Hither Green Baptist Church

What is a stolon? In zoology, stolons of certain invertebrate animals are horizontal extensions that produce new individuals by budding. In Hither Green Baptist Church, it's one of the two cells that budded from The Stem Cell in mid-2004. The group is led by Peter Webb and meets at a range of locations on Thursday evenings.

Cell members might be interested in the birthday list for the group; contact Peter for details of weekly activities.

The Shekinah Cell programme for February 2005 and birthday list have now been published.

Here is the calendar of meetings for the remaining period leading up to Easter:

• 23/02/05 Ignite
• 02/03/05 Leaders
• 09/03/05 Cell Leaders
• 12/03/05 Maintenance
• 16/03/05 Church Meeting
• 20/03/05 Palm Sunday Walk
• 23/03/05 Worship Group
• 24/03/05 Maundy Thursday Cellebration
• 25/03/05 Good Friday
• 27/03/05 Easter

Wulf Forrester-Barker

Neil publishes the Worship Group rota on his own website.

Maureen Aproskie is co-ordinating the creche to care for our youngest children on Sunday mornings. She has some volunteers but would be delighted with some further help, so please see her if you are interested in supporting this ministry.

Wulf Forrester-Barker

This part of our website contains information mainly aimed at the members and regular attendees of the church, such as teaching notes for our cell groups. Some information, containing private details such as addresses and phone numbers, requires a username and password to access. Login details are included in messages to the church email list and you can contact Wulf if you need further help.

If you have information you wish to publish, such as a rota for a group you lead, please email Wulf with the details.

Here are the cell questions relating to the second part of the "Three Dimensional Cell" teaching series, from Sunday 20 February 2005. Let me know if you've got anything you'd like to check before using the questions with your group.

1. Briefly share a positive model of community - a place that encourages and nurtures the members - that you have experienced or heard about. [Nb. this could be used as a Welcome question for the start of the evening or used to kick the Word section off].

2. How would you complete the following sentence: "IN is the dimension of cell life that ...."?

The following two questions might best be discussed in pairs, feeding back the answers to the overall group at the end:

3. What things help you feel connected with other people (don't limit yourself to just the cell meeting!)?

4. What things make you feel distant from other people?

As a whole group:

5. It's likely that any cell group will come up with a range of answers to the two questions above and some of them will even contradict each other. However, think about how you can use those ideas to build COMMUNITY. Make room in your discussions for talking to each other with HONESTY and expect some of your solutionsto require SACRIFICIAL LOVE to carry out.

6. In recent weeks we've looked at "passions" and "gifts". How can you support each other and create opportunities for everyone to use their gifts in areas they are passionate about? Try to commit to some firm ideas to help us see EVERY MEMBER IN MINISTRY and EVERY MEMBER GROWING.

Notes:

• Some of these questions are probably even more difficult than last weeks set. Do your best to help each other out in exploring them, which is a practical demonstration of the IN dimension.
• Hopefully you'll come up with some ideas for possible actions to strengthen your group in the IN dimension; pick one or two of these to commit to as a group and make a firm appointment to review your progress
• One of our goals as a church is to continue developing in "gift orientated ministry". By the end of April, we want to understand the "gift mix" of each group. It would help if each group could feed back to Wulf the gifts each person feels they have and the names of any people who would like some help in identifying their gifts. Talk to Richard, David or Wulf if you would like to understand more about the idea of a "gift mix".

Wulf Forrester-Barker