A Visit to the Palace
It is not often that I worship and pray in a chapel that dates back to the thirteenth century, but that is where I found myself last Friday morning! With its stained glass windows, carved wooden pews and painted arched ceilings, the chapel at Lambeth Palace is certainly a stark contrast to my usual places of worship. Deb and I were there last week as part of the Richmond Group, a relational network of church leaders from across the UK hosted by Nicky Gumbel. We spent a fascinating two days (only Friday morning was spent at Lambeth) with leaders from other denominations and church families in the UK, including Vineyard, Salt & Light, HTB and Jesus House.
It was a huge privilege to be able to spend time with such experienced and gifted leaders, and also to be able to share news from Newfrontiers of ongoing apostolic extension. An interesting part of our time away was hearing some results and analysis from the recent Barna survey on ‘Perceptions of Jesus, Christians and evangelism in England’. If like me you enjoy statistics and numbers, go to talkingjesus.org to find out more. It was also good to hear from Baroness Philippa Stroud, recently appointed to the House of Lords, about what she feels God has called her to do and how we can support and pray for her.
The highlight of the two days was most certainly the visit to Lambeth Palace, which started early on Friday morning with prayers in the chapel led by Archbishop Justin Welby. He is a most impressive leader with a challenging task before him – can I encourage you to pray for him? It was good to be able to stand together and pray for our nation, with Ken Costa from HTB urging us to believe God for another move of His Spirit across our land. Deb and I left feeling inspired by all that God is doing in and through His church.
As I look ahead to the next few weeks, I am excited to see the launch of our Christmas programme here at King’s – more of that next week, but if you’d like a sneak preview of our theme ‘Closer’, have a look at the Christmas webpage. I also see from my diary that I have a visit to another palace coming up - a more familiar one this time, the mighty Crystal Palace, playing Sunderland at home! Just hope they win…
