Ilkley Baptist

On Wednesday the local ministers come to me for lunch. We meet every week. We pray for up to half an hour, then eat and chat and josh each other for another thirty minutes. Lunch is mainly soup, so I'll be buying some veg tomorrow, and also some good bread, a bit of cheese, some fruit and maybe some small cakes.

The mix of prayer and lunch interests me. I think it's extremely important. If we just met for lunch, that would be good and useful. Good relationships are invaluable, and there is always a bit of business to do, a joint service to prepare or some resources to share. But the prayer bit - it's tricky. We pray in different ways, because we vary from Catholic to Pentecostal, High Church to Baptist. We pray in different ways because we are very different people in our aptitudes and sensibilities. It would be much more efficient to each pray in our own way (as if we would!) and then come together for lunch and conversation, but we don't. We grapple with this prayer thing, try different ways of doing it, fail, do it badly, and try again, because it we know it matters. In prayer we meet as we do not meet even over the table. We meet, not every time, but from time to time, at our deepest. We sense each other's faith. We hear of each other's need. And as we struggle to find ways to be together in prayer, we are aware of each other's dependence on God. And that is what makes us colleagues. And what we do together counts.

Carrot and spring greens this week, I think.