If there is one book

"If there is one book that you should buy at this year's assembly it should be 'Deep Church'," so said Rev Norman Graham of Denny Baptist Church, and so I did. I left assembly with this one new book under my arm and today I finished reading it. It is a great book, really thought provoking, extremely challenging; for anyone looking to ask questions about why our church does things they way they do them and how they can do them differently, it is a gem.

A few highlights would be comments on the Christian's view of the arts and culture. No one taught me a theology of that in church or at college but now with a daughter whose life is filled with the beauty of music and plans a career as a performer, some simple reflection on common grace, beauty, creation and creativity I pray will help her and the church around her to understand how her life might be meaningful beyond simply being an asset to a worship group.

Yet for me the challenges came most deeply in the chapter entitled Deep Ecclesiology. I am aware and experience the frustration of many that our structures can inhibit the move of the Spirit and a speed of response to a fast changing world. I also believe that we live in a time where institutions are not trusted, particularly by a younger generation and that to throw off the shackles that build up over time and to start afresh is very attractive.

Jim Belcher however stands by his Presbyterian institution whilst seeking to release a movement of God's people into Orange County. I found his understanding of deep ecclesiology extremely helpful. The idea of an institution that releases a movement of God's people scattered throughout Scotland seems to me something of what I long to see happen in the Baptist Union of Scotland and in each of the churches.

For such a turn around to occur it will take a change from control to reliance, from independence to interdependence, from institutional relationship to personal relationship, from security to adventure and maybe most of all from timidity to confidence in what the Lord can still do. As I read this morning in Psalm 127 "unless the Lord builds a house the work of the builder is wasted."

It's worth a read. It would also make a great book to study with friends.

Please pray for the BUS as we go into a couple of weeks of key meetings, charting paths, sharing hopes and praying for the Spirit of God to work in us, revealing the rule of Christ for our lives at this time.

Forward in Hope

Tonight I will be preaching at the watchnight service in Glasgow Cathedral. It marks the beginning to a New Year of work for me. On January 1st I will travel north to Fort William where on the 2nd I will lead the first anniversary service of the new developing Baptist Church there. On the 3rd I travel south to Birmingham to meet with the group known as the Fellowship of British Baptists, before holding our Assembly Planning meeting on the 5th. Then it is a quick return to Scotland for a staff meeting on the 6th to launch into a year which will see many changes.

However, let me say before I get caught up in these changes, that I am really looking forward to these next 6 days. Each of these events give me great encouragement and hope for the coming year.

The fact that hundreds of Christians will gather in Glasgow Cathederal tonight, from all sorts of denominations, is a reason for hope. "How good it is when God's people dwell together in unity." So often we have allowed theological difference to be the basis of disunity, rather than uniting around the fact that we all believe those ancient creeds that declare Jesus Christ as the Son of God. (I could go on but you get the point)

I receive great hope from Fort William Baptist Church who have had Sunday attendances this past year where their building struggled to contain the amount of people who chose to worship with them, and who saw 5 people baptised by immersion: new signs of life in a small highland church.

The Fellowship of British Baptists is another area of great hope for me. This group has taken on a new sense of importance. Is it possible that the Baptist Union of Great Britain, Scotland and Wales and the community of the BMS World Mission could not only get on but could come to love and support one another in real ways? There is a new depth to relationship amongst us, a new desire to support one another, a new dawn of joined up thinking and acting that says we are better when we work together.

More hope comes as I think of planning the next assembly. As the creative team of Scottish Baptists and BMS staff join together, encouraged by the assembly in October we dream about the coming year. What message does God want to bring to us? Who will He speak to as we gather? What new challenges will people take up? What will He say to us corporately? Our God is a God who communicates with us in planning and at the event and that gives me great hope.

And then I'll get back to the team at Aytoun Road. A team which gives me hope. People called, gifted and experienced. A team that will go through several major changes in the coming year, changes that will make us quite vulnerable at times through the process of change. There will be days when we feel that things are out of our control. There may even be desperate days when the plans that we have made fail. These prospects fill me with hope because it is in these times we tend to turn to the Lord. It is in vulnerable, desperate, challenging times that we seek his strength, wisdom and support. It is so easy to do the stuff that we are able to do on our own. However there is more hope when the stuff that we do is enabled by Him who alone can give us strength.

Thanks for following the blog. I pray that your New Year has many indicators of hope and that if you find yourself in times of weakness, challenge or vulnerability that you will know the strength of our Lord and Saviour.

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness."

Shepherding Season

It was a rare day for me yesterday. I had planned and managed to follow through on a whole day in my home church, Kirkintilloch Baptist. The morning was given over to the Sunday School crew with shepherds complete with foam crooks which are a lot less dangerous than the cane and coathanger crooks I used to beat people up with as a child. None the less the young shepherds complete with the obligatory T towels discovered that T towels could be used as a great weapon to strangle the donkeys.
The evening service took the form of a classical Christmas with young musicians including my own children. I had the privilege of leading the service and speaking briefly at the end. Again the shepherd became the focus of the evening. As the evening drew to an end the string quartet played Corelli's Christams Concerto which finishes with the movement entitled "Pastorale". It is a beautiful movement and I hope you enjoy listening to the live performance I have included on the blog. The inspiration for the movement is not directly the shepherds on Bethlehem's hillside but rather the shepherds on Italian hillsides who, imitating those earlier shepherds, entered the towns and villages every Christmas Eve to play their pipes by the nativity scenes.
I have come to love the significance of the shepherds to the Christmas story. They speak to me of the all embracing love of our Father God who invited them as his special guests. Shepherds would never be invited into the average person's home. Shepherds were not acceptable company to the religious or even to those who did not see themselves as religious. They were the outcasts of their time and yet invited as honoured guests by our Father God to welcome his Son into the world.
When I think about what is Christian about the way we celebrate Christmas, surely something of this welcome and warmth of invitation for the stranger, the outcast, for those that others reject (I'm not talking about the in-laws!) is key to our celebrations.
What are you doing to celebrate this Christmas that relates to the spirit of the first Christmas? If this is the shepherding season, what are you doing to gather people in? Why not listen to Corelli and contemplate these questions.
Have a wonderful Christmas.
If video does not work try this link!
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=696438926&v=app_2392950137#!/video/video.php?v=478344308926

A place for everyone

I can't believe its been two months since I put something on the blog. My apologies to those who were hoping for something more regularly. Since writing the last entry I have been on the go with some great experiences in great churches, attending the BUGB council, our own Assembly and just yesterday the Scottish Baptist Council meeting. But I want to reflect back on my weekend's visit to Abbeyhill Baptist Church, just off Easter Road in Edinburgh.

If you judge a book by it's cover then you might simply walk past this place and not even notice that it is a church. It's building appears to sit on the corner of a street as part of a tenement block.

But if you get inside, a whole new world opens up, a counter-cultural, unique world that is the local church. All that excites me about the local church as the hope of the world is on view in this eclectic group of Jesus followers.

The first thing that I saw on entering the building was the age range of the congregation. This was a congregation that welcomed all ages and the way the service was conducted proved that they were all welcome. Accessible worship for children without being childish. Kids were alert, involved, senior members of the congregation were fully supporting their involvement and engaging with them. The way worship was led and entered into allowed all people, without discrimination, to express their praise and thanksgiving.

Then there was the diversity in education. I spoke with adults with no qualifications, those who were hoping to achieve new academic targets of standard grades and at the same time to Phd students, all delighted to engage with the living word of God together.

Within this church family was a wide range of ethnic diversity. It looked just like the streets of Edinburgh. A variety of languages spoken, a variety accents, skin colours, and integrated into the worship a compassion for the peoples of this world.

As I left this church on Sunday evening I was rejoicing in what I had seen. There is no other place on earth where this diverese group of people would gather. There is a sense of love, welcome and belonging experienced and expressed by all, it is what the local church is all about.

In Christ, there is a place of welcome for everyone: when His body the church demonstrates it so clearly and it is experienced by so many it can only serve to strengthen the faithful witness of the Church to the transforming power of the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The power of invitation

Over the last month I've been thinking a lot about the Samaritan woman and how she invites people to come and meet Jesus. I don't imagine for one minute that extending that invitation was an easy thing for her to do. In fact I can think of a lot of reasons why she might have avoided making that invitation. (She didn't know much, not many friends, unresolved morality issues in life, no Holy Spirit to gift her in evangelism.)
She is contrasted in the story with the disciples who go to the same village and fail to appreciate that the harvest fields are ripe. They go into the village and return to Jesus without anyone coming with them to see the one they had witnessed healing the sick and turning water into wine.
Last year Dumfries Baptist Church got involved in the Back To Church initiative, an invitation-based church growth strategy run by Michael Harvey.
I was overwhelmed by the difference it made. The church spent time looking at how they welcomed people, reflected on their weekly practises and changed some of them. They considered issues of hospitality, children's ministry and what should be part of our services. They also took up the challenge to invite people to a church service that they believed would be an encouragement to their friends and colleagues.
In many cases these invitations led to friends and colleagues attending a church service. For others it opened up conversations about the importance of faith in their life. The local press were also captivated by the idea of a "Back to Church Sunday" and were happy to run stories, adverts and follow up articles.
Here is the big question: when was the last time you invited someone to come and experience your church? There may be many reasons for it being a while ago. As I reflect on my own reasons, I am afraid that I am discovering my reasons are only excuses. I have fallen into the disciples' trap, or devil's lie, of believing there is not a ripe harvest in Scotland.
Tear Fund conducted some research that suggested 6% of the nation are ready to be invited back to Church. That's getting on for as many as attend.
I think we could do with a good few models of people who, like the Samaritan women, are ready to invite others in and trust in the power of the Spirit to have softened hearts to receive the invitation.
Michael Harvey has some great resources available on line including 12 videos on the 12 steps to fruitful invitations.
http://www.mjhassociates.org.uk/?m=201008

Shetland connections

A one and a half hour flight out of Glasgow found me landing on the southern most tip of the Shetland mainland. It's the area served by the Dunrossness Baptist Church. A good 30 minute drive and you are in the area served by the Lerwick Baptist Church, keep going north for a further 30 minutes and you are at the area served by Brae Baptist Church and there is still a longer drive to reach the top of the main island. Head west out of Lerwick and you find yourself crossing a couple of bridges onto Burra Isle where the 4th Baptist Church is situated. The geography was staggering, I had little knowledge of these islands, of how big and indeed how remote they are. Sitting in the home of Ian and Morag who minister in Dunrossness, looking out onto a wild Atlantic Ocean, it is staggering to think that the next piece of land due west is Greenland!

It was a great visit, made special by the people I met and the opportunity to lay the foundation stone of the new Lerwick Baptist Church. But it was also a time of great learning and inspiration.

I witnessed an interdependency on the island seldom seen on the mainland. The ministers fraternal was relational, deeply relational. These 4 ministers really knew one another, cared for one another and supported one another. They shared a passion to reach out to the islanders and encouraged and enabled one another to serve.

During the vacancy in Brae the other 3 churches sent a visiting preacher each month covering 3 out of the 4 Sundays. Members of the congregation were familiar with the other church's members and as a result of Andrew's "Better together tour" they are talking of having annual joint deacons' meetings.

These structures are in essence the dry bones of what I actually felt. There was something life-giving, a supportive, encouraging, trusting, upbuilding and deeply caring attitude towards each other expreseed minister to minister, congregation to congregation. Competiveness, insecurity and suspicion appeared absent.

These, our most northern congregations who face the most demanding of climates, demonstrate for us a relational climate that we would do well to imitate.

Holiday Clubs - What Value?

I'm back from holiday and think I have caught up with everything else I needed to do on my return. So it's time to blog again. And immediately I want to return to the topic of my last blog Children and mission. In case you haven't read earlier blogs I guess I better say at the outset that I am absolutely committed to children's ministry and outreach. I long to see children serving in our churches and reaching out to their peers. I have been committed to primary school chaplaincy work through my years of ministry and spent several years working as a children's evangelist.

Yet today I am asking the question what is the real value of a children's holiday club? In the adult world we gave up on week-long missions a long time ago in place of things like Alpha or Christianity Explored courses. We have in the adult world primarily moved to a model of evangelism as a journey experienced over many weeks, months or years as opposed to an event. Yet this summer all around the country churches will hold holiday clubs and declare them a successful outreach. But are they?

Yesterday I visited two holiday clubs in the town of Kirkintilloch. Our Step Out team are working with the Harestanes Church in the local community centre made up of three portacabins. The children drawn from the local community looked delighted to be there, parents who were not church members on the whole looked delighted to leave them.

At Kirkintilloch Baptist Church a similar picture of happy children, happy parents and happy leaders. Both clubs were full of life, energy and creativity. There was an excitement in the room, and the children were feeding off it.

However looking back over 20 years of running several clubs a year I cannot think of many non-churched children who have come to faith and grown in discipleship through this work and are still following Christ today. Yes, there are many children who said during the week that they wanted to follow Jesus, conversion statistics would be high but to my knowledge they do not follow today, probably something to do with the fact that we expected kids to be discipled in Sunday school each week and a regular Sunday commitment was not on their parents' radar.

So why would I still choose to do a holiday club today? Why do I still support what the Step Out teams are doing?

1. Church kids find themselves presented with a clear gospel presentation and an opportunity to commit themselves to Christ.


2. It brings an opportunity to train Church children's leaders and introduce fresh communication methods, modern music and creative energy into the life of the Sunday School.


3. Teenagers in the church find a place of fulfilling service where their ideas and creativity are needed, valued and seen to work.


4. It demonstrates to the church it's ability to work together, across the ages, on a short term mission project bringing lots of people into service, and gives others something to pray for and get excited about. It's an encouragement.


5. Childcare provision in the holidays is a great blessing to working families in the community.
   
6. Saturday/Sunday events following a holiday club and pick up/drop off times give an opportunity for church members to get to know the parents of these children and to offer friendship to them and to introduce them to other services provided by the church.


7. Local Press will gladly run with your story and communicate to the community that the church is alive and is active in the town.


8. Who knows what the church will do to follow up a holiday club? In my experience in one church it was used to plant a new congregation, launch a weekly after school club, start a monthly kids club.

So I'm all for holiday clubs and you can maybe add other valuable reasons for them. But I am also concerned that we find a working model for presenting a clear gospel message to non-churched children that has lifelong discipleship at its core. Ideas on a postcard, or even replies to this blog would be greatly received.