Christianity from the 43 bus: 10. The Leysian Mission

Continuing a journey through London on the 43 bus route - with a Christian eye.  The whole series is viewable on the '43 bus route' tag below.

The 43 heads out of the centre of Islington down City Road towards the City of London.  City Road is probably most famous for Moorfield's Eye Hospital, one of the world's major centres for eye surgery.  These days the road is populated with many contemporary high-rise glass buildings, but at its end comes this building.

Looking the part as a rival to Harrods it is an eye-turning place despite being near central London's many grand exteriors.  It was The Leysian Mission.

The Leys School in Cambridge was a Methodist School designed to prepare non-Anglicans to enter degree study at Cambridge University - something only made possible in the 1870s.  Graduates of this elite school set about the improvement of the wretched social needs of London's East End.  Originally deep in the East End, this was the second, grander property, at the very edge of the East End but wielding a wide influence.

The story is even better than the building, but perhaps inevitably it is today apartments.

World Cup Churches 18. Costa Rica

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.

The Church of the Nazarene, Cabecar Indigenous Region lacks the grandeur of the great Spanish colonial-era cathedrals and municipal churches of Costa Rica.

It is a reminder that 'Church' is many things, and in many parts of the world a dynamic ministry among the poorest of people.  The Cabecar, a large people group forced by colonisation into the southern mountains of Costa Rica, are considered to be the nation's people group with the greatest level of poverty - 94% against a national figure of 20%.

Yet among them Christians have sought to work.  Journeys involving hours of jungle and mountain tracks have been made to run missions and provide welfare and education to improve the lives of the Cabecar people.  Churches have been formed to indigenise the work and in this picture of the baptism of a Cabecar believer as part of the 10-year-old Church of the Nazarene we see the Gospel building churches not with stones but living stones.

Baptists for a pandemic: 3. Joseph Binney

Augusta, Georgia' figures in the modern media each year.  It's golf course annually hosts one of the four great world Tournaments.  It is known for its pristine beauty - a far cry from a windy links course on the coast of Britain, for example.

Augusta is, for America, an old city.  It sits on the border of South Carolina.  In the mid 1800s it was part of the increasing influence of the Baptists, though also pointedly in their North-South divisions regarding slave ownership.

Pastor Joseph Binney and his wife arrived at its First Baptist Church because they had been unable to stay in Burma (today, Myanmar).  Ill health had cut short their missionary endeavours.  

The safer environs of Augusta did not turn out to be safe however.  In 1854 an epidemic of Yellow Fever arrived in the city.  You can be vaccinated for Yellow Fever today - but there is still no medical cure if the mosquitos win.  

Deaths were reported, and the people of the city fled.  The Binneys left the city but lived nearby, Joseph returning each day to minister to the sick and dying.  The missionary who had been defeated by ill-health, was found in its midst.

Almost inevitably, Joseph eventually caught the fever.  

He survived.

He not only survived, but recovered sufficient strength to leave Augusta - and return to Burma as a missionary!

Here was a man, a family, whose calling was stronger than their challenges.  May we be like them.

Mary Slessor

Today is the anniversary of the death of Mary Slessor in 1915.  Brought up in a poor family that had been impoverished by death and her father's resultant drinking, Mary was a child worker in a Dundee jute mill.  

Her only escape was her weekly Sunday and church.  Unlike the escapes that 21st century life offers, this one inspired her to look to do great things for God.  In time, armed with the toughness bred by her story, she was an unlikely lone female arriving in West Africa at a mission station as a nurse.  The rest, as they say, is history. 

In her home city of Aberdeen, in Dundee, on Scottish bank notes, but especially in Nigeria (as now is) Mary Slessor is recognised as the means of a revolution in the dignity of women and children - and the means of thousands of lives being protected.  Her fiery, Christ-inspired anger at the killing of mothers of the stillborn, of twins, of the mothers of twins, transformed a society.

Her appointment as the first female British magistrate in any territory advanced the value and dignity of women the world over.  

And, as we almost tire of pointing out, this was and is best achieved, by grasping - as Mary did - the Creator's dignity of his creation and the power of God to change a society by the agency of godly (not religious) people serving him and others.  

As Mary wrote to one of her prayer partners,

"I have always said that I have no idea how or why God has carried me over so many funny and hard places, and made these hordes of people submit to me, or why the Government should have given me the privilege of a Magistrate among them, except in answer to prayer made at home for me. It is all beyond my comprehension. The only way I can explain it is on the ground that I have been prayed for more than most. Pray on, the power lies that way."

World Cup Blogs 7: Croatia

Every football fan knows one thing about Croatia - the national football team have the most amazing shirt design - a red and white chessboard!

As I work through this year's World Cup nations alphabetically I choose instead to reflect on Croatia being the first country I've come to which is directly mentioned in the Bible.  (By directly I don't mean by name but by the province it was at the time of the New Testament letters).  Here it is, in Romans chapter 15, verse 19 . . .

17 Therefore I glory in Christ Jesus in my service to God. 18 I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me in leading the Gentiles to obey God by what I have said and done – 19 by the power of signs and wonders, through the power of the Spirit of God. So from Jerusalem all the way round to Illyricum, I have fully proclaimed the gospel of Christ. 20 It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known, so that I would not be building on someone else’s foundation. 

Illyricum, which today's coastal Croatia then was, had an early opportunity to hear the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.  How did that happen?

It happened because it was Paul's ambition (20) to preach the Gospel where Christ was not known.  The good news of Jesus did not spread around the world by default or by means of a virus.  The change that Jesus brings is enough to drive people to the places and to the people that would otherwise be left to live and die in lives that flourish only in the manner of most nations' transient World Cup dreams.

A Son's Tribute - Caravans

Although this picture comes from a generation earlier, it depicts the kind of setting in which my Dad began Christian ministry as a Wickliffe Preacher.  Three young men, a caravan plastered with big texts and a drive from village to village and including market towns and occasionally urban centres with missions to teach the children about the Gospel.

Today's children see many more words than these.  Why, as I write this they are busy tweeting them to one another, looking at them on endless websites and generally being bombarded by the messengers of the global village.

 

We smile at the change.

 

The quality of the media is vastly different but the message carried is vastly inferior.  Windows 8 has introduced no new input that improves on THIS IS A FAITHFUL SAYING THAT CHRIST JESUS CAME INTO THE WORLD TO SAVE SINNERS.

 

Sure, we can save documents, blogs, digital images, spreadsheets and the like.  But is there a new, improved way to save sinners?

 

One way to look at this in the 21st century is to say that we no longer interpret behaviours as sin.  That is to miss the point.  Sin is not the human way of looking at human behaviour, it is the revealed divine way.  Like the arrested bloke's, "Get yer 'ands off me. I ain't done nuthin' wrong." this self-described innocence needs some higher corroboration.  The Bible makes it clear enough that we cannot change the way God looks at our sin.  The Gospel declares that God has.  He has sent a saving Messiah - Christ Jesus came to save.

 

Throughout his life my dad lived with people gently observing him as pleasantly quaint and earnestly unnecessary.   It is the evangelist's lot.  But they were wrong.  He was witnessing to the only solution to the only long term problem we humans face.

 

 

 



March 17th as seen during our morning service . . .

One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic

All who are part of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ are stirred by the solemn description of the Bride of Christ penned long ago at the early Councils of the Church.

 



 

ONE - the mocker may, with some apparent justification, scorn this idea yet it remains in all our hearts a conviction that there will not be two, three or 3003 churches that meet their Lord on the Day - just ONE.  We struggle to express this very often and we do not agree who is in and out but the Oneness is not a question.

 

HOLY - here the mocking observer points to any number of ecclesiastical political evils throughout history, to glaring inequalities, to cultures of abuse and who knows what else.  The mocking observer ought to pause however for without God there is no holiness and none of those 'sins of the Church' are sins at all.  The holiness of the Church is a gift from above, variously grasped and expressed in too lesser a degree but never absent and firmly destined for the Bridal Day.

 

CATHOLIC - at which the Protestant mumbles worriedly yet should not.  The church is not a race or a tribe, a nation or a structure - it is catholic, global, entire, planetary, multi-communal, multi-era, uniquely inclusive.

 

APOSTOLIC - the Church is not simply Jehovah's Witness (to quote Isaiah), or Red Letter Christians (to quote the equally-well-meaning Tony Campolo) but is derived from the teaching of the Apostles and the full appreciation of the meaning of incarnation, substitution, resurrection, ascension and finality of the Messiah.

 

Wow.  In just four words - so much!!! 

 

But not enough.

 

When Professor Whitley lectured at Oxford a century ago he was brave enough to point out that in this crucial formulary the early Fathers forgot something.  It was not a minor omission.  As we all know, omissions are harder to spot that mistakes.  But this omission was a very big mistake because it is the omission of what is, arguably, the Founder of the Church's only commission.

 

We believe in one, holy, catholic, apostolic, MISSIONARY Church . . .

 

As my previous blog sadly implies (and as has been my experience and perpetration as a leader), conciliar meetings of varying branches of this Church continue to damn the missing word with faint praise, never denying it while never promoting it to a place where it is held tenaciously as the essence to which other tenets must often bow. 

Chu Chu Church

I imagine myself on a railway station.  This particular railway is only one of several that link the our region with the Destination City.

The railway that I travel on (my kind of ticket is not accepted on the other lines) has introduced a new way of operating from next summer.  The track systems  manager and the operations manager will lose their jobs and a new manager will look after everything (if she/he can).  Sometimes the thirteen trains a day will be reduced to six because there will probably be less drivers.  There will certainly be less maintenance engineers.  We are assured, however, that the railway will in fact be far more efficient at moving people to the Destination City.  I wonder how assured I am by this assurance.

Then there is the Big Railway down the road.  With its 42 trains a day (admittedly using some very old and varied but decorative rolling stock)  there is really no competition in this region.  It does have problems with the public however as it forbids women train drivers (though they can sit in the cab). 

Meanwhile, in the Destination City, the railways' purchaser, owner, inventor and builder looks at the diminishing passenger numbers from this particular region - which is his great concern.

 

 

Buttons

That morning Hudson Taylor had donned his customary frock-coat, as befitted a Victorian English gentleman, and started another day of brave, even reckless, Christian ministry. Here he was in the depths of China, a place forbidden to foreigners, far beyond the reach of consular support. Yet as he preached in town after town along the inland waterways he found that his foreignness guaranteed him an audience. And that, after all, is what every preaching missionary needs.

Irritatingly his foreignness seemed to be more alluring than the message itself. And on this, as it was to be, historic day pairs of eyes were transfixed upon him. Before the question, the wonderfully polite man had explained that they understood the usefulness of the strange things (buttons) on the front of his jacket. They were there to go through the holes and somehow hold the clothing together in the cold wind. But, the foreign teacher was asked, "What can be the meaning of those buttons in the middle of the honourable back?"

A lesser missionary might have laughed off the question about his decorative buttons. Hudson Taylor was not such a man. The question haunted him as he made his way to the next location. He resolved to dispense with the niceties of western regalia and adopt clothing, and habits, that were the best suited for his purpose of pointing the people of inland China to Jesus.

What a different place the world would be if Christians and their Church had more frequently dispensed with ornamental buttons!

St Andrew's Day

I've spoken in a lot of places.  In front of thousands, hundreds, dozens and less than ten; in freezing cold and searing heat, before vagrants and fabulously wealthy people.  More stories than a blog could ever cover.

But one place I spoke I will certainly never forget and Scotland's day - St Andrew's Day -  is a special day to remember it.  It was February, it was cold and windy and it was Howmore Church on South Uist in the Outer Hebrides.

To the west of Howmore Church there is a small area of moorland, a beach and then the North Atlantic Ocean.  Some thousands of miles later comes northern Labrador and Hudson Bay.  To the east there is not much either, as the picture shows.   Yes, that building is Howmore Church.

Amazing to think, on St Andrew's Day, that the news of Jesus the Messiah that Andrew first shared with his Galilean brother Simon (later called Peter) reached as far as Howmore!  The ends of the earth indeed.

Formidable

Our oldest Church member died recently.  The word most of us could agree well-described her was the word formidable.

You don't get to live to 102 years old without having some determination, and Evelyn had plenty of that.  And then some.  Even at a century old she was still, well, formidable.

Which brings me to Melville Beveridge Cox.

On the face of it he was decidedly not formidable.  He set out as a preacher in New England in 1822 before contracting tuberculosis.  You don't usually live to 100 after having TB.  He gave up preaching .

He moved and began working in a bookstore.  He edited a weekly Christian magazine.  He married.  That might be calculated to turn a sickly man into something a little stronger.  He and Ellen had a baby daughter, but not long after her birth both Ellen and the baby died of cholera.

The weakly widower volunteered for missionary work in South America.  This was refused but instead he was assigned to Liberia, the African state being formed from freed slaves.  There were doubts that this not-at-all formidable man would last long in Africa.

He began as quickly as he could with a church and two mission stations further up the river.  By now he had malaria, and 15 weeks into Africa he was dead.

This story of hopeless weakness is formidable too, however.  His story had so inspired other, stronger people that even as he died five further missionaries were en route to take up and expand his work.

In truth, all human formidability is to be found in God alone.

Blog Action Day

Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of diseases and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Children are especially vulnerable, as their bodies aren't strong enough to fight diarrhoea, dysentery and other illnesses.

90% of the 42,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and unhygienic living conditions are to children under five years old. Many of these diseases are preventable. The UN predicts that one tenth of the global disease burden can be prevented simply by improving water supply and sanitation.

 

Every year our church gives thousands of pounds to help directly with building wells for people in Tanzania.  We praise God for our members Andrew and Miriam who have been willing to give some of the best years of their lives to help people have this most basic resource.

Norway

There are plenty of reasons for the British to be envious of the Norwegians. The kind of landscapes that we travel to the corners of our island to see are found everywhere in Norway. When it comes to Oslo, the capital city, you have on the face of it an orderly, clean city typical of Scandinavia yet with the added attraction that it is based in a pretty fjord of its own. So the view from one side of the City square (think Trafalgar Square in London perhaps) is this:

That it is a fantastic land is not very surprising because Norway is also one of the richest countries in the world, courtesy of oil wealth and a sensible attitude to saving it. You should probably stop reading now if you are in the USA or especially the UK - Norway has a national debt of (wait for it) nil. That is, it doesn't have a national debt.

And it gets better (worse if you're looking from the UK): Norway also has - and expects to continue to have even this year - a budget surplus of 11%. Got that? It takes in 11 % more money than it needs as a nation and has no debt. Americans and Britons alike will never live to see the day when that is true of their nations. Indeed the Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund is one of the world's largest - possibly second largest - and yet the nation has less than 5 million people.

So what interested me most about my recent visit to Norway, apart from trying to keep my eyes from watering at the prices of everything, was that there is another story. Being on Sabbatical, I was not there to ferry across fjords, even if I could afford it. Rather, it was to taste the Christian ministries and their settings.

And out of those visits came these kind of pictures. One taken from the doorstep of an Oslo Church after the man who had been there for me had left for his next appointment.

Another taken from round the corner of a Baptist Church in as seedy a city street as you would find anywhere.

They won't make it on to the 'Visit Norway' website. But, if you imagine the scenes and add in some menacing groups of people hanging around (whose pictures I felt would best not be taken!) you will be reassured that humanity can make a mess of things in the face of even the greatest natural and national advantages.

And these were the places that Christ's people were ministering. Even if the sordid streets were a shock, that God's people were there serving was not a surprise!

Peru

Great to read the blog of our Church's link missionaries the Williamson family. You can find it here:

http://williamsonsinperu.blogspot.com/

Scripture

This month we celebrate the translation of New Testament into the language of the Gabri people in southern Chad.

Our church has sponsored this translation by supporting the couple who have devoted ten years to the task. 138,000 words later the people of Kimri and its surrounds can now read, in their own tongue, the ancient words that resound with God's own heart, words of life, words of hope.