“I have been living at Bridge House for nine months and am both clean and sober.  Without the support of the staff and the programme that is run here I honestly do not believe I would still be alive… I know of no other place like The Bridge Project in Birmingham.”

Right now it seems that we are at a crossroads in The Bridge’s journey.  God has been calling us on into a deeper reliance on him – to learn how to hear, follow and depend upon him more in all he is guiding us into.  We feel that our current funding situation is very much linked with this call.  We are seeking God for what the next steps are for the Bridge and we would love the wider church to be very much involved in this, praying for the Bridge team, for those next steps and for God’s provision as we go forward.

We will keep you informed and connected.

But for now please stand with us as we seek God for what his will is for The Bridge, and for his provision (in every sense) for us to do the work he is calling us to do.

Worth a listen…

…the world tends to say that if you are looking to raise children that cities are not the place to do it. I listened to this talk, ‘It takes a city to raise a child’ by Tim Kellor recently which gives a different perspective. I would encourage you to listen to the talk whether you have children or not as it takes all of us…

(To listen to the talk simply click the title of the talk above and then click the title of the talk on the linked page)

Session 8…

We focused in the session praying for our 10th Birthday celebrations. We used the time as an opportunity to thank God personally and corporately for all He has done over the past 10 years through Oasis.

Having looked back we then looked to the now and prayed for our ‘Big weekender’ that people would come and join us in celebrating being 10 and that through the celebrations people would leave thinking ‘they never church was like this’.

Finally we gave some time to pray for our future and used a prophetic word that Dave Devenish had given about Oasis Church having an influence in the City of Birmingham well beyond our size.

Week of prayer session 7…

Oasis church is just one of many churches in the city of Birmingham, and as we gathered to pray in this session, we cast our attention to the vast array of other churches in the city also looking to demonstrate something of God’s love for people.

Our prayers centred on the 2 other Newfrontiers churches in Birmigham (Churchcentral & The Crown); the Vineyard Network Church; St. John’s in Harborne; Hope City Church (a new church plant from Sheffield); Riverside; City Church; St Mary’s Church on Pershore Road; Edward Road Baptist Church; and more generally the multi-dimensional cultures of many churches across the city.

 We prayed for leadership relationships both within the church leadership teams and across church leadership teams; the positive influence of all the churches in their respective communities; peaceful relationships with third-partities connected to the churches (i.e. people who rent property out to churches without their own buildings); and growth, salvation and favour.

There was prayerful recognition that just as a local church should model a unified body, so the different church expressions should model unity whilst reflecting diversity. We prayed again for “Carols in the City” as a regular expression of that unity that can demonstrate unified love for the people of Birmingham across all the churches.

Week of prayer session 6…

God’s heart for the poor and the disadvantaged and the marginalised is unquestionnable. We as a church do our best to reflect that heart, and this session of prayer was a ‘humdinger’ as we cried out to God for righteousness, peace and joy for people in our city trapped in poverty!

We specifically prayed for a couple of initiatives we facilitate as a church. Firstly, “The Well” – an initiative started by Alison Stunt, where new mums or mums to be can come and find some listening ears of encouragement as they struggle with their pregnancy or post-natal depression. There was a massive sense of God’s compassion for these women, and a number of specific words and pictures to encourage us to expect even more of God’s compassion to be shown as more ladies are referred to the team. Alison made sure all the prophetic words were written down – so I’d encourage you to seek her out to find out what they were!

Then secondly, we prayed for ‘The Bridge’ – our addictions recovery centre based in Moseley. We thanked God for recent clear evidence of lives being radically changed, and of course prayed for a continuation and acceleration of such good news! But in the light of this, we also prayed for both The Bridge, and other charitable organisations in Birmingham, who have recently learned of such massive funding cuts,  that the continued existence of these excellent care ministries could be seriously jeopardized. We asked God to provide both what was needed to carry on…and more!…to see further expansion of care for those struggling in our city. Faith was very high that God would give generously all that is needed…because that’s what he does!