Moving to level 2!

Kia ora whānau,

It is has always been beautiful to hear people share about the significant impact our Sunday services have had on their lives because, as we all know, there is nothing quite like the St Tom's whānau being all together. I feel so grateful that we have gone through this time of lockdown in an age where we have online tools like Zoom that enable so many of us to still connect with each other on Sundays - in spite of the occasional poor sound quality and less-than-mad zoom skills. I have had many people comment about how meaningful it has been for them.

As we move down to alert level 2, we will still have our entire service this Sunday on zoom like we have these past seven weeks. The difference is: we can have ten people in our house! So, I would like to encourage you to think/pray about who you might want to invite over if you feel like you have the capacity to do so. When we go into our time of zoom breakout rooms you can choose to enter the online room together or if you happen to have a full house (ten people) you can choose to not enter the breakout room and have a discussion just within your home. The plan over the coming weeks is to fully move toward house churches, but still including some zoom features. We will keep you posted on this.

Regardless of the forms we may use, we want to continue to learn how to love God, love each other, and love the world. We want to reorganise our lives around our beautiful Saviour and invite others to do so as well. Zoom church, house church, or 'big church' are all just containers for those things and following him is much bigger than Sunday mornings.

Let's continue to seek God during these days. If he has something new to say to us as a church we want to be receptive to it. We don't want to just focus on creating new (or old) wine skins. God invites us to seek him with all of our hearts He invites us to taste and see that he is good. New Wine tastes so much better than wine skins.

Keep your eyes on Jesus.

Mark