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Discipleship - To be what you were meant to be!

The Cayman Region welcomed our new Moderator (installed 20th April), the Rt. Rev. Christopher Mason, this past week, when he spent from Tuesday 9th to Monday 15th June with us. While here, he managed to fit in something in each Charge, spent half a day touring both sites of our Cayman Prep and High School and meeting with its Management and Chair, visited our Bethesda Counselling Centre, and had a fun time on Friday night with the children and teens from across the Council. (He was a hit with these young people, and they were suitably impressed with his various smart-tech gadgets, posing – even, literally, climbing on him! – for ‘selfies’, etc!) The Moderator also brought the message on Worship the Lord on Sunday morning. Rev. Mason also enjoyed some good Cayman food and hospitality at the homes of his hosts for the week, Leonard and Carol Ebanks, and of Audrey and Handel Whittaker on Sunday, as well as at the Council reception at the home of the Chair of Council Ms. Angela Martins!
One of his specific wishes for the trip was to visit with individual Ministers in his major role as Pastor to the Pastors, and he was also able to meet with retired Ministers as well as one or two of our older members.
In his addresses at various forums, including with Clergy and Council Executive, the Future Leaders Breakfast, and sermons at North Side on Sunday Morning and the Moderator’s Communion on Sunday afternoon, the recurring emphasis was pointedly on Discipleship!  With the Future Leaders (pictured), his main focus was on The Call to Leadership of a Disciple, emphasising 6 points in particular, including that the Call starts with God, not us, God is in charge of the timing, and it can come in the ordinariness of everyday life – like Moses tending sheep. And he advised us that when the Call comes, not to ask too many questions or make too many excuses! In North Side his emphasis was the Cost of Discipleship (following Jesus) – highlighting from Luke 9: 57-62: no earthly security, no earthly ties and no earthly distractions. It is serious business! While his Sunday afternoon message drove home a number of points, the Moderator used a powerful and profound image that pushed us to serious contemplation when he said that the call to be a disciple of Christ is God’s call to each of us to be what we were intended to be when God first made men and women! That image of returning to the state when God first made humans and declared with satisfaction that they were “good” struck a chord and he elaborated on all people do when they are in the relationship with God and each other in which God created us to live. But he cautioned that while all these marks of the early church are no less fundamental for today’s disciple, they must not become something we do because we know it is right or looks good,  but must result from the outliving of who we are in Christ, returned by grace to that which we were made to be.
Rev. Mason was presented with a Caymanite Cross to welcome him as Moderator to the Cayman
Islands and to mark the love of the Cayman Region and our commitment  to work with him as he leads us to be better disciples of Christ. In making the presentation, the Regional Deputy General Secretary also spoke of the Caymanite stone serving as a reminder that the community of believers comprising our One Church in Two Nations have all been hewn from the one Redeeming Rock, just as the islands of Jamaica and Cayman were lifted up from the one earthly crust. But noted that the beautiful layers of Caymanite also remind us that each of the nations has its elements of uniqueness, forged from time to time by the different occurrences that sometimes lift us up, perhaps thrust us to new heights, and other times seek to press down on us with worldly weight, interspersed by the layers built up during times of blessed peace. And he noted that thankfully we have a tireless God who continues to take even the rough fragments of these combined experiences and shape us and burnish us to perfection.

(Picture of Moderator presenting at Future Leaders Breakfast)

Posted by: Administrator Wednesday Jun 17, 2015 15:33
Categories: | Tags: back to God, children, new creation, Renewal & Transformation, strengthening, Teens, Worship