Well we have finally landed as a family here in Harborne and we want to thank you all so much for your best wishes, prayers, kind gifts and encouragement to us all. Jennie, Bethan, Eden and I feel overwhelmed at the generosity of the church and we are ready to get going with life at St John’s, as I step into the role of Associate Vicar. Please do pray for us as we continue to figure out how to manage the school run (we are keeping the children in their current school the other side of Birmingham), and especially as Jennie starts a full-time MA in social work in September at the BCU Edgbaston campus. It’s going to take some figuring out, but we are trusting God and taking it one day at a time!

Some of you will know that I have recently finished serving my curacy in Dorridge and Bentley Heath, near Solihull, and that this is our second stint at St John’s as I used to serve on team previously as Youth Pastor. A sort of homecoming then, if you like. It was hard leaving St John’s over 5 years ago, but God has been good to us in the meantime - challenging, growing and teaching us to trust him as a family during my ordination training and curacy. Having done the hard work of leaving St John’s behind us, it was a (pleasant) surprise to us that God has led us back to Harborne! We were so moved by the sense of the Lord’s presence with us last week as Bishop Anne came to license Fiona and myself, and to commission Nathan and Josiah in their new roles as well. It feels like we have come back to St John’s during a new season of change and growth and we are very excited by all that God is doing and will continue to do in and through us as a community.

Marcus, our worship pastor, asked me a few weeks ago if there was a specific worship song I would like to have sung during the licensing service. He didn’t particularly find my suggestions of AC/DC’s Back in Black, Take That’s Back for Good or Elvis Presley’s Return to Sender amusing, but they seemed quite apt! I feel I am coming back to St John’s in some ways as essentially the same person who left, however God has done so much in me over the last few years, that in other ways I feel very different from the youth pastor who left (and it’s not just the haircut!).

And yet…it feels like this is not the same St John’s either. As Star Trek’s Mr Spock is oft-quoted (and famously never said) - “it’s life, but not as we know it”. You see it’s clear to us as a family that St John’s has moved on, has changed, has deepened and grown in faith, and is ready for what God has next. This is what drew us to St John’s once again – the unmistakable feeling that God is doing something new and exciting here, with the desire to build for mission and reach out into the community, the city and the play our part in seeing the nation changed.

In the end I chose the song “God I look to you”, which has that wonderful line in it “give me vision, to see things like you do”. That is my prayer for this next season in the life of St John’s – for myself and for us as a wider community centered on Jesus. That we look to God afresh, that we gain his perspective, sense his leading and go where he calls us to go. All so that many others can experience ‘a sort of homecoming’ as they find faith in Jesus.

Jon Tattersall