Mercy on the 134 bus

A few stops down the road from us one of London's latest knife attacks took place - on a bus.  The next day I sat on the same numbered bus and all of a sudden a 134 bus felt all bad.

The Curate's Egg is famously used to describe the part-good, part bad.

The wit derives from the curate awkwardly answering the Bishop that his bad egg is good in some parts.  Awed by the Clerical Eminence he is too timid to agree that it is all bad.  But a bad egg is, of course, just bad.

Life is a curate's egg of good and bad.  Only in the bad, such as on my 134 bus, it rarely feels that there's another chunk that is/was/will be good.  Only one organ may be diseased but the whole body seems bad;  only one neighbourhood gang is hostile, but the whole place feels unsafe; only one charge relating to one incident is made in court against you but you feel wholly criminal; only one relative is dangerously ill but the whole family lives under a cloud.  And so on. 

Psalm 23 does this in reverse. 

Goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life. 

Part of life is goodness from God.  And the other part?  Well, others may call it badness, the wrong side of the street, a run of bad luck or the going getting tough.  But for the believer it is interpreted as the place of God's Mercy.  Was my bus ride no longer good?  Then it had become a place, for me, of mercy instead.  But no less divine.

Selling Baptist Life: Part 3. Making a Mockery

Having forked out £19 million for a very interesting old religious building, an upscale hotel franchise has to decide what to do with it.  One option is to ignore its history.  Another is to embrace it a little (Bunyan's pristine restored statue - see Part 1).  In the end though, whether we are standing by Noah's half-built ark, by Jeremiah prophesying in encircled Jerusalem or at the foot of the Son of God's cross at Golgotha the unchanging inclination of an unbelieving world is to resort to mockery.

Over the years my sense of humour, not least in churches, has irked some primpy souls so it is from such a personality that I write that the way the hotel has appropriated Biblical themes in the old Baptist House is not funny at all.

I'm OK with The Baptist Grill conjuring memories of several church interviews.  Or even that person who doesn't leave after church with the others but lurks, waiting for the pleasantries to be over so that they can deliver their unpleasantry!

But hereon you may like to refer to the hotel's website (click here), a venue 'Devoted to the Divine.'

'Chef Tony Fleming will preach the gospel for seasonal British ingredients'

'In an irony Oscar Wilde would have appreciated a place of piety has been transformed into a place of decadence'

'The business of L'Oscar is to put every temptation in front of its guests'

'The Baptist Bar: Succumb to Temptation . . . sip on a 'New Testament' cocktail.'

'Perfect for a late night pilgrimage'

All in all it shows up the problem of building religion into stone and not into souls.  For while those who served the Lord they loved in that place are largely gone into His nearer presence where they cannot be mocked, their building and heritage in stone has fallen victim to the mercilessness of a secular age.

Selling Baptist Life: Part 2. Alexander MacLaren

'This Memorial Stone was laid by Alexander Maclaren D.D. LittD., President of the Baptist Union 1875-76 and 1901-2 on Wednesday 24th April 1901.'

Many of us have benefited from the Dr Maclaren's sermons, published with an enthusiasm not so far short of those of C H Spurgeon (though without the same earthy wit).  What would the good doctor make of the disengagement of this building that he witnessed in its proud inauguration?

He might do quite well - here is Maclaren preaching on God's refusal, delivered by the prophet Nathan, to allow King David to build him a house (i.e. a Jerusalem Temple):

Unless we can with our hearts rejoicingly confess, 'Thou art the King of glory, O Christ! Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom,' we do not pierce to the full understanding of Nathan's prophecy.
He, that is Christ, has built the true Temple, in that His body is the seat of sacrifice and of revelation, and the meeting-place of God and man, and inasmuch as through Him we are built up into a spiritual house for an habitation of God. In Him is fulfilled the great prophecy of 'My Servant the Branch,' who 'shall build the Temple of the Lord' and 'be a Priest upon His throne.' In Him, too, is fulfilled in highest truth the filial relationship... In that filial relation lies the assurance of Christ's everlasting kingdom, for 'the Father loveth the Son, and hath given all things into His hand.'

God's work is never ultimately about buildings.

Selling Baptist Life - Part 1: The Statue

Years ago, in the heart of one of the world's greatest cities, there was a building that was used by Baptist Christians.  I could have found that out by research, but the actual reason that I know is that I went there.

It was not a building that was especially encouraging.  It looked and smelled as though the maintenance level was determined by the needs of the budget more than the needs of the premises.  Nevertheless it represented the Great Baptist Headquarters and it was in Central London.  (To be technical it is not in London at all but in Holborn aka London Borough of Camden - the Free Churches have always been and remain almost entirely outside the City of London).

The Grand Vision that bequeathed the building to the current generations of British Baptists was that of early 20th Century Free Churchmanship, the same sense of Grand Vision that bequeathed a beautiful Edwardian church in Muswell Hill where I serve - complete with its galleries that imitate the old Langham Hall where the Promenade Concerts first began.

No Baptist congregation today would build such a chapel, and neither would the Baptist Union of today build the building in Southampton Row.  And so, in 1989, the building was sold. Today it is a hotel. Yet these old buildings are hugely instructive and symbolic and Baptist House is the more so for having been sold.

Here's the outside:

Yes, that's right.  A statue.

It is not very easy to understand a statue on Baptist House.  Baptists, after all, have scant love of statues and even at the height of ecumenism (the movement that blurred some lines between denominations in the hope of a visible unity) Baptists rarely had much positivity toward statuary.

Given the Biblicist nature of Baptists we might have expected a Biblical figure - John the Baptist perhaps?  Instead, leaving Biblical figures to the Catholics and High Anglicans the Biblical Baptists resorted to congregationalist John Bunyan.  He was probably, but not certainly, a Baptist too.  And famous.  But quite what a passer by is supposed to do with him remains a mystery.  Surely not a slight bow?  Not a garland on a saints day?  What, then?

Anyhow, fascinatingly the renovation of the building to an upscale hotel included bringing the statue into pristine condition, such as had not been seen since, perhaps, about 1905/6 as the London grime took hold.

Statues, you see, pose no threat.  Whereas the real John Bunyan was put in gaol, his statue can be secularly renovated without fear that it will ever do harm.  That's why we need living faith and not stonework.