I think you will agree that that January is often a challenging month. After the highs of the Christmas season, the short-lived New Year resolutions, the credit card bills, long dark nights and typically cold weather, we can so easily be demotivated if not down right discouraged. 

In my former parish, just after Christmas I would get the whole church family engaged in a collective exercise. I would ask them to reflect back on the previous year and identify what were their personal highlights to celebrate. I would collate all their feedback and distribute a summary of memorable events.

We began the first Church Council meeting in January praising God for all that he had accomplished among us and distributed a copy to every church member early in January. We encouraged them to keep the page in their Bibles and use it to fuel their praise and prayer, as a reminder of how the Lord was working among us, building his Church to reach our community for Christ.

We found this really helped strengthen their faith and raised their expectations of what the Lord might accomplish in and through us in the year ahead.

I have done the same in what follows, highlighting an event or Initiaitve for each month of 2022. I have also appended a taster of our emerging vision for 2023.

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