World Cup Churches 24. Croatia

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.

For this blog  I'm pleased to move from buildings to people of faith: Zagreb Baptist Church shares some of its testimonies online:

ZORAN: I was so dissatisfied with life that at one point I even thought about suicide. Yet I did not have the courage to do it. Thus began my search for the answers to questions about life that had plagued me. My friends and my environment didn't help me much because they mostly avoided those questions and told me that I was still young and that I shouldn't bother with all that. Dalibor the computer salesman]  gave me the New Testament and a few books which I started reading. I sought the truth with a truly open and sincere heart. And then everything suddenly opened up. It was enough for me to read the first few pages of the Gospel of John when my hair literally started to rise on my head and I suddenly realized who Jesus was and what he wanted from me.

STEPHANIE: After years of spiritual death, over a period of months, I began to think about the truth of what others were telling me about Jesus. Nothing happened abruptly - it was as if Jesus' gentle voice was slowly calling to his lost sheep. My spiritual skeleton slowly began to gain flesh and skin, and God then breathed His Spirit into me. My perspectives miraculously changed.  Now I understand that living with Christ means living with full lungs, that it is a life in which there is no emptiness because He is always there.  When I look back I see that I am truly born again, because the old me certainly couldn’t have imagined that I would be what I am and where I am now.  This is my greatest testimony - I was dead, but Christ brought me to life!

TAMARA: As I grew, I faced many things apart from the fact that my parents were separated. I have even attempted to commit suicide in the past as an attempt to punish my father for what he had done.  I was a very angry person and for everything I blamed my father and I blamed the woman he was with. 

Soon after I gave my life to Jesus, I was in Church one day and a preacher said “there is someone who is filled with hatred towards another person, God wants to set you free today”  I grew so angry at that very moment and I was offended by Jesus that He would even suggest such a ridiculous thing. As I struggled to let go of what happened to my mum, somehow I felt like my forgiving was letting my mum down, but He told me vengeance is His.  Then the Lord asked me to go to this woman’s house and I said to God “ I really hope I heard right because I don’t know what I’m doing here.” How do you walk up to someone's house and say “I forgive you" when they never apologised to you?  As she opened the door I felt something like a fire fill my body and my body just leapt forward, and I just hugged her. I remember as I turned and walked away that I had never felt joy like that in my life. For 14 years I had been imprisoned and that was my first moment of freedom. I felt like I was walking on air. I couldn’t stop smiling and laughing, I couldn’t imagine that I could be this free. I felt like I had not been living up until that moment. It’s 10 years later and I can tell you God has blessed me so much.

World Cup Churches 23. Morocco

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.

Morocco, like its North African neighbours, is not an easy place to be a Christian.  Having said which, it is probably currently the easiest setting outside Egypt (though Egypt is far from easy) because of its latest change of government.  More business-orientated than Islamist, it pays less stringent attention to issues around Christian life and witness.

Tangiers, the city over the water from Gibraltar, has a considerable Christian history, though one scattered with persecutions and problems.  In 298AD Marcellus, a Roman Centurion, was put to death because he refused to join in the sacrifices to Roman gods in celebration of the Emperor's birthday.  Others appear to have been killed in the city.

Tangiers' colourful history has seen it belonging to Portugal, Spain, England and as an International City.  Mostly, however, since the 8th century, it has been an Islamic city and there have been various persecutions as typical of North Africa.  But also, as this church indicates, times of generosity and accommodation.

Set in beautiful city-centre parkland it could easily be assumed this is an slightly strangely whitewashed English parish church perhaps on the south coast of England, benefiting from the historic land-owning established church. 

But of course, no.  The generosity that gave St Andrew's Anglican Church its remarkable setting was that of the then King of Morocco.  The complex relationship of generosity and antagonism between Islam and Christianity would provide never-ending study material, not least in Tangiers.

From the earliest days of Jesus and the apostles there are so many stories of unlikely helps in the work of God.  You'd almost think God was bigger than the Church . . .

World Cup Churches 22. Canada

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.

My disclaimer 'I am not going to choose only churches that are to my liking' has a special emphasis this blog as we look at a church in Canada.  Canada is not really an Association Football nation - Ice Hockey is the thing.  And this blog's church is not really a church - but anyway, here goes . . .

The United Church of Canada is the largest Protestant Denomination in Canada, albeit shrinking like the Arctic ice pack.  Formed chiefly of the Methodists and Presbyterians it began life as a large, generally evangelical and evangelistic denomination in 1925.  In the years following World War II and especially in the 1960s the denomination embraced ever more liberal positions on everything from sexual ethics to basic Christian doctrine.  It prides itself on its breadth rather than its truth, though of course not every church or church member is as spiritually weak as the central core.

Yet even when you officially believe next to nothing, there is always someone who can believe less.  Welcome to West Hill United Church, Scarborough and Margaret the Minister.

In charity, I may find Gretta (Margaret) a charming companion over a coffee.  What has made her famous/notorious (since 2001) is that she is an atheist - and remains as minister of her church (albeit it on extended medical leave at the time of this blog). She has come out and, er, not come out.

Now we're not talking about someone with a few doubts, or to whom God is a mysterious inspirational life force.  Neither are we talking about a building intended for a Humanist Assembly or a Universalist 'Church' with a cloud of unknowing where God may or may not be.  We're talking full-on North Korean, Richard Dawkinesque atheism: atheism, if you like, with attitude in a church building of Canada's largest Protestant denomination.

There was, some time ago, a debate in the United Church as to whether it was suitable for Gretta to continue as a minister, but in the end it was felt that it was okay. (Breadth, remember?).

You may wonder how, without hypocrisy, Gretta could lead Christian hymns and prayers to God-Who-Is-Not.  Be assured that she does not - and her transparency about her unbelief is far from hypocritical. Familiar traditional hymn-tunes have words of self-realisation and community discovery, and prayers are quiet reflective thoughts to ponder.

Hypocritical it isn't, but the pointlessness of it all is painful to consider - an unbelief system offering nothing to someone seeking God: a religious setting and format offering nothing to a thinking Atheist. It shares its spiritual prospects with Canada's prospects of winning the World Cup - about zero.

World Cup Churches 21. Belgium

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.

When I first visited Bruges (Brugge) I was, like many visitors, attracted to its canals, wonderful atmosphere and architecture.

I was not attracted by the church tower in this photo, made entirely of bricks and soaring far into the sky.  Yet as you see, I photographed it. I did so because it is such a monumental thing - far higher, for example, than Big Ben/the Elizabeth Tower of the British Houses of Parliament and far higher than any other building in Bruges.

'Being monumental' is not a great Christian virtue, and this tower is a monument to the enormous commercial wealth of Bruges mid-millennium.

Like any Catholic Church of size it is also relatively full of monuments (or in Protestant parlance perhaps idols) inside.  Yet this is where this church has a feature that says something significant about the confusion that is Belgium.

Belgium is about a third of the age of this church and is arguably at least two countries still, the Dutch and the French, plus a small German section.  When this Church was built it was part of the County of Flanders belonging to the House of Burgundy. Later it was under the Spanish, later the Austrians . . . you get the idea.

The feature in question, however, is Italian.

Michelangelo's Madonna and Child was the first of his sculptures to leave Italy and the reason it left Italy was the same reason the ludicrous brick tower was built - money.  No Italian patron could match the offer from Bruges and so this amazing statue has stood . . . no, wait a minute, it has NOT stood for 500 years here.

Three hundred years later the French Revolutionaries were in town and it was shipped off to Paris.  There is stayed until Waterloo, when Napoleon's defeat and demise enabled its return.  It lasted a hundred years or so until the Second World War.  

Peculiarly it became a 'victim' of D Day as retreating German forces retreated with the statue in tow.  Where had it gone?  A year or so later it was found in a salt mine in Austria.

Perhaps the lesson in all this is that although this is a monumental statue in a monumental church (The Church or Our Lady [Eng]) there can be relatively few churches or statues that have changed hands or countries as often as these!  Human things are never changeless things.