Sunlight

We had an amazing Pentecost morning at church in the sunshine.

One amazing thing (given that this is England) was the sunshine of course.  But also that we were in it, not passing through it on our way to church.  For we were outdoors.

Another amazing thing was the size of the congregation - many times the usual size.  This was because church this once had no label save the name of the town and the verb Love.

Love Wycombe was a momentary release from the silly institutional complexity that passes for the church of Jesus Christ two thousand years on.

Surely none of us who were there - especially in church leadership -  were foolish enough to think that dozens of churches giving up their morning worship to be in one place at one time is the way church is going to be any time soon.

Surely none of us who were there were foolish enough not to think that this is the future when the Head of the Church makes us finally and fully his own.

Ascension

Today  - Ascension Day - the Queen continued her Diamond Jubilee tour.  She was in one of the places I know best and where I was married - Liverpool.  She was also, as it happens, in Albert Dock which is less expected.  This, by courtesy of the amphibious tourist bus/boat.  She may have loved it, she may have just done it.  The Queen's privilege is not to have to reveal such things!

Ascension Day.  Whenever the Queen leaves one of her palaces and attends to the ordinary places of her realms there seems just a little taste of Christmas about it.  We remember how the King of Glory left his throne for a manger, his home for an itinerant ministry, his worshippers for us wanderers.

Yet while the Queen visits us she never becomes a commoner.  When, following her gruelling tour dates, she retires to her palace she is the same Royal Personage that she was before she left.

On Ascension Day we record - we celebrate - that the Man from Nazareth ascended into the Godhead's glory as one of us. As Caroline Noel's poem describes what He did with His name Jesus:

Bore it up triumphant with its human light,

Through all ranks of creatures, to the central height;

To the throne of Godhead, to the Father's breast,

Filled it with the glory of that perfect rest.

Through

Yesterday I was at CCK Brighton for John Turner's thanksgiving service.  John was a truly amazing man of God who served that most famous of evangelical churches with quiet, faithful humility.  As with all the best people, the tributes from his family and his church - though from  different perspectives - described exactly the same man and his life.  In evangelical consciousness CCK will forever be associated with Terry Virgo, but like churches everywhere its blessing includes lesser known saints like John who bend their practical gifting to the service of God's people and their mission.  I never remember seeing John other than calm in life, so he will certainly not be other than calm as he rests in the presence of Jesus! 

I loved he wrote his own tribute to be read out.  I was born etc. etc.  This might seem the height of arrogance but of course he wrote it for the opposite reason - to ensure that the audience of the admiring bereaved gave the glory to Jesus, to whom it is rightly due.

One of the words we were led to in Psalm 23 was the word 'through'. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . . Sure there are valleys.  But the valleys are pathways, not destinations!  Praise God. And death is now but a shadow of its former self.

Lost Lamplighters

Four hundred years ago Thomas Helwys founded the first Baptist congregation in England.  This inspired our Baptist Assembly in London this year.  Helwys wrote of the pre-Reformation days recently past that they were the depth of all darkness, when men might not know what God speaks to them because the Bible, the Scriptures, were not read and available in the language of the common people.  He also bewailed the Established Church of his day - What does it profit the king's people to have the Word of God to hear, and read it, seeing they are debarred of the Spirit of God to understand it other than by the one interpretation by the lord bishops . . .?

Somewhat following Helwys's tolerant ethic (though in truth he was not himself very tolerant of others) the Baptist Union has a minimalistic Declaration of Principle rather than any kind of Creed.  It begins . . .

The Basis of the Baptist Union is: 1.  That our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, God manifest in the flesh, is the sole and absolute authority in all matters pertaining to faith and practice, as revealed in the Holy Scriptures . . .

Having dispensed with the Pope, the lord bishops and an agreed interpretation of most things scriptural it may be thought that the Baptist Union's components have much in common with a queue of traffic in Victoria Street. A kind of intersecting without meaning.  

But no.  We gather under the headship of Jesus Christ.  And the revelation of our one, sole Authority is found in the Holy Scriptures.  The Living Word is the One that I authenticate in the Written Word.  We may differ in interpretation at times but the root of things is Scripture and there alone.

The logical outcome - whether reviewing Spitalfields in 1612, the life of Baptist Christians before or after the Union's founding or the worldwide expressions of Baptist fellowship (for the most part) - is that a Baptist Assembly will be short on heirarchy but in no imaginable circumstance will it ever, could it ever, be legitimately short on the Holy Scriptures.

Last time I was in a big meeting in London it was the Memorial Service for Anglican evangelical John Stott.  On that occasion, notwithstanding his extraordinary life, there was an exposition of the Bible (of course). Peculiarly, as we Baptists stare into a bewilderment of changing circumstances, the Holy Scriptures did not really attend the Assembly.  I defy any visiting Martian to work out that, once the new President has signed the President's Bible, it had any further centrality in the unfolding acts of programmed singing, screen presentations, dance troupes, story-telling talks, lectures and seminars on history or practice, prayers and appeals for money. We movingly 'recognised' ministers (?of the Word) - without using the Word.  We had a 'Futures' discussion. This plenary and axiomatic discussion was conducted almost in its entirety without any reference to Scripture at all.

I do love Tony Campolo's testimonial stories (though I have heard them enough times now that they might legitimately form part of my testimony too . . .), but this is not what Helwys was fighting the king for.  Even in Helwys's day - even for that matter in pre-Reformation England - you could tell stories all day long.  It was for the Holy Scriptures and ordinary people's access to them that our earliest forebears stuck their necks out. For freedom, yes - the freedom to hear and handle the authoritative Word of God.

Reading others blogs I think I am not alone in these observations but I did not make these observations in any consultation with others - it just hit me very strikingly (perhaps the more so because I missed the Communion Service which may have been the exception to this).

I dread future discussions on contentious issues if we do not centre on Scripture far, far more than this.  I understand that at the last Baptist Union Council a creative soul draped a blue cloth down the centre as a symbol of getting in the flow.    If we don't start centering on the only authority that Baptists can legitimately claim to have - the lamp that guides us into the future -  we might find it more symbolic (and it would save money) just to turn out the lights.

Ghost Trains

The Baptist assembly started in London in the afternoon on Friday and this gave me the chance to travel on one of Britain's Ghost Trains.  There are only a few of us sad enough to know they exist and even fewer that ever get to travel on them - but then they are not really designed for travelling on.

The train mentioned in the linked article above is the return journey of the train I travelled on from Gerrards Cross into London Paddington.  To the uninitiated that sounds a normal enough pair of stations but in fact every other train from Gerrards Cross goes into London Marylebone.

After dutifully waiting  for more important other trains (and every other train is more important) the 10:44 sets off in the same manner as dozens of others toward London (except it has hardly any passengers).  At Ruislip it waits for ages for some more of the more important other trains before setting off onto what can only be described as a siding.  Trundling down a single track at a speed familiar to all London road users (but not train travellers) it passes selections of burgeoning weeds, crumbling viaducts, electricity substations, old trackbeds and the back of Central Line surface Underground stations with waiting passengers visibly wondering how that train gets over on that bit by the hedges.  It passes the back of factories.  At times it is joined by important-looking freight lines.  It wends its lonely way through parts of West London that forever blow the theory that London is a city crowded with buildings - there are literally acres of wasteland and this train traverses them all.

It never stops.  (This is simply because nothing else uses the line it is on.)  It also never really starts because the line is not kept in any order that allows any speed.  It feels like it is going further and further into nowhere.

Then.

Then one more green light and it passes the gleaming Heathrow Express train depot.  It kind of springs into life at more than 20 mph and soon is in the back end of bustling Paddington Station.

And off I climb and join the hoardes of people pouring in from Wales, the West Country and from via Heathrow all over the world -  people everywhere from everywhere going everywhere.  Have I really just arrived from one of the most irrelevant pieces of transport infrastructure in London?

If assembly is anything - whether on a Sunday or Churches meeting together - it is a little like that journey.  We feel quite alone.  We look at the wastelands.  We feel we are travelling nowhere with nobody.  And then - and then we are part of the people of God.

What a day it will be when from the world over the people of God gather from their journeys through the wastelands of poverty and persecution and pain.  Ghost Trains are strange things - as anything must be that takes you to Paddington Station and leaves you standing there thinking of the Throne of Jesus and his glory!

Pentecostal Church Worship Leader leads worship for Redeemed Christian Church of God Pastor preaching at Methodist Central Hall

I enjoy the Baptist Assembly.  And I enjoyed the one that has just finished.  Many thanks to those who worked hard to make it happen.  Given that these are tense times of financial shortfall it was especially good that spiritual focus and Christian courtesy were maintained.

True, in Baptist Churches (and others) large and small I attend occasions that are more worshipful, more prayerful, more Biblical, more challenging, more comforting, more encouraging, more friendly, more inspiring or more valuable.  Yet the general sense of the occasion is that the Lord Jesus is at the centre and the machinations of church structural life are at the margins and this is something that many a meeting of church groupings fails to achieve.

This year's Assembly was largely at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, London.  This produced a very different feel to the balmy seaside locations in far flung corners of England that the Assembly usually inhabits.  The sound of police sirens replaced that of seagulls, strolls on the promenade gave way to escalators on the Underground and the proportion of white faces dropped in a minor version of the manner familiar to all who leave little English towns for a daring day trip to the Metropolis.

It was peciliar at times.  One peculiarity, captured in the blog heading, is the strange way that the Baptists themselves became the audience in their own Assembly.  This was not universally true but was a marked feature of the final gathering.  The Baptist Union has shrunk of course since its Edwardian heyday and indeed its current project is to attempt to shrink some more (for financial reasons).  But it still consists of thousands of churches, leaders and tens of thousands of Christians.  Worldwide, Baptist Christians make up one of Christianity's more populous and dynamic branches. Yet assembling British Baptists ended their Assembly at a location and with a worship leader and a speaker all from different expressions of the church.

I'm not sure what I think about this.  (I'm a lot surer about what I think of the second peculiarity but I'll come on to that another day when I've calmed down).  My instincts, like that of most Baptist Christians in the UK, are not very denominational (see earlier post).  Surely, though, Baptists have in their worldwide ranks some people who can lead worship at the three evening meetings as helpfully as the guy who did so.  Yes, I know he went to the Royal College of Music but so does the pianist in our Church Youth band.  Nothing wrong with what he did, but little variance from soft rock convention-style fare (well, perhaps that was what was wrong with it . . .).  The speaker was a national figure of considerable warmth and import but his visiting courtesy probably rendered him far less prophetic than he would have been to his own church grouping if it was in the same state that we are.

Perhaps the difference between visiting artistes and family members is that the artiste performs on the night but a family member behaves with an eye on the next morning.  The worship leader artiste imagines the next conference not next Sunday in Bloglington Baptist Church; the artiste speaker imagines ecumenical networking not Bloglington BC's (and the Blogshire Association's)  inadequacies inherited, incoming or self-inflicted.  Is this why the family counsellor will always make it their goal to get a troubled family talking to itself rather than listening to their outside input?

One connected observation.  If our speaker, worship leader or the Central Hall itself wish to become recognised as Baptist ministries (and no, I don't think this is likely!) they may yet be surprised at the paperwork, committee work, and possible rejection this would entail for them.  I think there is irony in that somewhere.

One of my problems has always been that, even when I'm enjoying myself, I think too much.