Christianity from the 43 bus: 4. Single Please

Continuing a journey on the 43 bus with an eye on Christian connections.  For other blogs in the series click on the '43 Bus Route' tag.

Leaving Muswell Hill for Highgate the 43 bus joins the A1.  Though its numbering may make this seem like an ancient road into London this is not the case - the Great North Road of olden times is now, in London, the A10.  That is significant because the current A1 owes its existence to the developing new areas north and west of London and into that area was planted Cholmeley Hall.  A fellowship that has had multiple identities, starting as part of the Brethren, and various names - it is today Highgate International Church (much easier to pronounce correctly than Cholmeley [Chumly]).

A striking thing about this church in its heyday - the 1920s (as Highgate and Archway developed) - was its singleness.  It was much remarked upon at the time.

Whereas the nearby areas were developed for families where the husband commuted into London, Cholmeley Hall had this astonishing profile: 253 members; 193 single.   In an era free of divorce, and a new residential area largely without widows and widowers, that is a phenomenal statistic.  Of course it was no doubt somewhat self-perpetuating as a place suited to finding a suitor.

Today there are many University churches with just that profile, but here among the families of North London was an unlikely reflection of that, and possibly an early version of a Christian Dating App.

World Cup Churches 20. Japan

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.

Christianity has made very little headway over the years in Japan.  Comparing it with other Eastern cultures like Korea and China make its resistance to the Gospel more surprising.  It is not as if Japan is entirely unable or unwilling to let the outside world in.  Just not Jesus.

The Church has done better than Jesus in one remarkable way.  Among many examples, I offer you St Bath Church in the Centre of Osaka.

At first glance this looks like an English parish church.  This is not entirely surprising because the stained glass windows are indeed from a disused British church or chapel. But on a second look there doesn't seem much between the happy couple and the windows.

Let's step outside  . . .

It kind of looks the part and doesn't look the part somehow.  And St Bath? Who was he or she?  What denomination is this?

The answer is the commercial denomination; it is a wedding chapel built to resemble a Western Protestant Church, squeezed between the outline of its related hotel.  Or as the blurb puts it:

'Reaching out to your heart the minister, choir, organist and violinist play in harmony.  Surrounded by the 18th century stained glass windows passed on to us from the United Kingdom and antique pews we deliver a unique impression and happiness to the bridal couple and guests.'

The point being this is one of many such chapels throughout Japan, a country where Protestant-style weddings are far more popular than Shinto ones, yet where the Christian Church has never made great inroads with the Gospel.

Perhaps the ultimate expression of the old truth that you don't become a Christian by getting married in church.

The Abode of Love

Valentine's Day brings us to but one subject - love. 

London has an endless supply of weirdness for those who have a mind for such things. On Valentine's Day I can think of no more deserving place to ponder than the Georgian Orthodox Cathedral whose vast steeple overlooks Clapton Common, these days surrounded by synagogues of the Stamford Hill Jewish community.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, this was not always a Georgian Orthodox Cathedral.  Just one look at it tells you it was formerly a Church of England parish church (or just possibly a Presbyterian, Congregational, Methodist or less likely Baptist imitation of one).

Wrong.

Notwithstanding its appearance, this building has never been any of those kind of churches and has written into its former trust that it can never be used by the Church of England or the Salvation Army.  In the early 21st Century it passes for just another old religious building, but at the end of the 19th century it was, to put it mildly, the centre of attention.

This 'Ark of the Covenant' as it was called, was the London location of the Agapemonites.  Together with a vast communal estate in Somerset and various minor outposts in Britain and Europe it represented the influence of an End-Time preacher who centred his followers on the Song of Solomon.  Mr Prince's followers included several wealthy Victorian merchants and several more Victorian single and separated women. 

Like countless before, contemporary with and following his day, Mr Prince gathered a following of those who knew they would not die for they were the last generation.  As it was to turn out they did die and so did he, but that was just the start: into his shoes had stepped the ample figure of Mr Smyth-Pigott, formerly of the Anglicans and Salvation Army (note above) under whose charismatic auspices this phenomenal building was erected.  And later besieged by rioters.

The Abode of Love (the community) and this building (the Ark of the Covenant) gave the Victorian press plenty of juicy speculative material of preachers with multiple wives (spiritual brides) and various goings on imagined.  Well, not entirely imagined because a spiritual bride fell pregnant . . .

As the Church of England worries itself sick about same sex marriage it might look a little closely at a building from which it is banned in Upper Clapton and figure that even a church with a high steeple is not enough to give spiritual dignity to an entity that has misunderstood the kind of love the church should really be talking about to the world.

All Souls

This is an interesting day to me this year, the year in which I laid my Dad's remains to rest.  Mostly but not exclusively in Catholic settings this is All Souls Day, or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed.



There is unquestionably a fellowship between the Church on earth and the Church at rest but this has been an awkward fellowship to define.  It has alarming, spooky elements when Spiritualists or those inclined their way seek to speak with the Dead.  It is only a little better in the one way communication by which the Saints are allegedly spoken to in prayer (without any assurance that they can hear and no Bible promise that suggests they can).  In evangelicalism a peculiar two part problem arises when the Faithful Departed are dispensed with in somewhat the way of any text containing the word Thou, i.e. they are fine but they are history.  This, however is countered by a hope that in the sweet by and by we will meet on that beautiful shore and reconstitute our families.

This latter hope has always bemused me given that my Grandad was also someone else's nephew or Grandson - so how would that work?  Jesus was asked a similar question about married reunion - what happens if a wife has remarried six times?  Who's she married to up there?  Jesus answer is authoritative and exactly explains what the future state is all about - one family in God not Mr and Mrs, Father and Son.

Or to put it another way, today a son celebrates not a departed father but a departed brother in Christ; a widower not a departed wife but a departed sister in Christ. 

There are other times when old relationships, contingent to this world, may be reflected upon with tears or cheers.  But once in a while it is good to remember our soul-fellowship; to remember that relationship in baptism which binds us eternally; to remember the Lover whose love modelled the best of our earthly love without ever being matched down here; to remember that unity in Him that holds us tighter to him and to each other than any imitation found in the relationships recorded on birth, marriage and death certificates. 

This is the fellowship planned and formed and preserved by the love of Jesus.

A Son's Tribute - Holding Hands

My Mum and Dad often held hands.  Not just at the beginning of their courtship but right through to their Golden Wedding Anniversary and several years beyond.  People sometimes remarked about it, for plenty of married couples don't hold hands much anymore.

 

Perhaps the most significant thing is this though: they were holding hands at the end of their marriage.

 

Just about everyone holds hands at the beginning.  As the old Prayer Book has it -

 

Then shall they give their troth to each other in this manner. The Minister, receiving the Woman at her father's or friend's hands, shall cause the Man with his right hand to take the Woman by her right hand, and to say after him as followeth.

 

Even a humanist celebrant in the Registry Office will instruct similarly.

 

There are no such instructions for the end of a Marriage though.  Many marriages in my parents' lifetimes have ended with a shout, an angry letter, a slammed door or at the very best a formal handshake as the solicitors finish their mediation of a tolerable settlement.

 

As my Dad lay dying, thus ending his marriage as he vowed he would - 'til death do us part - my Mum was kindly brought to his bedside and there, at the moment of his death (and the death of the marriage) she was holing his hand.

 

Of course it is fanciful to imagine that such a beautiful ending can always be secured in a world of sudden accidents and striking illnesses.  But for all of us who have made those vows as we held hands on our Wedding Day it is far less fanciful to hold to the determination that at least we should want to hold hands when our marriage ends. That was what the vow meant, wasn't it?



The Bitter Fruit of Freedom

As a Baptist Christian I celebrate the freedom of our Parliament to make law on behalf of the ordinary people.  It was not a freedom inherent in the place or in most historic government.

 

The emperor or monarch could make the laws.  While it is hard to see how this policy could have survived into the 21st century it took the spilling of blood and many an imprisonment to make it happen when it did.

 

Every November 5th we are supposed to remember that outside powers have longed to hold sway on this island, powers that include religious ones.  The people thus could have been enabled to do only what those authorities told them to do.

 

Or it could have been the landowners, or the men, who made the laws.  For years it was. The majority of people thus excluded by poverty or gender from representation.

 

Or we may have had the Third Reich.  What would a provincial government of that have looked like in Westminster?

 

And so to today, when our Parliament took upon itself the role of improving God's idea of marriage.

Freedom brings responsibility.  Before and again, like many a teenager leaving home, those who have a sense of authoritative freedom have disregarded and will disregard any limitations that might have previously constrained them.  Who cares what the Queen thinks?  Who cares what the Bible teaches?  Who cares what millennia of marriage has meant and its place in our story?  Who cares what the Church thinks?  Who cares what the Pope thinks, or the Islamic world thinks?  We can make our own, more perfect world.  Look, they think, we just did.  'An important step forward', David Cameron (and Ed Miliband) called it.  At least we can agree that it is an important step.  On that the redefiners and the Creator of marriage do agree.

 

We celebrate freedom not because it gets things right but because it reinforces human responsibility.  There will be no Britons of this generation who can look God in the eye (if that were possible) and say, "They messed about with your idea of marriage".  Do we seriously think that this Parliament would be redefining marriage if 90% of the voters were strongly opposed?  If a United Kingdom Marriage Party had been formed and UKMP had 55% in the opinion polls would the Bill voted on today have received the same support?  We all know that exactly the same MPs in exactly the same Parliament would be whistling a very different tune.

 

Freedom means this is our Parliament, our decision, our law, our redefinition, our responsibility and either God sits in his heaven tonight toasting the enlightened way we and David Cameron have improved on His original idea or the Bible is true and He's starting to look away until he calls us to account later.

Duke

Congratulations to the Duke of Edinburgh who was 90 yesterday.  Is he really 90?  I fear he looks no older than me . . .

He tried to sound 90 in his interview,

"I reckon I've done my bit so I want to enjoy myself a bit now, with less responsibility, less frantic rushing about, less preparation, less trying to think of something to say," he said. "On top of that, your memory's going - I can't remember names and things."

In the light of which it is somewhat strange that his wife bestowed upon him a new name/title to remember - that of Lord High Admiral, a title that was hers until yesterday. 

Isn't that marriage?  You get to your 90th birthday and for a present the wife decides you should be doing one of her chores to help her out . . .

Franklin

Approaching the Royal Wedding fixes our thoughts on Westminster Abbey and marriage.  A marriage with an extraordinary end is commemorated there and today is important in the story.

Among the very many monuments in what is our National Shrine is a monument to Sir John Franklin - 'This monument was erected by Jane, his widow, who after long waiting and sending many in search of him, herself departed to seek and find him in the realms of light.'

Today is his birthday and his birth is a lot easier to understand than his death.  For sure his remains are not in the Abbey.  Indeed they are somewhere quite unknown and very, very cold.

Born on April 16, 1786, John went to sea at age 15 with Admiral Nelson. He survived the Battle of Copenhagen then returned to England only to leave again, this time on a voyage to chart Australia. He next joined the Battle of Trafalgar, and later the attack on New Orleans.

He fell in love with Arctic exploration, and when the ships were forced to return to England, he joined another expedition to chart the northern coasts of Canada.

One of his crew wrote of him, "We have church morning and evening on Sunday. The men say they would rather have him than half the parsons of England."

In 1845 he sailed from England to look for the Northwest Passage and to explore the Arctic. Two letters came from him, then news ceased. Years passed.  His beloved wife Jane spent a fortune searching for him. Finally a boat was found frozen in the north complete with two of the crew's skeletons  - and Sir John Franklin's Bible.

Psalm 139.9,10 was underlined: If I. . . dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me. 

A hand that reaches further even than the hand of a loving wife.

The Food of Love

I know Valentine's Day is important but I also know that jet engines are important.  It doesn't follow that I understand them or know what to do when one comes near.  (Actually when a jet engine comes near it is a good idea to duck . . .)

I read a survey that explains what women don't want for Valentine's Day

Don't buy clothes.

So I didn't buy clothes!

Don't cook a heavy meal.

So I didn't cook.

Don't treat her as though she's any other woman.

So I didn't.

Instead, we went shopping in the local supermarket for our week's groceries . . .

Breaking

Philip Yancy tells the story of a guy who told him over dinner,

"I'm going to leave my wife and children for another woman.  Will God forgive me?"

He answered,

"He will, but you may not want Him to"

In the moment that one of earth's relationships is selfishly broken - the more so with earth's deepest relationship of marriage - the initiator is, consciously or unconsciously, destroying their relationship with God.  "Inasmuch as you have done it to one of these, the least of my family, you have done it to me"

That's what the wise Philip Yancey saw and, as the story is reported, his prophecy was proved sadly right.

I will

In the past week I have had time with families where people have just been married and where others are celebrating anniversaries and others are facing life-threatening illness together.  In tribute to them all and in gratitude for the marriage God has given me I offer J R Miller's moving description of a precious gift mistakenly maligned.

Don't Say