Fallow

I was looking back a year and noticed that last January I highlighted this beautiful song with Sandra McCracken.  And on reflection it is hard to imagine a song that was more appropriate, a few weeks before we were plunged into the fallow life of Covid.

I love the simple truth of this song.  Not every Sunday is a high experience.  Not every Church is in revival.  There is more to the Kingdom than days of feasting . . .

Prayer and Worcester Sauce

Could you not keep watch with me for one hour? .. Take heed, watch and pray ... Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself ... My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen wait for the morning ... He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty ... They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength.

What are the ingredients of prayer? On the back of a packet of anything, unless it is something as simple as honey, vinegar or milk, you find a list of them. Very intimidating, too, at times. What, for example, will potassium sorbate or pantothenic acid do to me?

Sometimes, like Marcus, you just taste something that is sooo good that you want to know the ingredients in order to make it for yourself. In the days when Bombay was Bombay, Marcus Sandys (we should properly call him Lord Marcus) sat in the sunshine and tasted something sooo wonderful he knew that on finishing his time as Governor of Bengal he must take the recipe back to England. On arrival here he gave the recipe to his local chemists, Mr Perrins and Mr Lea (all right, Lea and Perrins if you prefer). They dutifully and expertly concocted the brew.

The result was awful. Marcus himself declared that the result tasted "filthy". The grim broth was consigned to the depths of the chemists' store.

And that would have been that if it were true that all ingredients are the kind of things that can be listed on a packet. But, unbeknown to Messrs Lea, Perrins and Sandys, there was a missing ingredient.

Liturgies, closed eyes, Amens, bowed heads, bedtimes and chapels. And maybe many other things.  In fact the ingredients may stack up to quite a long and daunting list. Yet perhaps still our prayer life, if not awful, is at least tasteless. Anyway, back to Worcester and the rear comer of the chemists' storeroom.

It was months later that, during a clearout, the two chemists happened upon Marcus Sandys' revolting brew. They intended to dispatch it down the drain but decided first to have one more taste. In that moment Lea and Perrins' Worcester Sauce was born. 

The missing ingredient had been time. Worcester Sauce, like even the simple things - honey, vinegar, milk, fresh fruit or vegetables - needs the added ingredient of time.  

And prayer needs time.

Lightboat

There are three things about a light vessel.

It is not defined by its movement but by its position.  Living in a helter-skelter city in a helter-skelter age it is hard to appreciate the value of being rightly positioned rather than going at speed.  This is the curse of the church too.  We are not a denomination, we are a movement is the Baptist Union's current emphasis.  All this has a point.  But whether the point has much to do with Jesus's instruction to watch and pray is not clear to me.  

It must shine.  Our church's strap line is A Light on a Hill.  Being positioned well (at sea or on a hill) is not much use without lighting the world about us.

It mustn't sink.  If it sinks it is neither a light nor in the right position.  The Bible teaches us to stand firm.  

There is much that the Christian and the Christian Church can learn from a Light Vessel and almost nothing we can learn from a speedboat.  

Enduring Politics

The current politics of Britain are as amazing as anything in my memory: the leader of the Conservative Party exiting when not required to do by his parliamentary colleagues and the leader of the Labour Party refusing to leave when told to go by his parliamentary colleagues.

In Christian Ministry I have never been much attracted to siding publicly with party politics and when I read the rants of Church leaders that do I am even less inclined.  But as David Cameron left Downing Street yesterday - unable to move straight into his £3.5 million West London home because it is currently rented out at £7,800 plus per month, and humming happily as he returned into the PM's house after making his public announcement - it illustrates a vast contemporary trend that stretches deep into the life of modern Britain.  It is a trend further illustrated in the public faces of the referendum campaign who quickly disappeared from view, at least until Boris was resurrected last evening.  When the going get's tough the tough just go.

Into this whirling world of 'I'm off now - byes' has stepped Jeremy Corbyn.

He represents many strange anomalous things over against proper contemporary politics.  Teresa May decimated the front bench of politicians she sat with but (unless another surprise is in store) she will incongruously face Mr Corbyn at her first Prime Minister's Questions.

Quite a lot of leadership theory seems to revolve around instant departure; in the business world as well as politics, in the church as well as in education.  Yet Mr Corbyn, together ironically (he's a republican) with the Queen represents those outdated qualities of sticking at it.  As such they haunt the swirling world of proper 21st century leaders with the potential value of enduring.

Christians may think all sorts of things about all of this.  But at least they should recognise that the apparently quirky quality of enduring is, in their discipleship and in the church, a very divine quality.

Starting Well

A good start is such a sealing happiness.  When we roar off the blocks it is clear to us and to all that we are heading for  the stars.

Take the Church where I am currently Pastor, for example.  It was founded (at the height of British Free Church popularity) in 1902.  I have been Pastor or Interim Pastor of several churches including one MegaChurch.  What they all share in common is that they began in tiny rooms with a handful of people.  The number of people covenanting together to form the first Church Membership was usually in the teens or the twenties at most.

Muswell Hill Baptist Church in its leafy London suburb roared off the blocks with 116 members.  One hundred and sixteen!!  And that's not all.  Just two years later the membership had more than doubled.  After six years it had nearly trebled.  Even a cursory statistical projection would mean that at that rate of addition the current membership would be many thousands. (It isn't).  At that rate of multiplication the membership of Muswell Hill Baptist Church would, many years ago, have included every human being on earth!

It was a good start.

Probably no-one thought about it too much in those heady times, but the Bible is very short of encouragement regarding sparkling starts.  It seems almost obsessed with a good ending.

For example we might think of the story of the sower.  Some seed starts badly but much of it well.  All that matters is the ending, the harvest.  On another track, we cannot understand the mission of Jesus Christ by stopping at Christmas or the Sermon on the Mount.  We may go further: the very definition of a Christian is someone who finishes - Be faithful to the point of death and I will give you a crown of life.  You cannot go through a deconversion.  You can stop professing and this is a mark of non-conversion.

Starting well is never the end of the story.

Para-translation

The Paralympics are a great tribute to Great Britain which seems so much more able to celebrate diversity and integrate disability than many other cultures.  I suspect this has much more to do with its Christian Heritage than the Big Bang that the opening ceremony lauded but, hey.

Samuel Sherechewsky was also suffered from becoming largely paralysed.  He was in the process of  translating the Bible into Wenli Chinese so paralysis was apparently terminal to that task.  Yet he had a typewriter made to construct the characters necessary and with his one useful finger continued the task.

He sat for twenty years.  Of course this is not what was to be expected of the Bishop of Shanghai.  His life that had carried him to China from Lithuania via the United States had certainly not been sedentary before. "It seemed very hard at first", he reflected, "but God knew best.  He kept me for the work for which I am best fitted."