The Salvation Army Spryfield Community Church and Family Resource Centre

Mission Team Members: Kristie Burton, Sara Murphy, Jed Flemington, Sara Bowdridge, Thomas Marsh

This week Spryfield Corps hosted the Scotian Glen Camp Staff Mission Team. What a great week it was. Over 20 local kids took in a 5-day long VBS. From 9-12 each morning, our church was rockin’.

Other events the team took part in: providing leadership of our very first Spry Cafe – a coffee house in our beautiful foyer where folks from the community will feel comfortable in coming to have a chat and a cup of joe.

The city was bathed in prayer when we did our prayer walks, as well as EVERY school in Spryfield. We prayed for all the students who would be resuming classes in September, that God would be with them in a big way.

The group also helped us lead our Open Air (our first in many years). Over 80 people were in attendance! God is good! (An additional note of praise to add, is that some new people came to our Spry Cafe as a result of attending our Open Air service.)

 Coupled with the backpack distribution, where over 30 kids received a backpack loaded with school supplies, plus our wrap-up BBQ, there’s been a real buzz associated with our corps this week.

Someone walking by today, seeing the scores of children playing on our front lawn asked me in amazement, “What’s going on here?”  What’s going on here indeed. God is at work, working through the lives of our people, drawing the men, women, boys and girls of Spryfield – unto himself. Hallelujah!

"Joy! Joy! Joy! There is joy in The Salvation Army"

The crowds

Jed, Rob, and Thomas

Dear Fellow Salvationists,

This 19th Pastoral Letter comes to each of you with warmest good wishes and greetings in the Lord Jesus Christ.

As I prepare this Letter in an upstairs room in my home in London, England, I look out to see the green and blossoming evidence of late spring. The trees are suddenly abundant in leaf. The sky is lighter and the days grow longer. We discern the hand of God in nature once again and we are filled with gratitude.

Readers in the southern hemisphere are in autumn, waiting for the darker nights and colder temperatures of winter to arrive. The seasons march on with seemingly inexorable pace. We feel our smallness, our creatureliness, and we sense too the overarching mind of the Creator in it all.

Little wonder then that we can burst into song to declare: ‘How great Thou art!’ We offer praise amid the awe. We bring to God our smallness, ready for him to help us rise in Christ to all the fullness of what we can be.

It is God’s plan that each one of us should be all we can be. You matter, you count. Tell yourself out loud: ‘I matter! I count in the eyes of Almighty God!’

Now suddenly my mind is racing off in another direction as I see the word ‘count’ appear in my script. The Bible tells us that even the number of hairs upon our heads has been counted and is known to God in Heaven. This is a powerful reminder of God’s intimate knowledge of us. I find it enormously comforting, but many find the thought menacing. Not everyone wants a Creator God who interacts with us. Instead they seek freedom to wander, licence to please themselves, falsely supposing this to be freedom. 

Our God is a counting God. We see this in Jesus who spoke about a flock of sheep numbering 100, but one was lost thus reducing the flock to only 99. The shepherd would not rest until the lost one had been found. That lost one is you. It is also me. We are ‘Sheep Number 100’! How good that we have a God who can count and who searches tirelessly for us when we go missing. This divine attribute is ever before us when we do the sacredly routine work of counting how many folk are in a worship meeting, or how many have used the Mercy Seat, or how many names appear on the soldiers’ roll and other rolls.

If our Creator is by nature a God who counts, then we in turn must expect also to be like him. We can count our blessings, we can count the days he has allotted to us and give thanks for each one of them.

God stands alongside us as we count. He knows how many Army soldiers and junior soldiers there are in the world, and how many there are in your local corps. He knows the number of Army officers in the world and the number of cadets in our training colleges. He loves to see these numbers grow. He knows too that we are at work now in 121 countries of the world. Best of all he knows personally and in detail every individual soldier, junior soldier, officer and cadet. He knows those who are his.

We bask in this knowledge.

Commissioner Helen Clifton joins me in greeting each of you in the precious Name of Jesus.

Please continue to pray for us.

I commend each one of you to the grace of Christ.

Sincerely in him,

Shaw Clifton

General

Lieut. Rob Jeffery and Donna Williamson, Director of the Single Parent Centre

Take a drive up to our Cornerstone Building and you may see some new folks in the neighbourhood.  Some time ago, the Single Parent Centre of Spryfield approached The Salvation Army about using our Cornerstone building (180 Greystone Drive) to run their programs out of while they underwent renovations. We jumped at the chance to help out a well-respected community group, recognizing the strengths they’ll bring to the neighbourhood.

Sharing our resources is what we’re all about.  Besides our own programming, we share our facilities with numerous groups in the community. These groups include the Spryfield Business Commission, the VON, G-ROC (Go Reach Our City – a kid’s club sponsored by Faith Tabernacle), the Redeemed Church of God (a small African Pentecostal church that meets out of Cornerstone), and the Department of Justice, to name only a few. 

Allowing other churches and organizations to use the resources God has given us will ensure that we remain effective and relevant within this community. While the inclination may be to hang on to one’s resources in a spirit of competitiveness, by sharing what God gives us with others, we’re actually getting so much back on our return.  We’re getting favour from these community groups and the constituents they serve, plus we’re getting allies in the Salvation War – allies to help us in our mission to save souls, grow saints, and serve suffering humanity.

General William Booth, Founder of The Salvation Army

So often Sunday sermons exhort listeners to pray and read the Bible as a means to grow in the faith.  This is advice that sounds very easy yet in practice is very difficult to live out.  When we think of the giants of the faith, we often imagine them to have a very intense spiritual regimen.

“Spend 4 hours in prayer a day; then read two books of the Bible in both Hebrew and Greek. Then when this is done, stand on your head for three hours and reflect upon your sin.”  This is often the spiritual lives we imagine for our heroic saints.

The first instance of a daily spiritual regimen was written by Benedict of Nursia (480-547).  The Rule of St. Benedict outlined Benedict’s daily spiritual routine; this routine became the set of laws that would bind his monastic community together (the Benedictines).  Based on Benedict’s Rule, many spiritual leaders have adopted their own spiritual disciplines, exhorting their followers to copy their example.  Found in the various anthologies of Army writing is the Rule of William Booth (Booth’s Daily Spiritual Regimen), reprinted here:

Booth’s 6 Resolutions

1. That I will rise every morning sufficiently early to wash, dress and have a few minutes, not less than 5, in private prayer.

2. That I will, as much as possible, avoid all that babbling and idle talk, in which I have lately so sinfully indulged.

3. That I will endeavor in my conduct and deportment before the world and my fellow servants especially to conduct myself as a humble, meek, and zealous follower of Christ, and by serious conservation and waning endeavor to lead them to think of their immortal souls.

4. That I will read no less than 4 chapters in god’s word every day.

5. That I will strive to live closer to God, and to seek after holiness of heart and leave providential events with God.

6. That I will read over this everyday or at least twice a week.

Wow! It sounds really….reasonable, doesn’t it? I was surprised that a man as zealous, and (in many ways) extreme as Booth, lived by a Rule that was so ordinary and doable. This confirms the truth that God can accomplish great things in human beings who put forth even a modest effort to be in sync with God’s will.  I think we’d do well to adopt Booth’s spiritual regimen as our own (particularly if we’re not following one now).

What’s your spiritual regimen? Is it working for you? Are you walking in victory with the Lord?  Or are you limping through life? If so, might I suggest that you bolster your Christian walk with these spiritual disciplines?  It’s work – yes, but what have you got to lose?