Reverend Ron Rye, Wyoming Baptist Church
There are moments in pastoral ministry where you realise that renewal rarely arrives in the ways you expect. We often look for dramatic change, clear breakthroughs, or visible success, yet much of what I have come to recognise as “new life” is quieter than that.
Over the past season, I have seen renewal take shape in conversations rather than crowds. I have watched people begin to speak honestly about their struggles, sometimes for the first time, and in doing so, discover that they are not alone. I have seen small acts of faithfulness—people choosing to remain, to forgive, to serve, to pray—begin to reshape the life of a community in ways that are not immediately visible, but deeply real.
At the same time, there have also been moments where that same life has become more visible. We have hosted a women’s conference, reimagined our summer programmes, welcomed new leadership through the hiring of a CMC, and seen opportunities open up through support such as a CBOQ grant that helped us serve our wider community through a summer carnival. These moments matter, not as measures of success, but as signs that something is growing—expressions of a life that is taking shape both within the church and beyond it.
The hope of the resurrection has, for me, become less about a single moment of victory and more about an ongoing pattern of life. Paul writes that “the same power that raised Christ from the dead is at work in us” (Ephesians 1:19–20). That is not simply a statement to be believed, but a reality to be lived within. It invites us to ask whether we are looking for God only in what feels significant, or whether we are willing to recognise His work in both the quiet and the visible.
Perhaps the challenge of Easter is not simply to celebrate that Christ is risen, but to consider where that resurrection life is already present among us—in the small acts we might overlook and in the larger moments we are tempted to claim as our own—and whether we have the eyes to see it, and the faith to step into it.
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