Holiday Pics 5: Beautiful Redundancy

Spread along the coast of West Wales are the remains of seaside mills.  The corn was brought from the nearby farms and the many tiny harbours, in the manner of Cornwall, provided an efficient sea route out for the milled grain.

Today they provide great photo opportunities.  I doubt that they will ever be called into action again, but they tell a story of times gone by.

This particular mill was on the bay near the village we stayed in.  In the village itself were two other buildings that were no longer in use - a Baptist Chapel and a Methodist Chapel.  There were no places of worship, as there were no mills, that were still in use.

So do redundant chapels also reflect changing times and times gone by?

Well, no.  Whereas the products of farms nearby have new and better methods of refinement, transportation and therefore business, the redundant chapels tell another story.  The village has just as many souls in as ever it had, God is still the God who the villagers once worshipped, Jesus story of salvation is still the same, the 21st century souls in the village are all, like their forebears, going to pass into judgment and eternity.

There is nothing improving or efficient about redundant chapels.  They are just a community's death-mark.

Glorious Ruins

I've been sorting through my ridiculously large collection of photographs, a product of the digital age's invitation to wastefulness.  Though I have a moderate interest in history it is hardly my obsession and so I am amazed to find how many photographs I have that look something like this . . .

It is a picture among many pictures that I have of ruins. 

In my defence, I have rarely found myself alone as I have stood seeking to get the corner of the broken buttress or the top of the long-empty window frame in my composition.  Ruins, and Britain has a seemingly biased love for them, are somehow glorious.  So much so that, for example, I am not as sure I would have taken this picture of the significant but unpretentious abbey if it were still complete.

Glorious ruins was the picturesque phrase coined by Francis Schaeffer to describe humanity in this fallen world.  I think that is very good.  The vestiges of greatness are there.  Yet history cruelly draws our gaze to horrific wonders; isolated or even systemic stories of infanticide, a fate only narrowly escaped by the infant Lord of Glory in Herod's jurisdiction.  There is no human aspect that does not show brokenness as well as beauty, where the glory is the glory of ruins.

It is the peculiar work of God that makes humanity's ugly story somehow glorious.  Not so that we will see our belonging in the ruins but that we may see a portent of our undeserved glory there. 

I thank Thee, Lord, that here our souls

Though amply blessed,

Can never find, although they seek

A perfect rest;

Nor ever shall, until they lean

On Jesus’ breast.

A Son's Tribute - War

This picture comes in the BBC history section with the heading 'When Ken Dodd learned Welsh'.

 

We do not choose the when and where of our birth and my Dad was born in a most unfortunate situation from the point of view of Secondary education.  At about the age that we were exercised about 'which school is best', Ken Dodd, my Dad and thousands of others were evacuated from Merseyside to the perceived safety of Wales.

 

This may or may not have been a good idea by the Government though it had the obvious difficulty of breaking up the family.  Families still break up today of course for different reasons.  I was very blessed to be part of a family that was not broken up and this is another reason to be grateful to God for my Dad.  I have met plenty of people whose lives can recover the sense of stability that I enjoyed as a normality.

 

Governments do affect us.  The death of Margaret Thatcher has brought this starkly to light.  The wartime Government is regarded as heroic (presumably, as in the manner of a successful football manager, because it won).

 

It wasn't so heroic for my Dad though.  Having sent him to Wales away from danger but also family it decided it was safe to return after all.  So back he came to his home round the corner from a great shipyard - just in time for the actual blitz.  His teenage equivalent of my football on Saturdays was climbing around bomb craters in the middle of Merseyside.

 

We do well to trust in another Power than that of the State.

The Census

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world.

So the Christmas story was enabled by an Imperial Roman census.

The UK Government takes censuses too.  The one taken in 2011 disgorged some of its results just in time for Christmas.  Christian leaders have been hurrying to reassure the world that the results pertaining to the Christian Religion are really not bad at all despite appearances.

 

On TV a Venerable Lady from Norwich decried the statistic that it was the most godless place in Britain by beamingly reporting hundreds of people coming through the cathedral every week.  (In a misplaced cliché she added, "If this is the most godless city I dread to think what is happening in the others".  A sound bite that went a bit wrong I think).

 

A fellow Baptist or two have rejoiced that this indicates 'the end of Christendom'.  This is a little unfortunate as Christendom means something like 'where Christianity prevails' but I think they mean it is good that the country does not think itself Christian when it isn't.

 

You may want to look away now because what follows is going to be long and not pretty.

 

Detail from The Census in Bethlehem - Pieter Bruegel

My view is that these census results are appalling and nationally frightening. I want to love my country but this makes me very, very sad and ashamed to be British.  Yet it makes me even gladder that the grace of God reached me in this increasingly godless mess and has given me hope and a future.  It makes me ever more despairing of the prevalent evangelical idea that if we just change the morning service Tescos will empty and heaven will be filled with Britons.  We wouldn't have to pray, or weep, or do anything too heavy.

 

Rejoice at the end of Christendom? It is hard for me to understand how people that are consciously distancing themselves from the word 'Christian' are more fertile Gospel soil than those who do own the name.  I am not tee-total so I am a nominal drinker of alcohol.  In practice I go through many a year without drinking any alcohol at all.  If I now announce I am tee-total would that make me more likely to become a genuine drinker? 

 

Baptists should be careful of scorning these stats for another reason.  In the same ten years as covered by the census the Baptist Union reported that its total members, young people and children fell by - you've guessed it - 10-11%.  The census is telling our non-Christendom story too.

 

Hundreds visiting the Cathedral in Norwich? This hopeful anecdote seems to me to be a failure to grasp the significance of a fall of four million self-named Christians (11 percentage points) in just one decade.   Four million is half the population of London (or nearly all the population of Scotland).  Four million is way more than a normal national Sunday morning's Church attendance.  Numbers shuffling round a cathedral or dancing at a clappy conference are neither here nor there in comparison to this. 

 

Perhaps, like the Jerusalem temple in Jesus' day, the grand stones of the cathedral gave the Venerable woman a sense of unchanging confidence.  In which case (and before she becomes a bishop) she had better wake up.  59% is a truly amazing statistic.  When was the last time that less than 60% of Britons would have identified themselves as Christians?  We don't know.  But it was certainly well before Norwich Cathedral was built.  Maybe when Augustine began his Gregorian mission in the late 500s Celtic Christianity had not permeated to 60% though it certainly would have done in many localities.  And ever since those mid- to early first millennium days most people on these islands have, rightly or wrongly, said of themselves that they are Christians.   It is hardly an appropriate response to the turning back of a 1500 year identity in just ten years to celebrate hundreds of Cathedral visitors.

 

Thank God that these statistics came out in Advent.

 

I am part of a nation whose numbers shame us and our Redeemer.  I am also, by grace I believe, part of a number that cannot be subjected to a census.  Abraham couldn't do it when he looked up at the stars (Genesis 15:5), John couldn't do it in his heavenly vision (Revelation 7:9).  Even if not one single Briton followed Christ (as was once the case) the Church continues to be built until the Day.  I must not let my nation shape me.  I must pray and work for the glory of Another Country and a greater King.

 

Think of it like this.  Today the traffic in Wycombe was awful.  Roads that I familiarly purr along were clogged with the busyness of Christmastime and heavy rain.  Sometimes progress was OK, often it was very slow, occasionally no progress at all for a minute or two.  But I never went backwards.  And home was in no way diminished by the slowness of the journey.

 

Day by day, the Lord is building his Church to its completion, its homecoming.  It would be wonderful to progress quickly.  It is frustrating, almost despairing, to see progress stall to a halt in my particular district.  But day by day, year on year God fills more places and the Great Homecoming nears.

 

As I often think on my holiday journey to Cornwall in the summer - I'm fed up of this road  - but I'm not going to give up until I get there, because slow progress to vacation in Cornwall is a whole lot better than fast progress round the M25 to nowhere in particular. 

Off-Road

Some years ago I visited Rhode Island and saw this historic Church - the first Baptist Church building in America.

Yesterday we had an awayday for our leadership at this Baptist Chapel:

It's not very big, and its not as old as the one in Providence, Rhode Island.  More pointedly it is situated behind a Post Office and a Public House.  Is this typical of the Brits, we ask?  Americans (even early ones) give themselves a prominent landmark, we put ourselves out of the way in, effectively, someones back garden.

History tells a rather different story.  Chapels were built off road because in their founding day their founders were lucky if they were allowed to build at all.  Indeed, there were times when, in England, a body of believers outside the establishment could only meet - as would today be true in some other lands - in private houses.

It isn't getting any easier to witness publicly for Christ in 21st Century Britain.  But it's immeasurably easier than it's been for many of our forebears and many of our brothers and sisters through the world. 

Time

The British (though strangely no individual Briton I have met) are quite keen on ancient peculiarities.  We had a dose of them at the Royal Wedding recently when the Archbishop, dressed in finery that threatened to outshine the bride but bespeaking some other century, led the couple in thees and thous, past a betwixt and a wedlock and generally reminded us of the glories, if such they be, of ancient Church of England liturgy. 

You can get an ancient peculiarity daily in Oxford Cathedral (which, were I an Anglican, would be my diocesan mother church).  For Oxford cathedral keeps Oxford time, not Greenwich Mean Time or British Summer Time like the rest of the nation.  So the 11:00am service starts at 11:00am Oxford time, which was five minutes later than London.  So, unless you've adjusted your watch, it will be 11:05 to you.

It's all a bit of odd fun, isn't it?

Mmm.  Yet in the field of human life there are few things more important than than marriage, the public commitment of a man and a woman to stay together faithfully until parted by death.  If there is something more important it might be a service of worship at which humans gather to address, and be addressed by, their God and Saviour.  So why, I wonder, are these things the ones that are anachronistic?  Why make these the museum pieces?

Although, of all the things that happen in Oxford, only the worship of almighty God is stuck in this time warp the real peculiarity is this - that worship of almighty God is the only thing happening in Oxford that will also happen in a New Order of things when time itself is history . . .