Finding

Wisdom

and

Leaders'

Breakfasts

Every now and then avid readers of our Sunday notice-sheet in Church will see mention of a leader’s breakfast. This isn’t a recipe, or something on a menu but a chance for everyone who leads anything in Portswood Church to spend some time together. Usually there’s around 20-30 of us there.

It happens every other month on a Saturday. We arrive at 9.00, eat food and chat, then there’s usually something to help us do leadership with a bit more joy, or to do Church a bit more effectively. The only way to do that in the middle of all that’s going on is to give some time to keep up to date with plans, events and ideas that are bubbling away in the pot. All this includes people tasting, suggesting changes, adding seasoning, or new ingredients. Sometimes we then discover this particular dish, or that one, will always taste bad, so we’d best start again.

We try to make the conversations around breakfast go deeper than comparing the time we got up. Each time we talk about our life with God as well. We’re doing this to try and learn how to talk and listen to each other about our lives with Jesus; what he is doing in us and with us. We realise that it can be a struggle to put that into words and as a community we’ve lots to learn about that. If as leaders we’re growing in this, then perhaps it will start to spread out.

I wish, for all the wrong reasons, that I could say that what people most appreciate about these mornings is the brilliant agenda, great atmosphere, fantastically stimulating teaching input or anything else I end up doing at them. It’s not any of those, it’s actually the time spent with other leaders listening to each other and to God as he speaks within it all, and as we pray. 

‘Time is precious – spend it wisely’, someone must have said, even if it was just on a kitten-poster. But wisdom arrives in our lives through different routes and fearing the LORD is one of them according to the Bible. ‘The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom.’ (Psalm 111) I guess wanting him to be there, looking for what he says and does in conversation and time together is a way of fearing him. If that’s true then either wisdom follows or he doesn’t deliver on what he promises.

John Ayrton

(Lead Pastor)