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Beginning to Flourish - Introduction

Neil MacLennan February 16, 2025 2 0

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On the cross love was stripped bare. Everything had been taken from Jesus. He had been ripped from his community, deprived of food and water, exposed to the elements, his final breath taken from his body, until all that remained was love. But this love is the transforming love at the heart of the universe — the most powerful thing — the love of God. A love which brings hope and restoration out of despair and suffering — a love freely given so that humanity can flourish!

Our theme for Lent and Easter 2025 Beginning to Flourish explores the fundamental things we need to live: breath, shelter, water and belonging. In Part 1 ‘What We Really Need’ we travel with Jesus through the wilderness and reflect on how we all share the same basic needs — even Jesus himself did as God amongst us in human form. In Part 2 ‘My Father the Gardener’, as we head into Holy Week and Easter, we will see what happens when love is stripped bare on the cross in an act of incredible compassion and sacrifice only to burst once more into life and hope. God doesn’t just want us to survive he wants us to thrive! We have been created to grow, develop and blossom — rooted in love, branches of the true vine. And in those branches we create room to shelter and nourish one another connected through Christ — ready to flourish.

PART 1 : What We Really Need

The first part of Lent: from the week beginning Sunday 2nd March to the week beginning Sunday 23 March.

Life is so complicated until it isn’t — until it’s just about the next breath, some clean water, somewhere to stay, or a community to belong to. That gasp of air, that cold glass of water, that roof, that place you can simply be. What do we learn about our God from breathing deeply? Or from catching our breath? How about when we quench our thirst? Or when we feel safe? Or from when we lose that sense of security? As Jesus fasted in the desert wilderness, surely a dry and unforgiving place, these needs would have been on his mind. He was fully divine but yet — incredibly — also fully human. 

Jesus speaks with authority in our lives as one who knows what it is to fight for breath, to long for water, to be without a permanent address, to find oneself forsaken, betrayed and abandoned. But he also knows what it is to laugh, to drink in celebration, to share hospitality, and form lasting friendships.

What can we discover about our God and ourselves when we take things down to the basics and consider our most fundamental needs?

  • A sudden intake of breath — animated for expressive life
  • Sheltering together — welcomed by God 
  • Thirsting after — the physical and spiritual intertwined
  • Really belonging — being acknowledged, recognised, celebrated

PART 2: My Father The Gardener 

The concluding part of Lent and into Easter: from the week beginning Sunday 30th March to the week beginning Sunday 27th April.

God has given us within ourselves, within our friendships, within our communities, within our world — the means to live and to live productively and creatively. Who we are and the choices we want to make matter. We are not just cogs in a machine or workers in a hive. We are individual and idiosyncratic. There has never been and there never will be someone just like you with your combination of personality and experience and genetics. You are a unique creation and God wants you to live but also to feel fulfilled in that life — able to blossom into the fullest version of you.

From the shoots that grow in and amongst the rubble and hard ground of desperate need to the copious fruit of the groaning branches of the overspilling vineyard, our God cares for us and nurtures us. When love was stripped bare on the cross — when one by one Jesus was torn from his community, pulled from shelter, deprived of water, and ultimately his breath — it was not the beginning of the end, it was only the end of the beginning. In God’s eternal love are the seeds of our flourishing.

The journey can be seasonal and cyclical with times of growth and then times of pruning back. We might flourish for a time before finding ourselves back to first principles for a season. Times of bearing fruit and times of lying fallow. But through it all our Father the Gardener never abandons us, caring despite everything so that we survive, thrive and flourish, even becoming apprentice gardeners ourselves.

It’s time to flourish…

  • Gardener and Baker — the Bread of Life
  • Longing and everlasting love — a well watered garden
  • Love stripped bare  — on the cross
  • Jesus the Vine — becoming branches ourselves
  • Flourishing Together — reflecting on living so that all may flourish

As part of our Lent reflections this year we are encouraging one another to take on a Lent Transformation each week. These disciplines are inspired by our rich Christian heritage and offer simple, straightforward ways of settling the heart, stilling the mind, and focusing our thoughts.

They invite you to to do one thing every day for each week, the idea being that repetition allows you to build on the experience, noticing new things each day. If you forget or miss a day don’t worry, just start again on the next day. Our hope is that by repeating the exercises you make space for rest, calm and new insights. Lent is an important time in the church calendar to slow down and make time to focus our minds on God.

Download the Discussion Questions as a PDF

These discussion questions adapt our monthly themes for small Connect Groups or personal Bible study. The questions are divided into 9 parts to correspond with the 9 weeks of the Daily Worship theme. They are offered as a guideline and there is no need to go through all the given questions in a single session, or in the following sequence. Feel free to pick and choose, or adapt to what interests you or your group.

 

This is a theme remix revisiting and reimagining material we first developed in 2020.

 

Find how to get involved: Connect group Blog

 

 

You can also listen now to our six part podcast series Beginning To Flourish Pod inspired by our Lent and Easter theme. James Cathcart and Albert Bogle explore topics such as breath, shelter, thirst, belonging, eternal love and life changing grace in a free range exploration of life and theology as we’re living it today! This pair are buzzing with questions…