#1 Women's Gathering

I ran my first Women's Gathering at BCC this morning. It was hectic, but also wonderful.

Jeff had an early meeting at church, so he left home shortly before 7:30am. I got the kids into their clothes and drove Joshua to school. Next we drove to a nearby shopping centre and picked up a few things for our lunch and extra supplies for morning tea for the children's program. As we left the store I realise I had forgotten to buy milk and then Jeff rang to say the one thing we definitely needed was milk. But I already had the three kids back into their seatbelts, so we drove off to pick up J and then G, and stopped at a deli near G's house to get the milk. I think we were the last to arrive of all the women there, but at least Jeff was there with the morning tea things all out and his kind assistant, one of the retired men from our church, was ready as well to look after the children. As well as our three youngest, there were two other children, which was great.

We had eight women altogether, with a mix of older and younger women, and women who have been at the church for a long time and others who have been there less than a year. Pretty much what I had expected! A few women who had said they would come were not there, so I shall remember to remind them this Sunday. Two of the women who came had only decided in the last week that they would be able to fit the morning into their schedules, so I was particularly pleased to see them.

We studied Acts 1:1-14 together. I prepared the Bible studies myself, with three sets of questions:
1. Context - examining the historical or cultural background to the passage
2. Content - digging deeper into the passage
3. Connect - discovering how the passage applies to Christians, and in particular, ourselves.
I think this can be a very helpful way of studying any passage from the Bible. When I prepared the questions, I also paid particular attention to what the passage tells me about the nature of God and other matters of doctrine such as sin and salvation.

I think everyone got something from the Bible study. Although I had prepared thoroughly, I was excited when our discussion of the identity of the "men in white" who spoke to the apostles after Jesus ascended to heaven. They were angels, of course. But this led us into a completely unexpected conversation about the way people with New Age-style beliefs describe angels, and how different the Bible's portrayal of angels is. In the Bible, angels are messengers from God. They tell people important things, such as the angels at Jesus' tomb telling the women that "Jesus is not here. He is risen!" or the angels who we read about today, who told the apostles, "This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back..." The news of Jesus' resurrection and His future return are very different messages to those received by people who claim to have heard from angels today. And so, next time the topic of angels comes up in conversation (or an email), I will recognise this as an great opportunity to begin a Gospel Conversation. I am very thankful to God for the way He used this study to teach me as well as the other women.

The Women's Gathering is not all about Bible Study. We also split into small groups (two triplets and one pair) for prayer together. These groups will remain the same throughout this term, and hopefully we can draw a lot closer and pray for each other more pertinently than was possible before. I am looking forward to getting to know the women in my triplet a lot better.

This week I asked the women to spend most of their time just getting to know one another better, then having a short time of prayer. The time in my triplet seemed to fly past.

At the end of the time we had an informal chat over a late morning tea while the children were let loose from their room next door. In between purloining food from the adult's morning tea, they ran around and had a great deal of fun. I had enough time to check in with each of the women and all said they were pleased with the morning. Hooray!