What3words 4. ///oath.placed.snap

My disconcerting look at W3W and our church building spooked me even more when I found the three words for the area of our baptistry.

Oath Placed Snap . . .

The first two words amazingly appropriate; the third distinctly worrying!

World Cup Blogs 29: Sweden

Sweden put in a, well, Swedish performance in this World Cup.  Never incompetent but never exciting.  Their performance against England was as unremarkable as the Colombians' was eccentric.

I'm not sure what it is about Sweden that makes it so laid back - after all the Swedish winter presumably requires some determination to get through each year.  But laid back they are.  All the passion in our local IKEAs comes from the queuing customers from Britain.

When I visited Sweden some years back I did encounter some laid back elements in things spiritual.  Yet there were exceptions, and one especially glorious one.

I went to a church that caters for people like me by running parts of the service in English. It included Believer's Baptism and the Pastor asked just one simple question of each candidate. It wasn't, in one sense, the most satisfyingly theological baptismal question, yet a strangely fundamental one,

"Will you follow Jesus all the days of your life, and not turn back?"

Each candidate in turn affirmed.  The final candidate was a doctor who had come to Sweden from a difficult African country.  He was also asked the question, but his reply was not "Yes", or "I will". Instead he said, with a big smile, "Yes, of course".

Was he young and naive? Hardly - he was a Doctor. In that man I glimpsed the kind of faith that changes churches, communities and countries. This bewildering, to the outsider, commitment to things not seen is commented on in Hebrews chapter 11;

How did they do it? They saw it way off in the distance, waved their greeting, and accepted the fact that they were transients in this world. People who live this way make it plain that they are looking for their true home. If they were homesick for the old country, they could have gone back any time they wanted. But they were after a far better country than that—heaven country. You can see why God is so proud of them, and has a City waiting for them.

Am I, I ask myself, a competent Christian or an of course Christian?

Sides

Today I was on holiday.

It being Jesus' resurrection day and professing to follow him, I went to church.

One of the churches I went to was populated mostly by people from Africa. I had not been to this church for perhaps 20 years, and then the congregation was almost entirely British, bigger and more boring.

But why would I go to church on a holiday week?  My daughter put in a word of discouragement -"You don't need to go to church, Dad.  You're a Pastor."

A totally deaf and dumb man was asked why he attended church.  Taking his notebook he wrote,

To show which side I'm on  

Headfirst

If you are going to be a Christian, this video reminds you that you may as well throw yourself into it (or rather Him)