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Hi this weekend.
We celebrate communication Sunday when we reflect on
and pray about, uh, communications, obviously, um,
about proclaiming the good news.
You know, when we say communications, it's always best
to start with what is what we're trying
to communicate and not communicating.
We not even communicating
with the church, communicating Christ.
It's about evangelization.
Christ leaves his disciples at the ascension
with one very strong message, go therefore
and make disciples of all nations.
There's a kind of urgency about Christ in his earthly
ministry for those three years when he goes from place
to place, spreading the good news, preaching the gospel,
preaching the kingdom, there's an urgency
and an insistence about,
and people want him to stop and say, stay with us.
And he says, no, I'm going here. I have to go here.
I have to go here. And then
before his ascension, he passes on that urgency
to his disciples and expects them to do the same thing.
And in turn then expects us to do the same thing.
So when we speak about evangelization
and when we speak about communication,
it's always worth remembering that the first actors in this,
the principle evangelizers, are you,
is every single Christian is called to go
and make disciples of all nations.
If people are to hear about Christ, if they are
to be introduced to Christ,
it's not usually gonna be from me, it's gonna be from you.
You are the ones that encounter people
that haven't met Christ
or have fallen away from it in your workplace,
in your community, in your school,
sometimes in your role as well.
And so you are the communicators, your witness
and your words and your actions
and the practice, your faith is the way
that we communicate the gospel to others.
And I'm gonna tell you where I've just come from, uh, to,
to, to kind of give an example of that.
I've just come from a place called Generation Hope.
It's a, an outdoor place, an outdoor center.
We went with a couple of, uh,
high schools from gallery diocese
and within that there was lots of,
and Z slides and things like that.
But also there were a lot of young people there
who were giving their witness to their faith,
talking young adults in their twenties
and so confident about their faith.
And so happy talking about it,
not embarrassed talking about it
and talking to these, these kids who are about 11, 12,
13-year-old and just know the gospel is
radiating outta them.
And these showed where it is to be an evangelizer.
Some things were a bit shy, and yet they were the opposite.
They were so confident in proclaiming their faith.
That's what I would ask you to be,
to be confident about your faith.
And if you do that, then you become an evangelizer
and there is no substitute for you as someone
who communicates the gospel to those around you.
There is no substitute, but there are support
because there's, the more that we do as well
as the individual with this as a church, we do,
we always use the means of communication.
We have for centuries, whatever communication is available
to us, we use in order to evangelic.
And we do that within our parishes.
And we do that as the whole church in Scotland. And part of
That will be a office for communications.
But the office for communications
isn't just gonna be called that.
It's the office for communications for evangelization,
because that's what we communicate.
And we always have to remember
that we are here to preach Christ.
So I'm not gonna say too much about that just now.
It's gonna be light on detail, but heavy on ambition
because over the next few months you're going
to hear more about what we're going
to do across the church in Scotland using the media
that's available to us.
We use the classic media, you know, we use print,
we use radio, we use television and content
and connect with all these different media,
but also using the internet and using social media.
Sometimes we're a bit scared of those things,
but if we use them well, we can project our message out so
that others can hear that.
They might not hear it in others, in, in any other way.
Dunno if you rule this. A church
is a hard place to come into.
If you're a stranger, it's not easy to come to.
You might think you're the most welcoming people in the
world, and I'm sure you are.
But for a stranger coming into the church, that can be
so daunting that they just won't do it
won't come through those doors.
If through social media, we can reach out to someone
and they can kind of put their
toe in the water a little bit.
How about we peek into a church through,
through different media?
That may be the thing that then draws them in,
that they start from there, that kinda safe place, then make
that step of coming in and coming to our church.
These are how we use communication
to evangelize, to reach out to other.
So I'm gonna invite you to do a number of things.
The first thing is what we always do, we pray, we pray
for the, the spread of the gospel.
I'm gonna ask you to, to commit
to be confident in your faith
and be an evangelizer in your own life.
Then I'm also gonna ask you, no surprise there for money
because if we have this office, we do need to support it.
And I ask your support for that so that
as a church together we help
to build on what we already have.
We have your witness, we have our parishes, we have the,
the, the whole church in Scotland.
We have the, the sacraments
and the proclamation of the gospel.
We can do more and more if we use the means available to us.
So please do if you can support that.
If you can, it's okay Because the main
thing we do is we pray.
We pray for each other and take on board
that you know the message.
Will Christ that our urgency from Christ go there for
and make disciples of all nations.