Dear church,
This week marks 20 years since Trinity Church Brighton (originally known as Trinity Bay) was planted by a small team of people from Trinity Church Adelaide. It was great to be able to celebrate this milestone on Sunday and consider the very same Bible passage that was read on that first Sunday in 2006 – Mark 1:1-15. If you were unable join us or if you were serving out at Trinity Kids, you will have missed a couple of really encouraging videos that were included in the sermon.
1. We reflected on the tremendous impact God has had through our church in the training and formation of men and women for service in gospel ministry. A particular example of this is seen in training people for vocational ministry around Adelaide in the Trinity Network and beyond. This video is a great reflection of that.
2. John and Geetha Warner, who led the team that planted Trinity Bay, were kind to send us this greeting.
As I’ve reflected on Mark 1:1-15 over recent weeks, it strikes me just how self-aware Mark was that he was writing something totally world-changing. Not that he necessarily thought that his Gospel itself would be world-changing (could he have imagined that it would still be read 2000 years later, in a land not unknown to him and in a language not yet spoken at the time he wrote?) But it is obvious that Mark was very aware that the history he recorded and, in particular, the man that he wrote about, was totally world-changing. It comes through in the very first word of Mark’s Gospel: “beginning”. It’s the same word that the Greek translation of Genesis 1 begins with – the translation that Mark would have been most familiar with. It’s an odd way to start his book, unless he’s deliberately acknowledging that he’s announcing a new beginning that is just as significant as the beginning described by Genesis 1. And it’s obvious that Mark saw this news that he shared to be that significant: it’s the long-awaited, much-anticipated, pivot point of history that God had promised. It’s the turning point in all of human history when the anointed one of God would come. Mark wrote the shortest of the four Gospels, but he still chose to set the scene with ancient words from the prophet Isaiah, reflecting on an even more ancient promise made to King David, that built on an even older promise made to Abraham – that God would be with his people. And here he was, coming in the flesh!
So it strikes me that Mark was profoundly self-aware that as he wrote his Gospel, he was handling something precious, something history-making, something life-changing. And that reminds me that whenever we open the Gospels, when we help each other understand how the scriptures fit together around Jesus, when we connect the dots between God’s eternal plan and our present lives, we too are handling the same precious, history-making, life-changing news. I wonder how often we think about it that way? Because that’s what has shaped the last 20 years of our church – whether we’ve recognised it or not. And I pray it will shape the next 20 years and beyond, unless Jesus returns first to complete his work of making all things new!
God bless,
Simon