fleshandblood is a campaign to mobilise the church to increase the number of blood and organ donors in the UK, a call to recognise a need and respond with an act of generosity.

Founded as a partnership between Kore and NHS Blood and Transplant, the campaign aims to raise the profile of donation within the church and encourage donation as a personal gift. It seeks to equip individuals and churches as advocates for donation helping them engage with their family, friends and community.

Sponsored by Give.net and in association with denominations, organisations and festivals, our hope is that the church can make a significant impact on the lives of many and help to support the work of the NHS in caring for our communities.

Visit: fleshandblood.org

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Give.net is a simple online donation website from Stewardship.

Using this new service, it is possible to give and Gift Aid a donation in a way which will remain anonymous to everyone at GBC (there will be a box to tick on the confirmation page). GBC has a donation page so there is no public list of donations!

3% of the total (gift + gift aid) is retained as their administration charge and a further 1% of the gift if it is made by credit card.

You can find out more at their FAQ page: www.give.net/pages/help/for-sponsors, or speak to Brett Mickelburgh.

You can give to GBC via give.net by following this link: my.give.net/godmanchesterbaptist

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Do you ever shop on the internet? If you do, here is an opportunity to raise money for charity by doing what you already do and at no cost to yourself.

Give as You Live is a scheme whereby any one of 2200 merchants will give up to 5% (typically 1-3%) of the purchase price to a charity of your choice. In return they have the opportunity to send you one e-mail a week suggesting stores with whom you may wish to shop, which of course you are free to ignore and do nothing differently than you did before!

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All you have to do is download software which pops up with a banner when you enter a site which offers the charity donation. You then choose to click on the banner to activate the software for that site on that visit. Thereafter everything is automatic and the charity donation is collected by GAYL and passed on to the charity.

The link below will allow you to download the software in order to support GBC, but at any point you can choose to change the charity you support to another – Cambodia Action (registered under the old, still official name of Southeast Asia Outreach), Anglo Indian Concern, Rehoboth Children’s Homes Trust and Mission Direct are all registered as recipient charities, as are most of the major national and international charities.

http://www.giveasyoulive.com/join/godmanchesterbaptistchurch/ct4885

If you have any questions about this, do ask Brett Mickelburgh

YouVersion

There are plenty of places to read the bible online—the best being BibleGateway and the increasingly popular YouVersion. a completely fresh approach to engaging with the Scriptures.

When the Bible is always nearby, you can use any moment to read and share God’s Word.

*Use it on nearly every mobile device
*Enjoy 150+ Bible translations in many languages
*Listen to audio Bibles on the go
*Choose from hundreds of reading plans
*Share verses quickly on Twitter & Facebook

It’s free. It’s easy to use. It’s right where you are. On your computer: http://youversion.com

On your phone: the Bible App.  Install it in minutes: http://youversion.com/download

The Bible App has now been installed on more than 35 million mobile devices, and they are averaging about 2 million installs each month. It is probably the best bible reading app available at present.  It is available for all mobile operating systems.  The Android and iPhone apps are especially good; as usual the Symbian one leaves a little more to be desired!

If you don’t already use YouVersion on a digital device, it comes highly recommended.

Why not have a try at an on-line reading plan with YouVersion starting on 1 January?

Our 5 young people (and Daniel Beckett and Joe George) were involved in the Beyond Belief initiative in Cambridge!  They particularly helped with a Holiday Club – leading groups, and doing drama and games; prayer walked; and helped with a Youth Cafe at Great Shelford Free Church.

Last weekend, the Leadership Team shared breakfast with those in our Seniors Team.  John Smith spoke about some of biblical values which underlie this ministry.

Today, there are more people over 65 than under 18-olds in our nation. By 2020 number of retired people will grow from 11 to 15 million. 1 in 20 of the population will be over 80.  Eight years ago Time magazine ran an article suggesting we may soon be living to 125!.

The Bible is realistic about age. In the OT the very young and the old are not so valuable in economic terms to the hard life of a largely agricultural nation.

Thus, in Leviticus 27, we have a list of the redemption price of those dedicated to the Lord’s service at the tabernacle: the value of a child under five is five shekels of silver, the value of a young person aged five to 20 years is 20 shekels of silver, the value of those in the prime of life from 20 to 60 years is 50 shekels of silver, and then it decreases to 15 shekels for those over 60. That is biblical realism.

Four words which should feature in seniors’ ministry: INCLUSION: DIGNITY: PURPOSE: HOPE

1. Inclusion

Psalm 68.4-6 describes for us an important characteristic of God:

‘Sing to God, sing praise to his name, extol him who rides on the clouds — his name is the LORD — and rejoice before him. A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.’

That family may well be the local fellowship of Christians.

Respect of the elderly will not get better. Why?

* Because of the scattered nature of our families.

* Because the caring for the elderly is too often given to the most poorly paid.

* Because the relentless pressure of the euthanasia lobby seeks to convince us that the elderly ill should no longer have the right to live.

* Because a society driven by economic value will conclude that caring for the elderly is not productive.

2. Dignity

It is an utterly false argument to say that we should care for the elderly because of their long and valued service to their country, many of whom fought for our freedom. That is a utilitarian argument.

What then is the value of those who seem to have achieved very little in their life? No!

In old age there are the creaking joints, the aching muscles, the breathlessness, embarrassing problems, deafness, poor eyesight. Or we become mentally confused, forgetful and slow. And our longstanding friends and loved ones fall off as leaves from the trees in autumn. But the dignity of old age is as great as the value of a new-born child.

Romans 14.8: ‘If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.’

The elderly deserve dignity simply because they have the value and dignity of a human being.

Of course there is often a loss of dignity with the paraphernalia of old age, as with any serious illness. We must demonstrate the value of life in a society that, for all its pretence, has steadily devalued life.

We have to show that we are guardians of that dignity.

James 1.27 ‘Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.’

Leviticus 19.32 ‘Rise in the presence of the aged, show respect for the elderly and revere your God. I am the LORD.’

3. Purpose

Psalm 92.14: ‘The righteous… will still bear fruit in old age’.

Why have so many of our older people little else to talk about when we visit them than their arthritis and grandchildren? Because we allow them to close down their vision.  But nevertheless great things can be achieved by the elderly:

* John Wesley claimed he was far more able to preach at 73 than when he was 23.

* John Newton, in spite of claiming that he was ‘packed and sealed and ready for the post’, was still preaching at 80.

*At 84 and 82 respectively, Peggy and Christine Smith, one blind and the other crippled with arthritis, prayed for revival on the Isle of Lewis in the 1940s — and it came.

We must continually work, not merely at maintenance mode for older people, but for the provision of positive activity and fulfilment for those who are capable of much more than sitting and dreaming all day. What a powerhouse of prayer and positive interest in the Lord’s work our older people could be.

4. Hope.

2 Corinthians 4.16-17: ‘We do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal’

C.S. Lewis referred to heaven with the simple expression: ‘Term time is over, the holidays have begun’, and, meanwhile, this is term time, and we all have a lot to do — even in older age.

It’s really easy to know what’s happening in at GBC and stay right up to date.

Choose whichever option is best for you:

By continuing to visit our website regularly and check out the GBC news section:godmanchesterbaptist.org/news
By reading an email sent direct to your email client (Outlook, Thunderbird, Windows Mail). It’ll have the text of any new pages or posts on the site.Click this link to receive e-mails of any new pages.Your e-mail address is secure and verified to prevent spam by Feedburner, part of the Google family of services.
By using an RSS feed to your web browser or email client. Click this link to receive RSS updates.Find out more about RSS feeds [click here]
Facebook By linking to our Facebook page Click this link to visit our Facebook Page.

We also podcast many of our sermons [click here].

Our website is easy to read from a mobile device.  Just use our normal address and your mobile browser should automatically display simpler and clearer pages.

 

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When the original Bible documents first emerged, they captured exactly what God wanted to say in the language and idiom of ordinary people. There was no friction between hearing God’s Word the way it was written and understanding it the way it was meant. The original audience experienced a unique fusion of these two ingredients.

Readers of the Bible today, however, no longer experience this fusion. The passage of two thousand years has turned the Greek and Hebrew of Bible times from living languages into historical artefacts that only scholars can understand.

If we had the original documents in our hands today, they would still represent exactly what God wanted to say. But the vast majority of people would no longer be able to understand them.

King James Version

In 1611, the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible brought English readers back as close to that original fusion as possible. As with all translations, the KJV involved some loss of transparency to the original documents. And yet that small loss in transparency was more than made up for by a tremendous gain in comprehensibility: People could hear God’s Word in their own language! The result propelled the body of Christ into a new era of personal transformation and global reformation.

But, just like the original documents, the KJV was unable to escape the effects of time. The English language changed. The “thys” and “thous” and “whosoevers” of the KJV became less and less the language of everyday people and more and more the language of a bygone age. The KJV’s ability to present God’s Word the way it was written, while at the same time allowing readers to understand it the way it was meant, began to decline.

20th Century Translations

During the last century, a number of new English Bible translations emerged to compensate for the changes in language since the translation of the KJV.

Some translations placed a high priority on reading God’s Word the way it was written — giving the modern English reader the opportunity to see much of the form and structure of the original documents.  Other translations place a high priority on understanding God’s Word the way it was meant — helping the modern English reader to grasp the content of the Bible in their own words and their own idioms.

New International Version

The Committee on Bible Translation (CBT) was formed in 1965 to create a modern English Bible translation from the oldest and best-available biblical manuscripts. The committee represented, and still does represent, the very best in evangelical biblical scholarship with its members drawn from various denominations and from some of the finest academic institutions in the world.

The NIV is founded on the belief that if reading God’s Word the way it was written and understanding it the way it was meant were the hallmarks of the original reading experience, then accuracy in translation demands that neither one of these two criteria be prioritised above the other. First published from 1973, the NIV rapidly became the world’s most read modern English Bible with more than 400 million copies in print.

Built to endure!
The NIV was designed from the very start with a built-in mechanism to defy the attrition of time. So the NIV translation team continued to meet, year after year, reviewing developments in biblical scholarship and changes in English usage — revising the translation to ensure that it continues to offer its readers an experience that mirrors that of the original audience, and periodically releasing those revisions in updated editions of the text.

A second major NIV update was issued in 1984.

2011 edition
In 2011, the CBT completed their work to further a third major update. It is this edition that you will hear read and see projected at GBC.  The 1984 version of the NIV, and the 2002 version of the TNIV are now being discontinued in print in favour of the 2011 text.

A fuller explanation from the NIV translators can be found here.

What-Is-Rss

RSS is the way that millions of web users around the world keep track of their favourite websites.

In the ‘old days’ of the web to keep track of updates on a website you had to ‘bookmark’ websites in your browser and manually return to them on a regular basis to see what had been added.

RSS Changes Everything

RSS provides you with a way to get relevant and up to date information sent to you for you to read in your own time. It saves you time and helps you to get the information you want quickly after it was published.

RSS stands for ‘Really Simple Syndication’. Many people describe it as a ‘news feed’ that you subscribe to.

It’s like subscribing to a magazine that is delivered to you periodically but instead of it coming in your physical mail box, it is delivered to your ‘RSS Reader’ every time your favourite website updates.

How to Use RSS – as simple as 1 – 2 – read

1. Get an RSS Reader

The first thing you’ll want to do if you’re getting into reading sites via RSS is to get yourself an RSS Feed Reader.

There are many feed readers going around with a variety of approaches and features – however a good place to start is with a couple of free and easy to use web based ones like Google Reader.  Or you can use your email client, like Outlook, Windows Live Mail or Thunderbird.

The best way to learn how to use Google Reader is to simply subscribe to some feeds and give it a go.

2. Find some feeds to subscribe to

Over the last few years you may have noticed a lot of little buttons and widgets appearing on your favourite sites and blogs. Little orange buttons, ‘counters’ with how many ‘readers a blog has, links called RSS, XML, ATOM and many more.

They come in all shapes and sizes:

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You could start by click on our feed:  https://godmanchesterbaptist.org/feed/

Any time you see any of these buttons or anything like them it means that the site you are viewing almost certainly has a feed that you can subscribe to. In most cases it’s as simple as either copying and pasting the link associated with the button into your RSS Reader or clicking the button and following the instructions to subscribe using the feed reader of your choice.

3. Read

Many internet browsers now have the ability to find and subscribe to RSS feeds built right into them.

You can usually tell if a site has an RSS feed by looking for the orange icon.

Here’s how it looks for Godmanchester Baptist Church when you’re using Internet Explorer :

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Other modern browsers will have similar icons.

To quickly and easily subscribe by clicking these icons you’ll want to set up your browser to do it with your feed reader of choice as by default they will probably subscribe you using the in-browser reader. You can do this by going to the ‘preferences’ to your browser and choosing ‘Google Reader’ as your feed reader.

Once you’ve done this and have subscribed to a few feeds you’ll begin to see unread items in your Feed Reader and you can start reading.

Don’t want to use an RSS Reader? Email is an option

If the above explanation all just seems a little too complicated for you then please don’t worry. Many sites also enable you to subscribe to RSS feeds via a more familiar medium – Email.

At GBC, we know that not everyone is into the RSS thing so at the top right-hand corner of our site, there is email icon.  This will send you an email when a new page or post is published.

Registered Charity No: 1188171