World Cup Churches: 30.Ghana

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Ghana, it must be said, is not short of Christian churches.  In fact, even if Ghana started last year where Saudi Arabia is - with no Christian churches - it would still not be short of churches given the exponential growth it has.  New churches appear every Sunday.  It is an example of why, despite the miserable decline in many European countries, the Christian Church across the world continues to grow.

Spoilt for choice (or more accurately overwhelmed and bewildered by choice) I am going for Action Chapel International for this World Cup Churches blog. This probably has more to do with the founder-pastor Nicholas Duncan-Williams (or perhaps rather his current wife) than with the church itself, which is 'just another' vast Ghanaian church (with a Communion table that might trump the ones in St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican).

Speaking of Trump - here he is on the front row in the rather more humble (at least in size) St John's Episcopal Church, Washington, prior to his Inauguration, with Melanie at his side.

There on the platform is the Archbishop, Patriarch, Founder-Pastor and General Factotum of Action Chapel International, headquartered in Accra, Ghana, leading prayers.  Those of us that have not heard of Nicholas before are probably revealing more about ourselves than about him by not knowing him.  

How does he end up in St John's on that auspicious day?  I am not privy to that, but it has something to do, I feel sure, with his wife.  Rosa Whitaker is American, but not just any American (with apologies to the others).  The CEO (and founder of course) of TWG (The Whitaker Group) a US based African Investment enterprise she has served different Presidents, represented the US in Trade negotiations and agreements across Africa yet also worked in various Christian enterprises including Mercy Ships International and Pan African TV.

Or to put it another way, to step into the vast auditorium of ACI is possibly to fail to grasp the reach of this and some other African churches across the world where Western churches have often lost their voice.

Whether Nicholas prayed for the right things - and whether his prayer was answered - I leave to the wisdom of Almighty God.

World Cup Churches: 26. Cameroon

Continuing a series of blogs heading round the 32 qualifying countries in the 2022 World Cup - I will pick out one church in each one.  I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking.  This is an exploration not a recommendation! To see all in the series select the label 'World Cup Churches' below.

Cameroon, with its mix of French and British colonial influences and accessibility in Central Africa, has a vast array of interesting churches.  I've gone topical with the one that appears on this old stamp, but which continues to exist today.

The story begins in relatively straightforward fashion.  St Demetrius church in Cameroonian capital Yaounde represents something of an outpost of the Orthodox Church in Africa.  Sub-Saharan Africa is dominated by Catholicism or Protestantism, but the Patriarchate of Alexandria in Egypt sees Africa as its own.  It has some justification for this given the antiquity of the See of Alexandria (which is just about in Africa - top right corner of course) and predating the Schism with Rome, let alone Protestantism.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine.  No - wait - that must belong somewhere else in another blog.  

But no.  St Demetrius has also kind of been invaded by Russia - and in the mind of the Patriarch of Alexandria so has the whole of Africa. 

If you know a little about Orthodoxy you'll know it is deeply cultural, political and hierarchical.  Patriarch Kirill, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, has gained infamy for his explicit cheerleading of Vladimir Putin in general and his invasion(s), most lately of Ukraine, in particular.  Both Kirill and his Church are fabulously rich and able to project their power quite easily.

So when the Patriarch of Alexandria supported the relative independence of the Orthodox Church in Ukraine from Moscow, the Russian Orthodox Church declared an Exarchate in Africa.  In other words, made Africa a part of its 'world'. Orthodox outliers, such as priests in Cameroon, who had been expected to work voluntarily under Alexandria have been invited to Moscow for training and paid handsomely to be Russian Orthodox rather than Greek Orthodox.

And St Demetrius and its Archbishop find themselves facing a powerful invader in an ecclesiastical imitation of the people of Ukraine.

Our Church Flags: 8. Zimbabwe

 

What is utterly fascinating about the flag of Zimbabwe is not its colours or general design.  It is the bird over to the left.

When I first saw this flag a few years ago I assumed that the bird depicted flies in large flocks across the land.  But not so.

In truth this is likely to be based on a bird once in the area, but the actual symbol is derived from a sculptured soapstone bird found in the ancient Great Zimbabwe site.  A statue not a creature.

More interesting still is that this bird has achieved something that little else could ever hope to do - it has figured both in modern Zimbabwe's symbols and in the symbols of the independent apartheid Rhodesia that declared UDI from the British.

The sculptors who long ago formed the soapstone birds could hardly have believed that they would provide the only point of unity between two regimes of sworn enemies.  We never do know what our legacy will truly be.

Our Church Flags 5. Angola

 Continuing reflecting on the flags of people who have come to our church in London

Some flags are boring, some are cheerful, some are weird, but the flag of Angola seems to me to be, well, scary.

It owes its general form to those who fought in its civil war, and to the supporting Soviet Union.  But as Angola reinvents itself as a tourist destination I can't help thinking it is missing a trick or two with the flag.  It looks like some grim European industrialised nation instead of an expansive sunlit African coastal country.  The black stands for Africa, the red (as usual) for blood shed in the fight and the peculiar reinvention of the hammer and sickle representing agriculture and industry.  The latter might have worked for the USSR but Angola is notably poor at both agriculture and industry which makes it a little ironic.

And my mind turns to church and the way we are quite inclined to dress up the good news in ways that are well-intentioned but not very inviting.  

Maybe we and Angola could learn together.

My Covid Walk: 6. Benghazi

If, instead of walking the North London suburbs and parks day by day the past year I had set off south and a little east and kept walking (across the Mediterranean too) I could have reached . . . Benghazi.  My first speculative Covid Walk took me to potential danger in Mariupol (Here).  Benghazi, for all its Mediterranean breezes and sunshine, is a great deal less safe as my destination.  Let the UK Government explain . . .

The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) advise against all travel to Libya. This advice has been in place consistently since 2014. If you’re in Libya against this advice, you should seek to leave immediately by any practical means.

All travel to, from and within Libya is at the traveller’s risk. Local security situations are fragile and can quickly deteriorate into intense fighting and clashes without warning.

In August and September 2020 both Tripoli and Benghazi saw demonstrations against deteriorating living conditions and corruption. Pockets of violence were seen, with reports of civilians being shot and wounded.

Here, then, is the confirmation that travelling in one direction is not much use if it takes you to the wrong destination.  Atheist readers please consider.

Is it Covid-safe?

Benghazi is not the kind of place where this is the main issue - but that's not because its safer.

On the Plus Side:

Weather (but Lanzarote was good too!) - and fantastic history, now not easily discoverable on the ground in these disrupted times globally and locally.   In fact, if all went well, it is by far the most interesting place of my six walks so far.  

On the Minus Side:

Civil unrest erupting at times, guns that are used too much and general lack of security, especially for someone who's walked in from England.

Has it got a Football Team?

Several, who play in the Martyrs of February Stadium (Even the football stadium's name hints at troubled times!). Al-Ahly have been very successful in the Libyan Premier league.  However unsurprisingly the LPL has not successfully finished all its recent seasons - and not because of Covid-19.

Has it got a Baptist Church?

Probably not.  Unlikely to have an internet presence for obvious reasons.  I could visit the Coptic Orthodox or a leftover-from-Italian-colonial-days Catholic church.  Simon of Cyrene came from near here and in the early years of Christianity this was one of the most Christian areas on the planet so it represents quite a sad story.

Prospects out of Ten:

Two.  Just too dangerous right now - but it would be a great city to see if it was safe.

Mary Slessor

Today is the anniversary of the death of Mary Slessor in 1915.  Brought up in a poor family that had been impoverished by death and her father's resultant drinking, Mary was a child worker in a Dundee jute mill.  

Her only escape was her weekly Sunday and church.  Unlike the escapes that 21st century life offers, this one inspired her to look to do great things for God.  In time, armed with the toughness bred by her story, she was an unlikely lone female arriving in West Africa at a mission station as a nurse.  The rest, as they say, is history. 

In her home city of Aberdeen, in Dundee, on Scottish bank notes, but especially in Nigeria (as now is) Mary Slessor is recognised as the means of a revolution in the dignity of women and children - and the means of thousands of lives being protected.  Her fiery, Christ-inspired anger at the killing of mothers of the stillborn, of twins, of the mothers of twins, transformed a society.

Her appointment as the first female British magistrate in any territory advanced the value and dignity of women the world over.  

And, as we almost tire of pointing out, this was and is best achieved, by grasping - as Mary did - the Creator's dignity of his creation and the power of God to change a society by the agency of godly (not religious) people serving him and others.  

As Mary wrote to one of her prayer partners,

"I have always said that I have no idea how or why God has carried me over so many funny and hard places, and made these hordes of people submit to me, or why the Government should have given me the privilege of a Magistrate among them, except in answer to prayer made at home for me. It is all beyond my comprehension. The only way I can explain it is on the ground that I have been prayed for more than most. Pray on, the power lies that way."

World Cup Blogs 18: Nigeria

By the time I'm blogging about them, Nigeria are heading home.  Though, like Morocco, they hail from Africa and are out of the World Cup, the differences are stark.  Not least when it comes to the manifestation of the Christian faith.

Whereas the number of Moroccan believers equates, in known likelihood, to not many more than the Moroccan football fans that headed to Russia, Nigeria is a little different.

On returning home Nigeria will resort to playing internationals back in their national stadium, which holds just over 60,000 people.  Or they might play in their southern, second national stadium, the second largest in the country, which holds 45,000.

This second stadium has the same capacity as the Deeper Life Church that opened a couple of months ago.  If you spare a few minutes to watch this video I can contribute the following: 

There might be a thousand times as many people at that church, but our church can match them for the complication of parking for the service . . ..

World Cup Blogs 17: Morocco

In an earlier blog I told how my wife attained Morocco in her workplace sweepstakes. (Workplace sweepstakes are a vanishingly rare experience for Baptist Pastors so I have to live my excitement through hers . . .).  Not for the first time, Morocco have failed to set this World Cup alight - they have prevented my wife catching any gambling addiction bug -  but they do provide a happy byway for my blogging.

Morocco is obvious enough as a nation - it's on the North African Mediterranean coast spilling round the corner to the Atlantic coast.  Isn't it?

A couple of bits of what looks like Morocco are in fact part of Spain (Yes, Spain is in Africa too).  But then, moving round to Morocco's southern border we come to . . . um . . . Morocco.  Or is it Western Sahara?  On that issue many lives have been expended.

There is, then, a vast but sparsely populated chunk of Atlantic Africa which may or may not be a country, two countries or part of another country or some such combination.

Western Sahara does have a team (they also have a stadium but that's in the part most certainly claimed by Morocco so unusable to them).  Like many similar awkwardnesses, Western Sahara are part of the CONIFA group.  Here you will find Tibet, Northern Cyprus, Zanzibar and the like.  These nations (or otherwise) are the refugees of International Football.  This is typified by this year's CONIFA World Cup which was hosted by Barawa (an area in Southern Somalia).

Perhaps you are wondering how Barawa found the stadia in their war-torn bush country to host the tournament.  The answer is - they hosted it in and around London.   Here's Northern Cyprus playing Tibet - in Enfield.

You thought you understood Morocco?  You thought you understood International Football?  Human beings have made the world a complicated place. London somehow always ends up involved it seems to me.

Mandela

It is a rare thing for quite so many people to be honouring one human being in his death as are now lining up to pay tribute to Nelson Mandela.  It is easy to be cynical about this when no politician can afford to be other than fulsome in their tribute of the man.  If anything resembling this honour had been afforded him in his imprisonment he would have been released far more quickly.  In other political times equally heroic people have passed unnoticed into oblivion.

 

On the other hand, his story of forgiveness and reconciliation (not tolerance, as some have tried to suggest - don't western politicians love that word?) is a heart-warming and affirming one to celebrate and to imitate.  This is humanity at its better end.  When we see it cheered it cheers us all.

 

Humanity at its most humane is an awesome creation.  It is easy to focus on the times when the animal world seems to hold higher virtues and standards - and frankly in South Africa that has probably been sometimes true.  However, the image of God has vestiges enough in the human frame that we see glimpsed many lights in a dark landscape and, like the Christmas lights in December, they warm our hearts.  We pray for our leaders and so now we thank God for what he showed us in Nelson Mandella who will remain a lasting hero for so many of us.  Admittedly that is partly because he was outstanding for doing so often the right thing after suffering the wrong thing.  How nice it would be if that was normal instead of shockingly good.

 

I thought I'd wait until the third day to write about Nelson Mandela.

I think he is a true hero of humanity.  But on this third day as we await his funeral and know that what the apartheid regime couldn't defeat death has, I would not want anyone to mistake who is humanity's only truly victorious hero.

And he's living today and is still forgiving and reconciling human beings day by day.



Backflips

Our church has a limited platform area.

There are two reasons why I have never done back flips as part of a service.  The first is that there is not enough room.  The second - let the reader judge whether this should be the first - is that I can't.

 

Undeterred by my poor advertisement for such an activity we had a back flip or two on Sunday evening with the third visit to our Church of the African Children's Choir (more specifically the 39th African Children's Choir).

 

What a fantastic evening we had! It is one of those evenings that makes me prouder of my faith than my country.  I should be this anyway I know.  I just cannot see how the primary school pseudo-nativity or the Cathedral School Evensong training can hope to produce the dynamic spiritual life that these choirs always display.

 

What I loved was the way that they made US feel special.  This was quite an achievement on their part.  I notice that among other things the Choir, as part of a long, long tour has sung the National Anthem at an Atlanta Braves home game which must make Sunday Evening at Union Baptist Church feel, well, intimate.

 

They have spent a lot of their recent weeks on tour in Florida.  Which must make High Wycombe feel, well, grey.





And as if that wasn't humbling enough, they leave us (and our 168th Church Anniversary weekend) to go to Malmesbury Abbey which was founded before England and over 1300 years ago.

 

 

So, what made last night special was certainly nothing that we brought to the party.  We'll have to put the specialness and the origin of back flips down to God and Africa.

Fabrice

When a 23-year-old Premiership footballer collapses in front of tens of thousands of people, a game is abandoned and teammates call for prayer for him following a technical death from cardiac arrest the worlds of ministry and sports chaplaincy feel very close together.

Fabrice Muanga's life, we all agree, is more important than his footballing life.  Football, even at its highest level, is nowhere near as important as life and death.  This one man's trouble has stopped thousands in their tracks and brought an encouraging humanity into the business whirl of top-level football.

But.

The beauty of what has happened in response to Fabrice's heart attack is a reason to think harder about humanity than we first imagine.  In this connection it has been passingly commented that Muanga's father came to Britain as a refugee from Congo.  From this upheaval Fabrice grew into a fine student as well as an excellent footballer.  And if he'd stayed in Congo?

Over ten years of the internal strife in that land it is estimated over five million people have died and hundreds of thousands have been raped.  Under the floodlights one man's hurt was shared by thousands but in the Congolese rainforests thousands' hurt has, too often, not been observed or shared by anyone.

This is not a fair world, though sometimes (as here) gems of kindness gleam within it.  We are about to relive the God-Man's journey to a hill where a crowd watched, a Saviour died, but more truly he was the one who was watching them - "Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing".  Never a truer, kinder, or more heartfelt observation by one man. 

By one man watching a dying crowd.

Formidable

Our oldest Church member died recently.  The word most of us could agree well-described her was the word formidable.

You don't get to live to 102 years old without having some determination, and Evelyn had plenty of that.  And then some.  Even at a century old she was still, well, formidable.

Which brings me to Melville Beveridge Cox.

On the face of it he was decidedly not formidable.  He set out as a preacher in New England in 1822 before contracting tuberculosis.  You don't usually live to 100 after having TB.  He gave up preaching .

He moved and began working in a bookstore.  He edited a weekly Christian magazine.  He married.  That might be calculated to turn a sickly man into something a little stronger.  He and Ellen had a baby daughter, but not long after her birth both Ellen and the baby died of cholera.

The weakly widower volunteered for missionary work in South America.  This was refused but instead he was assigned to Liberia, the African state being formed from freed slaves.  There were doubts that this not-at-all formidable man would last long in Africa.

He began as quickly as he could with a church and two mission stations further up the river.  By now he had malaria, and 15 weeks into Africa he was dead.

This story of hopeless weakness is formidable too, however.  His story had so inspired other, stronger people that even as he died five further missionaries were en route to take up and expand his work.

In truth, all human formidability is to be found in God alone.

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.