Fliss barker has been a Church Related Community Worker (CRCW) at the project in Wooler since July 2022. It is both a new project and is the United Reformed Church’s first rural CRCW post. It is also Fliss’ first project, after completing four years of training at Luther King Centre in Manchester.
So, what is this new initiative all about?
What Would You Ask Jesus (WWYAJ) is a new group from Wooler URC that has been meeting in the local pub once a month since 1st June 2024. The first session was very much a ‘trial run’ where we rocked up, said hello to the locals, introduced ourselves and started chatting.
In our first session, we heard a powerful testimony from one of our church members who shared her own story from Alcoholism to finding Jesus, which had completely turned her life around. We then shared food together and talked about our own experiences of faith. We have since met four more times in the pub, and it is now starting to gain real momentum. We have become known as ‘that group from the church who ask questions’, which has led to some people joining in to find out more and some staying clear. That’s ok! We aren’t there to coerce but to welcome anyone who is curious.
How was it set up and what impact has it had on the local community?
The discipleship and development fund have supported WWYAJ by providing advertising materials, food costs and room hire. Two members of the group have since come along to church since the group began and have taken books and resources away to learn more. We try to make each session different, either with a personal testimony or a ‘BIG question’ that we offer to the group to chat about.
In our last session, we chose from several pictorial interpretations of the person of Jesus …
– some recalled images from our early / school years which were significant in our own understanding of him.
– some pictures chosen expressed an ambiguity or lack of strong definition, suggesting a Christ who can be all things to all people.
– related to this, we found the variety of images positive, because Jesus was thus not highjacked or enlisted by any single ethnicity, colour or gender.
‘WHY, & WHENCE COMES EVIL & SUFFERING’ paraphrases one off the most frequent questions we are asked:
If the Genesis narrative portrays us (in our representatives Adam and Eve) as capable of evil, and we’re made in the image of God, then must not God be capable of evil too, and be the source of it? Or, is God wholly good and incapable of evil, because he will not act in contradiction to his own nature?
We discussed whether being created to love, and be loved, also required the capacity to choose, rather than being programmed, to love – and would that be true love? Therefore, is the possibility of failure and of being ‘out of sync’ with our Creator’s desires and intentions, a risk that God, or Love, must take?
We are so pleased with how WWYAJ is developing and feel that it will continue to develop as time goes on with more people coming to ask their questions as well as developing good relationships with our existing members. If you would like to know more about this initiative, please feel free to email us at [email protected]
Fliss’ role as Church Related Community Worker is to take church out into the community, to reach out to people through Christian love and fellowship to be the glue that helps bind their community together and to serve the town of Wooler through a range of different activities. If you would like to find out more about Church Related Community Work, please email the Administrator for Community Engagement and Public Issues for more information.