The Curious Incident of the Baptist Beer Barrel (and a Bottle of Whisky)

What might I find in the Church recycling bin?

An old sermon perhaps?  There'll have been a few of those that could be usefully composted I fear.  Some old hymnbooks?  No, you're wrong there.  Churches never throw out old hymnbooks.  Indeed, Christian newspapers contain baleful ads pleading with others to take ancient, useless hymnbooks into new ownership.  I assert you are more likely to find a collection of diamond jewellery in a recycling bin than a hymnbook. 

I suppose  in some churches there might be a weekly wine bottle from the Mass.  In a Baptist Church make that an old grape juice carton.

Yet if there is one thing nearly as unlikely as an old hymnbook in Baptist Church recycling it has to be what we found last week.  A barrel full of beer.  And a bottle full of whisky too!

What did we do?  What could we do?  What should we do?  How could such a thing happen?

We did exactly the same thing as we would have done if we had found old hymn books there.  Concluded it could not have been us, an enemy hath done this,  and called the Police.

Spending Review

Blog Action Day

Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of diseases and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Children are especially vulnerable, as their bodies aren't strong enough to fight diarrhoea, dysentery and other illnesses.

90% of the 42,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are to children under five years old. Many of these diseases are preventable. The UN predicts that one tenth of the global disease burden can be prevented simply by improving water supply and sanitation.

 

Every year our church gives thousands of pounds to help directly with building wells for people in Tanzania.  We praise God for our members Andrew and Miriam who have been willing to give some of the best years of their lives to help people have this most basic resource.

Worldcom

Most Sunday mornings I'm booked in to work. That's kind of par for the course for a Pastor!

When I'm not at my Church I'm nearly always at someone else's.  So it was a very unusual Sunday last Summer when I had to transport my daughter to camp and I joined the motorway hordes who believe they have found something better to do than go to church.  One of the larger buildings I passed, and shiny too, was this one.

It was Sunday and it was empty.  It looked very high tech and expensive.  Then again, the company concerned could well afford it as this extract from one of their reports shows . . . 

'For the quarter, the company posted consolidated net income, excluding goodwill amortisation, of $710 million, or 25 cents a share, equalling analysts' forecasts. The company reported net income of $1.3 billion, or 44 cents per share, excluding charges, a year earlier.'

More accurately I ought to state, they APPEARED to be well able to afford it.  This was WorldCom's UK headquarters (a mere rabbit hutch compared to its American cousins).  And yet, as we now know, Worldcom was moving forward in a way analagous with the Sunday traffic on the adjacent M4: at high speed on a road to nothing that lasts.  Now, after uncovering $11 billion in accounting mistatements, the CEO is in jail for a long time.

If only all those people driving past would learn the lesson of Worldcom and go to church.

Mmm.  But that CEO did go to church.  In fact, he taught Sunday School in a Baptist Church.

It is not where I place my bottom that ultimately matters, even when that place is a church pew.  It is where I place my heart.

Digory

Only as a result of my summer holiday in Cornwall did I learn the interesting story of Digory Isbell, a stonemason who, with his wife Elizabeth, opened their little cottage as a preaching station for John Wesley, the great evangelist.

Their gravestone at Altarnun church bears this inscription, which somehow manages to encompass the meaning of Christian marriage, sacrifice, spiritual warfare, obedience, promises and glory.  A kind of introductory course on Christianity written by two lives and a memorial,

Reader, may thine End be like theirs.

From early Life, under the Guidance and Influence of divine Grace, 

They strengthened each others Hands in God, 

uniting to bear their Redeemer's Cross 

and promote the interests of his Kingdom 

in the face of an opposing World, 

thus estimating Scriptural Christianity; 

in Youth, Health and Strength 

their conduct was regulated by its precepts;

in Age, Infirmity and Death 

They were supported by its Consolations 

And in a happy Immortality 

They enjoy their rewards.