Wonderfully Engineered

Harvest Festival

On Sunday 18 September, we celebrated Harvest Festival at Wall End with our usual Harvest Service celebrations. Mel Turner from Ulverston Christian Fellowship was our speaker.

The church was brightly decorated with vegetables and fruit donated by members of the church with a particularly colourful display in front of the Communion Table. A couple of enormous green and orange pumpkins were propping up the lectern and there were delightful pear, tomato & freesia cameos decorating the window ledges.

In his Harvest Service message to the congregation, Mel Turner talked about how, like a well designed locomotive engine where all the cogs, wheels, shafts, and other moving bits work together to produce a top flight engine, the Church was made to function in harmony: all parts working together to God's glory and the benefit of all who are a part of the Church.

Several times, Mr Turner cited 2 Peter 1.3-4. He said we should all read it and take it in, rejoice in what it says, and read it frequently to keep before us what God asks of us and how He equips us to achieve what He asks. Here is the verse (Amplified Version):

"For His divine power has bestowed upon us all things that [are requisite and suited] to life and godliness, through the [full, personal] knowledge of Him Who called us by and to His own glory and excellence (virtue). By means of these He has bestowed on us His precious and exceedingly great promises, so that through them you may escape [by flight] from the moral decay (rottenness and corruption_) that is in the world because of covetousness (lust and greed), and become sharers (partakers) of the divine nature."

We can live in harmony—God had given us the grace to achieve it. We can look forward to a future that we can live triumphantly through good and bad times because God has promised to equip us with what we need to live holy lives. It's a choice we all need to consider and make—to the glory of God and to the life of His Church of which we are all a part.

We enjoyed our usual lively faith meal afterwards with delicious contributions from everyone. Thank you to everyone who contributed their kitchen garden produce to decorate the church and also to those who prepared and donated food for our harvest meal.

Our retiring Harvest offering of £200 has gone to Christian Aid.