Just a minute

Sermons don't come much shorter than this.

I would be a rich man if I had been given a donation every time someone made a comment about long sermons in my hearing or reading with the implication that a shorter sermon would obviously be better (see previous blog regarding a disappearing newspaper's editorial, for example). 

As I did not attend the service I cannot confirm directly the success of this attractive advertisement for brevity but I was outside not long before the service was due to commence and there was no queue!  I did some further investigation on the Church's website however.  Websites, for all their techno wonder, are often more out of date than a good old fashioned notice and thus I read an earlier version of the service there:

1.10 pm Holy Communion (said) (lasts twenty-five minutes), with two minute sermon.

Aha!  I have, then, discovered that if I get my sermons down to two minutes I will find that is way too much to bring them in - exactly 100% too much in fact.  Thoughts race round my head - what if the new one minute version is also unsuccessful?  Half a minute - would that work?

The good news is that, given restraining circumstances, a preacher can make a decent fist of it in about five seconds, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved" (Acts 16:31).

Except that we are told that the apostles then spent time telling the family the Word of the Lord.

And if Jesus had not taught all afternoon long there would never have been the feeding of the five thousand who had listened and learned hour after hour.  Indeed, they would have never been fed at all - which is rather the point.

Baptist Times

The news that the Baptist Times is to be published no more after 2011 struck me is a similar way to that described by Catriona Gorton; I'm somehow sadder than I expect to be.  Steve Holmes has written a good blog on why it probably matters.

The Baptist Times has not played a large part in my life.  Apart from a supplement where our Church was featured my only appearance in the paper was for one of my inductions to a Pastorate: a couple of weeks later a more famous Baptist minister (also called John Roberts) arranged for a rebuttal to assure his friends that he had not, in fact, been called to the church that I'd been called to!

Oh, and when I was a student I had a letter published too.  It was about the ecumenical movement and somebody took it and turned it into a pamphlet which was my introduction to the fact that once your words are out there you have little control over them - a helpful lesson ahead of blogging!

The predominant effect of the Baptist Times over the years has been to irritate me.  So, true to form, before I read the announcement of its closure (I never read papers and magazines from front to back and the announcement was near the front), it irritated me again.

Often it is the pretentious letters (and that happened again) but there was also the editorial.  This was mocking refreshments after services and (of course) the length of sermons.  The editorial was headed 'First Impressions' and was alluding to the woeful ones that Baptist Churches allegedly give.  But you know what?  Scarcely ever - in any of the churches I've served - have I heard first-time or relatively new  unchurched people complain about the refreshments (which is unsurprising if you've visited a hospital, travelled on a train or sat in an airport lately).  More astonishingly they scarcely ever complain about the length of services or even sermons.  No, the complaints - if they come at all - come from people who have been going to church for years (and frequently on behalf of their growing children who are in the process of deciding that the Christian faith may not be for them.  I think we Christian parents have to accept that the coffee is unlikely to be the major factor there . . .)

I wouldn't greatly respect these potshots on any week but they had a special irony on a week when the paper itself was seen to be a failed enterprise after 156 years.  Statistically the fall in BT circulation is catastrophic compared to the decline in Baptist Churches.  Maybe if they'd offered coffee/biscuit vouchers and free sermon DVDs . . .

Gold in Concrete

As things turned out (see last week's blog), Jimmy Savile's coffin was encased in concrete to prevent thieves stealing some of his extravagant jewellery which was not inside but might have been (or indeed investigating whether the coffin was real gold . . . Tutanjimmy's tomb as it were.)

All that concrete is going to make it very difficult on resurrection day. 

Like moving a stone I suppose.