Practicing the Way, and Mark Escott

Practicing the Way

Following Jesus in a busy, distracted, secular culture is hard. But if it isn’t Jesus that we’re following, we’ll still be following someone or something that may not have our best interests at heart.

Following Jesus is more than going to church or believing the right things, it’s much more about what ancient Christians called “spiritual formation.” So we’re going to learn from a course called Practicing the Way, which seeks to help us develop our apprenticeship to Jesus into a personal “rule of life” – not a series of rules to try and fail to live up to, but a framework that will shape the direction of our lives and help them grow fully, like a trellis helps a vine grow and be fruitful.

We can engage with the course in several ways: our Men’s Group will be working through it on Tuesday evenings, starting on 4th June. We won’t be rushing, we’ll be tackling one session a fortnight, and taking a summer break, resuming in September. For this time, the Men’s Group is open to anyone women included!

Hopefully our other home groups will be engaging with the course as well, on Mondays & Thursdays. It is up to those groups to decide how best they want to tackle it.

If you’re not part of a group, there are two other ways you can take part: Zoom meetings on Saturday mornings at 10.30 from 8 June (use this link) or sermons on Sunday mornings from 9 June.

The most important thing is that you don’t try to do this on your own – otherwise it will fail like New Year’s resolutions often do! Talk to our leadership team, talk to friends in the church, and share your progress with them!

Mark Escott

Hopefully you have heard by now that Mark has been appointed as the next vicar of St Catherine’s & St Paul’s in Hoddesdon. This is excellent news, and all of us at St Cuthbert’s are rejoicing – Mark was a part of our church family while he was training for the ministry, and contributed a great deal. Please pray for him, and for Jess, Thomas and Joel.