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As part of its response to Covid-19, CMSI has launched a new series of blogs and updates, that seeks to share positive stories of how the Church cares in the midst of crisis. The series is entitled: Voices Of Hope - stories of light from God's global family.
In this new world of social distancing and lockdown, God's people throughout Ireland have found themselves facing fresh challenges of how to 'be Church' and how to 'do Church'. Local churches have been adjusting to community life without contact and finding creative ways to maintain connections and facilitate worship.
Even if our normal patterns of worship and ministry look very different at the minute, the underlying principles of Church remain the same. As the Body of Christ, we are called to Love God and Love Others. We are to be a source of comfort, hope and healing for those who are living in fear, pain and despair.
In CMSI, we've been thinking about how best we can support the Church at this time. In what ways can we can continue to equip God's people and provide inspiration and encouragement?
One response is to provide easily accessible resources for churches and individuals - things that help people continue to explore how best to Love God and Love Others. So, we've made our Discover course available as a free download and will be doing the same with some of our Children's Resource material. We're also working on some updates and prayer material from our Global Partners, which we will share after Easter.
However, we also want to share some positive stories of light in the darkness.
We're more aware than ever that our Global Partners have much to teach us about how the Church can care for people in the midst of crisis. This is an ongoing reality for many of our partners. We want to tell their stories, and some of our own, in the hope that they will help us lift our eyes and embrace the bigger story of grace and love, of which we are all a part.
In this Voices Of Hope series, we'll be offering new updates from our partners, as well as re-posting some stories of hope that we've shared at events and in our publications in recent years.
Voices Of Hope was the title that we gave to the planned programme of Global Partner visits to Ireland this summer. That programme has been postponed to 2021, but we thought the title would work well for our blog series.
