World Cup Churches 21. Belgium

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.

When I first visited Bruges (Brugge) I was, like many visitors, attracted to its canals, wonderful atmosphere and architecture.

I was not attracted by the church tower in this photo, made entirely of bricks and soaring far into the sky.  Yet as you see, I photographed it. I did so because it is such a monumental thing - far higher, for example, than Big Ben/the Elizabeth Tower of the British Houses of Parliament and far higher than any other building in Bruges.

'Being monumental' is not a great Christian virtue, and this tower is a monument to the enormous commercial wealth of Bruges mid-millennium.

Like any Catholic Church of size it is also relatively full of monuments (or in Protestant parlance perhaps idols) inside.  Yet this is where this church has a feature that says something significant about the confusion that is Belgium.

Belgium is about a third of the age of this church and is arguably at least two countries still, the Dutch and the French, plus a small German section.  When this Church was built it was part of the County of Flanders belonging to the House of Burgundy. Later it was under the Spanish, later the Austrians . . . you get the idea.

The feature in question, however, is Italian.

Michelangelo's Madonna and Child was the first of his sculptures to leave Italy and the reason it left Italy was the same reason the ludicrous brick tower was built - money.  No Italian patron could match the offer from Bruges and so this amazing statue has stood . . . no, wait a minute, it has NOT stood for 500 years here.

Three hundred years later the French Revolutionaries were in town and it was shipped off to Paris.  There is stayed until Waterloo, when Napoleon's defeat and demise enabled its return.  It lasted a hundred years or so until the Second World War.  

Peculiarly it became a 'victim' of D Day as retreating German forces retreated with the statue in tow.  Where had it gone?  A year or so later it was found in a salt mine in Austria.

Perhaps the lesson in all this is that although this is a monumental statue in a monumental church (The Church or Our Lady [Eng]) there can be relatively few churches or statues that have changed hands or countries as often as these!  Human things are never changeless things.

World Cup Churches 17. Spain

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.

Our lodger looked at the placemat we had put underneath her glass.

"That's where I come from!", she said.

And so it was.  A quite worn down picture of a castle on top of a coastal hill overlooking the town of Denia.

Our lodger came from a Baptist Church in Denia.  But we had heard of Denia many years before when visiting Christian friends in that area of Spain.  While it would be surprising for any smallish Spanish town in a Catholic country long ruled by autocratic government to have a Baptist-type church, it would be a 'given' that it would be likely to be a group in a house, or 95% expats in a hotel ballroom or the like.

That's what made - still makes - the Baptist Church in Denia so amazing.

In the oppressive General Franco years (specifically in 1957), Gerald and June McNeely arrived in Spain as Southern Baptist missionaries from Kentucky.  They served in many ways in an environment that, to put it mildly, was not conducive to evangelical Christianity.

However in the Denia area Spanish Baptists owned a patch of land - in those days almost worthless - with a view to holding Christian camps by the seaside.

Its a long story that can be read elsewhere, but the end result was an evangelical Baptist church with hundreds of people.  A patch of Spain that had an evangelical witness that would have been hard to find in some English seaside towns of those days (and most of them today).

It is a Church that defies sociological trends and cultural explanations and which testifies to faithful ministry and the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit.

My Covid Walk: 5. Lanzarote

Had I walked in one direction during Covid year (and been able to walk on water) where would I have reached?  As we have seen, and will see, not everywhere is an improvement on the woods, parks and suburban streets of North London.  

But had I headed broadly south and a little west I could have reached - Lanzarote!  Now we're talking...

From the Daily Telegraph 

'You can go to the Canaries at any time of year and have good weather more or less guaranteed.  It gets windy sometimes, and storms aren’t totally unknown, but most of the time it is sunny with an average temperature of around 22C. Even when the islands are at their hottest, in July and August, the temperature is usually only in the mid-twenties centigrade. Whenever you go, it is nearly always warm enough to swim and sunbathe.'.

Is it Covid-safe?

The Canaries have had their bad weeks, but things are improving now.

On the Plus Side:

Warmth, seaside, mountains and just a great holiday destination.

On the Minus Side:

Not much to report on the downside.

Has it got a Football Team?

Unión Deportiva Lanzarote are the island's most notable team, but of course the Canaries as a whole have two leading clubs on Tenerife and Gran Canaria who have played at the highest level in the Spanish League system.  Lanzarote has a much smaller population.

Has it got a Baptist Church?

Lanzarote Christian Fellowship seems like an amalgam of evangelical Anglicans and New Frontiers so that seems to land somewhere near me http://www.lanzarotechristianfellowship.com/ There are Baptist Churches on the more populous islands.

Prospects out of Ten:

Ten.  Lanzarote would be a great result from a year's walking.

World Cup Blogs 28: Spain

Writing this on a blisteringly hot day in London, I remember a journey in similar heat to visit this place in Barcelona.


It is impossible not to be impressed by the Nou Camp Stadium. History, in the football sense, has been made here time and again. It is the largest stadium in Europe and somehow creates a sense of excitement even when the only thing that is currently happening is that the grass is growing!

Then there is the Motto.

Most stadia have seats coloured to spell out something - frequently the club's initials or nickname. Not so Barcelona. Instead it spells out, in Catalan, the Motto,

MORE THAN A CLUB

The motto reflects the Catalunyan pride in Barcelona such that the club came to represent the Catalan nation and culture. This was especially true in the days of Franco's dictatorship when most expressions of Catalan culture were suppressed. Supporting FC Barcelona was a political act.  It has continued and been revisited in the Catalan pressure for independence since the last World Cup.

Football - other sport too of course - is often a MORE THAN.  Even this summer, England's unexpectedly extended stay into the semi-finals of the tournament did something positive in the unifying mindset of the country.

Life is never as compartmentalised as we are inclined to think.  Football Teams are never just football teams, houses never just houses, holidays never just holidays, churches never just churches; the weaving of life demands that we seek God's ways in it all.

Sabbatical Picture No 7 Still Standing

Storm Ophelia blew through yesterday amid the inevitable 21st century meteorological hysterics - unprecedented, catastrophic (this is a really pop twitter-ism just now), life-threatening (true - but so is the M25 and so why isn't that in the traffic news?).

On the edge of the North Atlantic people live, and lived, for whom Ophelia was just a noticeably windy few hours.  These standing stones show that like Stonehenge the exposed moors of the Isle of Lewis have more history of settlement than London, though faring less well in the last 2000 years or so.

There aren't many warm, still summer days on the Atlantic coast of the Isle of Lewis.  But that didn't mean that people couldn't be warm and still.  The secret is having a fire (conveniently achieved by walking outside and cutting some peat) and by having very thick stone walls (conveniently achieved by utilising vast numbers of boulders broken off the land by the weather).  Unlike the sad stories currently circulating from the balmy climes of California and Iberia (where wildfires are destroying people, their lives and their homes) the crofters of Lewis lived with storms in houses that in part still stand.

The secret of a peaceful life is not found not in the climate, but in the refuge we have found.  

My life is hid with Christ in God, wrote the apostle.