Lights for Christ
George Bingham-Davis
Hannah Sandoval talks to us about the Diocese of Sheffield’s Lights for Christ initiative, and taking those steps to have a personal connection with God.
If you’re a part of the Anglican tradition, or you’ve been to a local Anglican church recently, you may have heard about ‘Lights for Christ’. Maybe you’ve heard your vicar speaking about it. Perhaps you’ve seen a new leaflet amongst the other flyers. Maybe the phrase even stirs a memory at the bottom of your mind. Don’t worry, it's not déjà vu! It’s the name of an initiative from the Diocese of Sheffield aimed at helping believers to walk more intentionally with Jesus.
The idea to launch Lights for Christ was born when the Church of England produced a national report for its Dioceses and Parishes in 2017. Titled ‘Setting God’s People Free’, the declaration set out to help millions of Christians live out their best lives as disciples of Jesus, by equipping them with the tools they need to follow God in their day-to-day lives - at work, at rest, at the school gate – wherever they find themselves.
“We’re trying to challenge the idea that faith only happens in church.”
“We’re trying to challenge the idea that faith only happens in church,” Lights for Christ Enabler Hannah Sandoval tells us. “And I think we sometimes need help to recognise that it’s part of our everyday lives. And so we want to nurture the gifts of lay-people so that they can play a full part in their church communities and be a witness to the people they interact with in every area of their lives.”
The Diocese of Sheffield’s answer to this question - how to help people find God in their everyday lives - is the Lights for Christ initiative. The name is taken from the service of baptism in the Church of England, in which the newly-baptised are encouraged to ‘shine as a light in the world to the glory of God the Father’.
“The thinking was that, regardless of which part of the Anglican church you’re from,” Hannah explained to us, “if you’ve been baptised, you’ll have heard these words before, and you’ll have been given this candle that symbolises that you are a light of Christ. Jesus doesn’t say, ‘You could be a light of Christ, you could be a light of the world’: he says, ‘You ARE the light of the world’. It's not an optional extra.”
Read more about Lights for Christ and the Personal Rule of Life in Hannah’s article (read it here on the blog) and visit the Lights for Christ website: www.lightsforchrist.uk
