In Depth:  John Benton

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This month I step down as the editor of en.

I have been asked to continue to write a monthly column, but Jonathan Worsley now takes over in the hot seat.

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Back in December we ran an article in en on self-harm.

It was prompted by relative silence from Christians. Young people are cutting themselves and committing suicide at an alarming rate in this new digital era of the secularised Western world. This horrific tragedy even breaks surface from time to time in and around the church. But the recent campaign surrounding 14-year-old Molly Russell, who sadly took her own life after viewing images of self-harm online, has brought it to the fore.

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Ernest Shackleton’s advert for volunteers for his Antarctic expedition may be mythical.

Nevertheless, it truly reflects the brave spirit of the men who went. ‘Men wanted for a hazardous journey, small wages, bitter cold, constant danger, safe return doubtful…’ But such ‘foolhardy’ courage is desperately needed today by evangelicalism in the West. This relates to two particular areas.

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End-time society will not be any kind of meaningful democracy.

We enjoy many benefits of democratic ideas. But the end-time world will be dominated by trade and the arrogant misuse of wealth (Revelation 18). The political landscape at the start of 2019 brings this apocalyptic vision to mind.

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Nothing encourages a church like people becoming Christians.

When genuine conversions are happening, the whole of church life seems to be reinvig-orated. Our worship becomes more passionate because we know God has been at work. Our fellowship is stimulated because the church is growing – new babies always bring a warm glow to a family. Our evangelism is given new momentum – we feel that the our outreach is making an impact. Christians moving into the area and joining is fine, but it is nothing like as good as seeing salvation.

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Since 1980, churchgoing has halved in the UK.

In particular, churches are losing the younger generation of millennials. I will leave suggesting the answer to this heartbreaking situation to the upbeat bloggers and strategists who always seem to have ‘the solution’. May the Lord bless them – though I suspect a solution will not be found until we humbly confess to God that we don’t know the answer.

A new situation

But the fact must be faced that our situation as Christians in the 21st-century Western world is now one of exile. The culture has changed dramatically. It is as if we have lost our country and now live in a foreign land. At the recent Labour Party conference a poster from a women’s group that declared ‘A woman does not have a penis’ caused outrage among men who wish to be viewed as women. In October an Italian scientist at CERN who stated that ‘men invented physics’ was castigated by women’s groups. Even simple facts have no place in a world where subjectivism trumps objective truth. What chance then for the truth of the gospel? The world is upside down - especially ethically. We are very much out of place.

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The controversy within the Labour Party has rumbled on for at least two years.

It shows no signs of abating. What needed to be dealt with root and branch has been the subject of hedging by the Labour leadership.

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In the car, Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones has become my companion.

Through someone’s kindness I have come into possession of the recordings of his messages on Romans. What a thrill it is to listen! And unsurprisingly, he has brought me great encouragement recently.

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The 70th anniversary of the NHS is being celebrated.

Our National Health Service, launched by Aneurin Bevan on 5 July 1948, was a marvellous innovation and the country owes a great debt to its founders and those who work so hard within it.

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Crowds celebrated the ‘Yes’ vote on 25 May for abortion to become legal in Ireland.

I, like many others, was overcome with huge sadness at the prospective killing of new lives. I’m not sure that these days, as a man, I am even allowed to have an opinion on the issue, but I know that God is a God of life, not death. In England, we have had legal abortion for over 50 years, yet the fact that, statistically, the most unsafe place for a baby is its mother’s womb, I find horrific.

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I never used to worry about privacy laws.

I just naively thought: ‘I’ve got nothing major to hide. So, no problem?’

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I met with Mike Ovey before his untimely death.

We sat together in a coffee shop on Waterloo Station. He was concerned that a substantial percentage of the men who trained at Oak Hill were not lasting in the ministry. He talked of a ten-year watershed: if he could get them to hang on past that, then they would stay for life. But before that many dropped out. He got me thinking: are we training men for the ministry in the right way?

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It began with Oxfam.

In February The Times reported that it had discovered that Oxfam had allowed three men to resign and had sacked four others for gross misconduct after an enquiry concerning sexual exploitation and bullying in Haiti, when the aid agency sent workers in following the devastating earthquake there in January 2010. As the press got to work, Save the Children, BBC Media Action, Christian Aid and many others were caught up in similar stories, including allegations that women in camps for Syrian refugees found themselves having to offer sexual favours in return for aid from the United Nations. The scandal has led to much national soul-searching.

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How’s the money in your church?

I hope there’s enough and I hope you pay your pastor adequately (1 Timothy 5.17, 18). Without a proper salary he will worry about his family bills and that is bound to affect his ministry adversely. Churches who underpay their preacher tend to suffer spiritually. The ‘keep him poor, keep him humble’ attitude in some churches is appalling.

But, visiting various places, I have become aware that some churches are facing financial problems – and they are not the type of church you would expect to be in difficulties. They are generally growing churches. I have heard it said that the optimum church size financially is one of around 80 members – one pastor to support and volunteers doing what they can. It is when churches go beyond that threshold that expenses per capita rise steeply. More staff may be required (not least for administration), maybe the building needs to be enlarged, or a new kitchen is required. Perhaps more people are offering themselves for Bible College or the mission field.

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Our God is really there.

Sometimes in unexpected ways he reminds us of this. My mother died a few years ago and the circumstances surrounding her departure still amaze us.

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I was talking with some theological students.

One of them was decrying the fact that there was never any conversation in his church about Brexit. He had a point. It is an issue of immense consequence. But I said that perhaps the reason was that it is such a contentious question (a bit like Trump/Clinton in the US elections) and Christians were keen to keep the peace in the churches (Ephesians 4.3). He wasn’t convinced.

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We are only human.

We like to be liked. Therefore one of the most difficult things for us as Christians is that, if we are faithful to Jesus and his word, the world will hate us. ‘If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first,’ said the Lord to his disciples (John 15.18).

Elite world

Bear in mind that, when John records Jesus speaking about ‘the world’, the Gospel writer is not so much referring to our planet or its inhabitants but to the rebel spirit, the system of attitudes insinuated among us by the devil, which is antagonistic to God, his Word and his people. It is to do with independence, power, pride, love of money, etc. At one level, not all are quite so caught up in the spirit of the world as others. The poor and oppressed loved to hear Jesus. It was the worldly rich and the ruling elites who were the chief instigators of persecuting both Christ and the early church.

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We were away looking after a small church for a couple of weeks.

It enabled the pastor and his wife to take a holiday. There we met a great Christian couple who had experienced tough things in their lives, been part of a number of larger congregations and had now joined the little church. The wife said: ‘The trouble is, when you go along to larger churches they tend to deal with you as a category – a young person, a senior, a single, a young married, with or without children, etc. – but overlook you as an individual. O the joy of coming to a little church and being treated as a person again!’

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Forget the Reformation for a moment.

October is also the centenary of the Russian Revolution. Lenin (who tellingly seems to have coined the phrase ‘political correctness’) founded the first modern totalitarian state. Currently, the greatest military threat for a generation hangs over the Western world from just such a regime, North Korea, led by its dictator Kim Jong Un. Despite the ratcheting up of sanctions, this Communist state is relentlessly pursuing the capability to launch missiles with nuclear warheads able to reach America or its bases in the Pacific. In early September, Nikki Hayley, the US spokesperson at the United Nations, spoke of this totalitarian country as ‘begging for war’. (We need to be praying for governments – 1 Timothy 2.1,2.)

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The nationally funded broadcaster fought ‘tooth and nail’ to keep the secret.

But in July the salaries of some of the BBC’s most famous presenters were finally published. The top earner was the Radio 2 DJ Chris Evans, who pockets £2.2 million per annum, then came Match of the Day frontman Gary Lineker with £1.7 million. Among journalists and interviewers, Jeremy Vine’s annual ‘haul’ is £700,000, while the most highly paid woman Strictly Come was Dancing’s Claudia Winkelman with around £450,000.

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George Verwer, founder of Operation Mobilisation, visited our congregation.

Giving an ironic advertisement for his book Messiology, he parodied Matthew 18.20: ‘For where two or three come together in my name, there… will soon be a mess.’ Christians have a tragic ability to fall out with each other. While the Holy Spirit seeks unity in the gospel, we often do the devil’s work for him. He comes at us both internally and externally.

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Here is an election story that made me chuckle.

Some parents we know well decided to take their primary-school-aged children with them to vote. It would be good for the kids’ education. So the dad got his voting slip, took them into the voting booth, explained and put his cross in the box, folded the paper and popped it into the ballot box as they watched. Next it was mum’s turn and of course the children wanted to go with her too. Dad waited outside. But then suddenly, for all to hear, there came shouts from the voting booth. ‘No! Mummy, you’ve done it wrong! You’ve put the cross in the wrong box!’

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Is politics to become a ‘no go’ area for Bible Christians?

In the run-up to the snap General Election, called by Theresa May for 8 June, Rico Tice was interviewed for Radio 4’s Today regarding the issue. If Christians are seen as inherently unfit for public office because of their beliefs, it would effectively mean that we are excluded from the ‘inclusive’ society.

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Jonathan Haidt is Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University.

In March, under the aegis of the Veritas Forum, he debated with Tim Keller on how we can have a properly pluralistic society in which all points of view are respected. It is online to watch. Haidt is an atheist who recognises the benefits which faith has brought about in the evolution of civilised society (click here for a review of his landmark book The Righteous Mind ). During the debate however, he confessed that there are a number of subjects that he cannot discuss openly, for fear of losing his job.

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We need to be resilient as Christians these days.

But it’s possible to do that in an unChrist-like way. Spurgeon tells a wonderful story about a hard-headed Christian leader who was rather unwavering and grim. He describes a man travelling by train, who was putting his head out of the carriage window to see the way ahead. When the guard came along, recognising the man and seeing him with his head out of the window, he spoke up saying: ‘You must not put your head out.’ ‘Why is that?’ said the clergyman. ‘There is some ironwork under one of the bridges,’ replied the guard ‘and it might get damaged if your head struck it.’

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President Trump is now a reality.

Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th President of the USA took place on 20 January amid protests in Washington and across the world from women’s groups and many others. These protests were reminiscent of those in Britain after the result of the Brexit referendum was announced. The election of Trump and Brexit are seen as part of a conservative (small c) backlash against multi-culturalism and the moves towards globalism of recent years. ‘The world has changed’, we are told.

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There is a great motorbike chase.

It is in the 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Set in the late 1950s, professor of archaeology Dr Jones is riding pillion, chased by Soviet agents, as his young companion roars through the streets. Looking for a way to escape the Russian cars, they ride the bike into the university library (Yale?). As students scatter they swerve and skid under some tables, finally coming to rest in front of a geeky archaeology student who, unruffled, looks up from his book and proceeds to ask Dr Jones about a question that is bothering him. The professor answers, referring him to another learned author, and then remounts the motorcycle ready for a quick getaway. As they disappear from the library Dr Jones shouts back to the students something that has always stuck with me: ‘If you want to be a good archaeologist you’ve got to get out of the library!’ In other words you need to do some field work, you’ve got to see what’s out there and make some findings.

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In June 1967 there was an electric atmosphere in the Sixth Form common room.

The Beatles had just released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Who would be the first to get a copy, bring it in and play it?

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These days church planting and revitalisation are, rightly, on the agenda for us.

There are areas of the country without a Bible-believing, witnessing church and many small congregations are struggling. 25 years ago our congregation was invited to get involved in seeking to set a dying church in the town back on its feet. It was in a bad way and it took much encouragement to motivate our folk to take up the challenge. But four brave families along with some others took the plunge and launched out, trusting in God.

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As I write the various Nobel Prizes are being announced.

This year’s prize for chemistry includes Scotsman Sir Fraser Stoddart and Bob Dylan got the prize for literature. But last year’s Nobel Prize for Chemistry went corporately to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar, who originate from Sweden, USA and Turkey respectively. They won it for their work on the mechanism of DNA repair.

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I have a picture on my office door.

It is an Internet shot from the opening montage of London 2012. The Queen is walking in the corridors of Buckingham Palace with Daniel Craig in his role as James Bond. Speech bubbles have been added. The intelligence officer is saying: ‘…and Donald Trump, ma’am?’ The Queen is responding: ‘Make it look like an accident, 007.’

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I’ve been meaning to write this for some time.

I have hesitated. ‘People will think it’s over the top.’ And obviously I really hope I’m wrong. But I’ve begun to wonder how long churches like those represented by the en constituency will be allowed to continue by the powers that be.

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How did your church react to Brexit?

The vote on 23 June to leave the European Union seems to have surprised most people. We voted 52% to 48% to go. The Prime Minister, who had campaigned passionately to stay, stepped down to be replaced by Theresa May. The Labour Party, which had rather languidly encouraged us to stay, went into a leadership civil war. The financial markets swung wildly. I liked the cartoon which summed things up with one person saying to another: ‘Aliens have not landed, Elvis has not been found alive, but everything else has happened!’

Spirit of unity

On the following Sunday our own congregation was predictably divided on the matter, but we got over it. Some had felt that to come out was too much of a financial risk, would give the wrong impression to foreigners among us and might damage missionary links with Europe. Others, especially the older ones, wanted out because they were worried by the pace of immigration and what they saw as a lack of democracy at the heart of the EU. I think the veiled threats of some EU leaders about how they would treat us if we left backfired and actually worked to the advantage of the Leave Campaign. Saying ‘Stay in this marriage or else!’ is so wrong at so many levels. But despite different views among God’s people, no one fell out. Ultimately of course, we have something more important to unite us. We are privileged to be part of a much bigger kingdom under the benign government of our loving heavenly Father who holds all the political ups and downs of our world in his hands.

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I had set the Lord a deadline.

Whether I was right to do so some people have disputed, as I have shared the story with them. And perhaps they are right. My thinking was that because God is real we can afford to be real with him. I must stress though, it very much needs to be done in a humble way.

I was a novice in the ministry when ‘being real’ got under my skin to challenge me. In God’s great grace our call to the church had been unmistakable for my wife and me. In fact we were certain about what would happen months before the church was. That was not foolish self-confidence on our part, but all to do with God’s kind reassurance to frail people.

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André Trocmé was a Protestant pastor with a good turn of phrase.

Along with many others, he courageously saved the lives of many Jewish people, hiding them from the Vichy authorities, and then the Nazis in the Massif Central in France during World War II. Arrested in February 1943, his thoughts were: ‘I had always believed there were two powers fighting over our world, good and evil. But now I realise there is a third: stupidity.’

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I’m not a fan of The Archers.

But Britain’s longest running radio soap opera, formerly ‘an everyday story of country folk’, made headlines in April when its plot of domestic abuse came to a dramatic climax as Helen Titchener, at the end of her tether, stabbed her emotionally manipulative husband Rob. Even I sat down and listened! It brought to public attention the sorts of shocking family situations which domestic abuse charities, social workers and sometimes pastors, have to address.

The dominator

This kind of abuse is generally different from domestic violence. Usually perpetrated by men on women (but vice versa does occur) it is about undermining the other person and their self-confidence. This takes place through continually questioning their competency, or making them feel guilty, or inadequate. I came upon one situation in which when a beautiful woman appeared on TV the husband would comment ‘there’s a real woman, not like you!’ It might take the more subtle form of feigning care but saying: ‘I’d better do that, dear – you’re not very good at things, are you?’

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It’s a great joy that many churches are growing.

Some are growing rapidly. In our own congregation, starting around a year ago, we have seen substantial blessing and along with folk being saved we have had many applying for baptism and church membership – Soli Deo Gloria!

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A much-reviewed book grabbed me recently.

It is The Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of Mass Unemployment by Martin Ford*, a Silicon Valley software entrepreneur. His well-informed thesis is that any job which involves ‘routine’ can, with the astonishing advance in computer technology, be ‘learned’ by robots. They are set to become as available and as ordinary a sight as a motor car.

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Does the Reformation matter?

It’s a question which is going to become increasingly crucial for evangelical churches in the coming year or so as the 500th anniversary in 2017 of Luther’s nailing his radical ideas to the Wittenberg church door draws ever closer. The church is under terrific pressure both from militant/political Islam and militant/political secularism and forgetting the Reformation, sinking our differences and standing together with anyone who calls themselves a Christian seems a good option to many.

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Balance is crucial. It is especially crucial when it is easy to swing to extremes.

Following the Commons’ decision on 2 December for RAF airstrikes against Islamic State in Syria after the terrorist atrocity in Paris, there is a new recognition that the UK is at war. Our security forces are thwarting many planned attacks, but there may be reprisals meted out on us. The question is: how can Christians be praying in a biblically sensible way?

Facing extremism

Of course we need to be balanced towards Islam. Many Muslims are civilised people of peace and we need to honour them. But with Hilary Benn’s speech to Parliament the penny seems to have dropped that those supporting Islamic state are as much fascists, seeing themselves as superior beings willing to liquidate all ‘inferiors’, as the Nazis. The West is now engaged in a Third World War. So, how should we pray?

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What do the Rolling Stones have to do with the Second Coming?

Half a lifetime ago, a good friend, David Porter, a gifted writer and editor, now with the Lord, spoke at our church on the subject of rock music and the Christian. It was a fascinating evening, illustrated by a number of rare recordings. What stuck in my mind was the similarity between the Stones’s 1965 hit The Last Time and an ancient tape of a US black church choir. The choruses seemed very alike, but the choir’s theme was the return of Christ. No one knows the day or the hour. This could be the last time we meet as a church. And similarly we could say this could be the last time we meet for prayer, or for a Christmas carol service. He comes at an unexpected hour (Matthew 24.44). ‘This could be the last time – I don’t know.’ Quite a thought!

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Our home town made the national news.

A couple accused of child abuse had the charges against them dropped. They had taken their 6-week old baby to hospital worried about blood in the child’s mouth. Medical staff spotted what seemed to be bruises on the baby and X-rays appeared to show fractures. The couple were indicted. For three years they maintained their innocence. On 7 October, with the prosecution’s medical evidence proving consistent with rickets rather than violence, they were declared innocent.

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There were four ministers and their wives.

An Anglican couple, an American Presbyterian couple, a Baptist Union couple and a Grace Baptist couple. (It sounds like the opening line of some embarrassing joke. Should I set an en competition to see who can write the most amusing anecdote with that entrée?). But we were at a wedding reception and for some reason the bride and groom had decided to seat all the clergy around one table – perhaps so that the other guests could enjoy themselves!

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I was once offered a job with the Ministry of Defence.

It was in the days when the Channel Tunnel was first being proposed. At the interview I was asked what I thought about the implications of the tunnel for British security. In terms of conventional warfare it is not really a problem. But this summer the Channel Tunnel has become a gigantic headache for the government with enormous numbers of migrants desperate to get into the UK.

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Who do you not see when you are in church?

Which people are there but invisible to you? And to which people is your attention naturally drawn? Young families? Students? The Lord Jesus often viewed things in a rather different way from us, and noticed the people we overlook. Contemplating worshippers at the temple he drew his disciples’ attention to a poor old widow (Luke 21.1-4).

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FIFA’s president Sepp Blatter finally resigned.

The dominant news story as May turned into June was that officials of the governing body for world football were facing investigations of bribery and vote fixing. Both the US FBI and the Swiss authorities are looking into the matter.

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We live in a celebrity culture.

And, sure enough, the church has bought into it. We have celebrity Christians of various sorts who bestride the evangelical scene. They have an enormous following. If they tweet a commendation of something, thousands of Christians buy into it.

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This is ‘non-political.’

That is how a covering letter, from an Anglican stable, described a document released over the Easter weekend with the title ‘Affirming Evangelical Unity over the Theology of Men and Women.’

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The West is beginning to show it is vulnerable.

And people like President Putin of Russia and extremist groups like Islamic State know it.

Recently the defence secretary Michael Fallon warned that Russia would test Nato’s resolve in the Ukraine and that it is likely that President Putin will soon seek to destabilise the Baltic States. The tactics are subtle. Nato’s Article 5 of mutual defence in the case of invasion is circumvented by Russia supporting dissident pro-Russian groups within a state.

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‘Religion’ now has a very bad name.

A friend from church was recently out for a meal with work colleagues. With the terrorist threat from jihadists now a given in modern life, the conversation turned to the evils of ‘religion.’ To their surprise, my friend, whom they knew to be a Christian, said he agreed with them. How come?

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Europe has been given an horrific reminder of the threat of terrorism.

On 7 January, Islamic extremists stormed the Paris offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo with assault rifles and killed ten of the editorial staff and two policemen. Refusing to surrender, the perpetrators were hunted down and eventually killed by French police by which time another incident, in which an Islamic extremist held people hostage in a Jewish supermarket in the French capital, was taking place. More deaths occurred. We are sad for the bereaved and disgusted by these murders. The attackers claimed links to both ISIL and al-Qu’eda.

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en has learned of recent early morning visits from Ofsted inspectors to a number of Christian schools in the North of England.

This came soon after the head of Ofsted said that there would be no more such ‘dawn raids’ except in extreme cases. Where are such moves coming from?

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I was visiting an older couple who had come along to one or two church events. 

They told me a little of their own life in business and their travels. I can’t quite remember how the conversation turned, but suddenly the wife said something which took me aback but was very heartening. ‘The people at your church’ she said, ‘are like a different race – they are all so kind’. I quickly assured them it was the Lord’s church, not mine, and that despite God’s goodness to us we are far from perfect. But here a couple of outsiders had sensed something wonderful among us and as soon as I was able I related this comment to the church for folk’s encouragement.

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Recently doctors explained that sadly they think my mother will die soon.

She is 92, suffering from advanced dementia, and has had pneumonia. During a busy pastoral day I found time to get to the hospital, as we have been doing every day. I walked into the ward but my mother was not to be seen. I asked a nurse where she was. ‘Didn’t you know?’ she said, ‘She was moved to a nursing home this morning’. I was stunned. She was very apologetic.

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In the last month or so we have entered a crucial phase in the struggle between the West and extremist Islam.

This has become clear both at home and abroad. At home we have seen not only the so-called Trojan Horse project where Muslim governors tried to Islamise Birmingham schools but also the immense tragedy of gangs of largely Pakistani Muslim men targeting and trading children for under-age sex in Rotherham and across the North. They used threats and violence while the police and local authorities turned a blind eye. The report by Professor Alexis Jay said that more than 1,400 children were sexually abused over a period of 16 years.

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A new generation of preachers is being trained.

There is a stream of advice that young preachers should only preach dazzling sermons which are all their own work. They have to be completely original.

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He uses it as an illustration.

But it is a powerful one. When the apostle Paul says ‘if the trumpet does not sound a clear call, who will get ready for battle?’ he is speaking in the context of the messages given by the church (1 Corinthians 14.8).

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Late May saw elections to the European Parliament.

It is the largest exercise in democracy in the world apart from in India, with nearly 400 million EU citizens eligible to vote.

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Being the pastor of the same church for a long time is great.

One of the benefits is that you get to see the end of some stories which pastors who only dodge into a place for five or six years and then move on would never see. Recently I had just such an experience. Hopefully it will encourage you.

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2014 could turn out to be an historic year in science.

Recently radio astronomers who had been operating at the South Pole announced they have discovered proof of the Big Bang theory of how the universe began, they say 14 billion years ago.

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A GP friend was finishing a home visit.

He had been examining a middle-aged woman and was just putting his stethoscope away. Having noticed her smile and wanting to find a pleasant word as he departed, he commented: ‘What lovely teeth you have’. Nothing could have prepared him for the response. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they were my mothers’! The winning smile turned out to be composed of a china set from years gone by, which just happened to fit perfectly. Not everything that looks good is all it seems to be!

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‘What do you think?’ she asked me. Someone in our congregation had been asked on Facebook about the accusation, which hit the headlines recently, that the heavy storms across Britain were God’s judgment for the government’s legalisation of gay marriage.

The question put me on the spot. My response was to say that as a nation we are guilty before God of all kinds of sins and already under his judgment. Whether or not the floods were related to that matter specifically was beyond my wisdom.

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What did your pastor preach last Sunday?

Hopefully he preached faithfully from the Bible. And probably he gave an ‘expository sermon.’ By that term we mean that he took a passage of Scripture, explained its meaning and brought practical application for living.

Often these expositions are consecutive. Over the weeks the preacher takes the congregation through a whole Bible book. So if we’re asked what’s going on at church we might reply, ‘We are going through James,’ or ‘We are looking at Esther.’

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I don’t know if the Scots will vote for independence.

But the break up of Great Britain after hundreds of years of beneficial union would surely be another sign of a sick country.

A referendum on Scottish independence takes place next September and the Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, recently unveiled his government’s white paper describing what they hope an independent Scotland would look like. They hope the pound would be kept. 30 hours of childcare per week in term time and a secure pension scheme were pledged. But it seems Britain’s deterrent, the Trident submarines based on the Clyde, would have to go somewhere else. In the UK, government concern is not to see Scotland cut itself loose; already shipbuilding at Portsmouth has been sacrificed in order to keep Scottish yards open.

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I believe in Sunday Schools and that children should have teaching specifically tailored to their needs.

A child’s way of understanding is not the same as that of an adult. ‘When I was a child… I thought as a child’ (1 Corinthians 13.11). A child can understand the truth in a simple way, but can also misunderstand. To mention a crass example, when she was a girl, there was a boy in my wife’s class named William Heaven. You can imagine the kinds of confusion that arose in the little boy’s mind from the opening sentence of the Lord’s Prayer. So it’s good that there is a time when children are taught separately from the rest of the church. Sunday School teachers do a wonderful job.

During the sermon

Our Sunday School takes place during the sermon time. Here are some reasons why.

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When our kids were young, one of their favourite books was We’re going on a bear hunt.

It’s a great bed-time tale by Michael Rosen, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury. A family sets out in search of a bear. On the way they are faced with difficult terrain — a river, thick mud, a dark forest… The repeated refrain is: ‘We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it!’ Sometimes you have to just face things. It’s a life lesson.

With the passing of the same-sex marriage bill the politically correct world has arrived. The faithful, non-PC church can’t get round it. Just as gay activists have pursued B&B owners, Christian counsellors and hounded MPs holding views contrary to their own, it is unlikely that Bible-based churches will simply be left alone. We will have to go through it.

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Recently our Sunday morning exposition focused on Elisha.

It was the incident in which the prophet was protected by chariots of fire when Israel’s enemies sent soldiers to take him. The following mid-week fellowship group was based on the same passage, taking up the question of what the Bible teaches about angels. As we talked about this, one of the members of our group, brought up in Poland, related a story from her family.

Siberian camp

A few months before the end of World War II, her (future) grandfather was taken to Siberia. Stalin’s Russian army was passing through Poland and men were scooped from the streets and sent to internment camps.

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It was a familiar story.

The pastor had left the church after a few years of, sadly, fairly inconsequential ministry. Did I know of anyone I could recommend to take his place?

Probing further led to the comment that the problem with the previous pastor was that he tended to shut himself away in his study. At one level his sermons were excellent. People thought he was a good preacher. But somehow he was a ‘loner’ and there was something that didn’t connect with people. How does a preacher’s character affect his usefulness?

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If same-sex marriage is eventually adopted in our country, then what the Coalition Government will have succeeded in doing is to redefine a word.

Presumably dictionaries will need to be amended. At present The Concise Oxford’s pri-mary definition of ‘marriage’ is as follows: ‘the legal union of a man and a woman in order to live together and often to have children’. It will need to be replaced. As a multi-faith alliance wrote in protest to David Cameron in June, in order to pursue the fiction of same-sex marriage: ‘The importance of consummation, procreation, and the welfare of children, as well as issues such as adultery, have been ignored’. In reality, of course, same-sex partnerships are no more marriage than apples are oranges. We are simply legislating a lie.

Red herring

To say this might infuriate some. ‘If you make things like the possibility of procreation essential to marriage then what does that mean for infertile couples?’ they ask. While we have every sympathy for couples unable to have children, actually this is a red herring. A car which breaks down and cannot reach a destination is still a car. And it does not mean that we ought to redesignate as ‘cars’ every caravan / trailer which never had the possibility of travelling anywhere unaided. Same-sex marriage is simply not marriage. But the government will insist it is and woe betide anyone who says otherwise. The word will be redefined.

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I was going to write something about the current fad for TV shows which take the tack ‘women are good, men are bad / idiots’.

ITV’s detective series Scott & Bailey is a classic of the genre. In the cauldron of discussion over the redefinition of marriage, such propaganda is hardly helpful. The truth is ‘all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God’ (Romans 3.23). That includes both men and women.

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Ann was half-watching the BBC evening news recently while working on the Telegraph crossword.

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There is a stirring line in |Band of Brothers|.

The TV series tells the story of ‘Easy Company’ led by Dick Winters, part of the 101st US Airborne Division in the months following D-Day.

The German counter-attack came unexpectedly in December 1944 through the Ardennes and the 101st were given the task of holding the area around the strategic town of Bastogne. Short of warm clothing, equipment and ammunition, the soldiers of Easy Company arrive to find fellow Americans in retreat. At this point, Captain Winters is informed that the German panzers are about to cut the road to the South. ‘It looks like you guys are going to be surrounded’, explains Second Lieutenant George Rice. Then comes Winters’ heroic reply: ‘We’re paratroopers, Lieutenant. We’re supposed to be surrounded’.

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As a pastor, sometimes there are meetings with people that you dread.

Not long ago I was contemplating such a meeting. Years previously a couple had left the church as their marriage was on the brink of breaking up.

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If the proposals to introduce gay marriage become law, it will be in no little measure due to the UK’s liberal elite having forced it on us.

Instrumental in this has been the influence of the media, especially the BBC. From the first TV lesbian kiss on EastEnders through the gay story line on The Archers (an everyday story of country folk?) those years ago, the propaganda has been clearly there. Even the recent series Last Tango in Halifax, which began as a gentle tale of rekindled love between two heterosexual pensioners, turned into a TV stick to beat people unsure about the rightness of same-sex relationships. Of course, the obsequious defence always trotted out is that the broadcaster is only reflecting changes in society. But we all know that the media not only reflects but also shapes society.

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When you bring up a child, what you are aiming at is self-regulation.

The parents want to bring good moral principles in a firm, reasonable and loving way such that the youngster eventually sees the basic sense of them, imbibes them for himself / herself and so begins to moderate / manage his / her own behaviour accordingly.

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A reader wrote into EN. He was worried.

He wondered what I thought of a talk on YouTube given at this year’s Spring Harvest. If you want to see for yourself what is being said, you can find it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAZ4FKHE9cQ.

The talk is given by Les Isaac, who is involved with Street Pastors ministry, and is about Christian unity. He refers to Revelation 7, which speaks of John’s vision of heaven in which people from every nation, tribe and language worship together before God’s throne. The speaker’s thrust is that a lot of Christians are waiting for such unity in heaven, but God ‘wants us to be one now’.

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We are told that Britain is a place of ‘tacit atheism’.

Whether it is the tragedy of St. George’s Tron being thrown out of their building for taking a stance for biblical standards or the economic recession our greed brought upon us or ongoing cover-up that seems to now be coming to light about Sir Jimmy Savile’s abuse of young girls, it is the laissez-faire attitude to morality which atheism promotes which underlies most news stories in our country.

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Mid-September witnessed the exposure of the police cover-up concerning the Hillsborough disaster in which 96 Liverpool football fans died 23 years ago.

At the same time it emerged that the deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg thinks that all who have any qualms of conscience over the legitimacy of gay marriage are ‘bigots’.

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In early August, as the very successful Olympics Games were getting underway in London, another piece of news saddened and shocked many in the UK.

A Pakistani couple were convicted at Chester Crown Court of murdering their daughter, of whom they had come to feel ashamed because of her rejection of strict Islam and adoption of Western ambitions and attitudes. The man and wife were found guilty of the 2003 ‘honour’ killing of their daughter. They were told by the judge that they would serve at least 25 years in prison. It seems that they suffocated their 17-year-old by forcing a plastic bag down her throat in front of their four other children at their home in Warrington, after she rejected an arranged marriage in Pakistan.

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In late June, the latest banking scandal concerning the rigging of market rates erupted in Britain.

At around the same time, a sociological study was published with the title Divergent Effects of Beliefs in Heaven and Hell on National Crime Rates.¹ When corruption and antisocial behaviour is evident at every level of society, from the MPs’ expenses fraud, to phone hacking journalists, to the rioting and looting in our cities last summer, the article makes interesting reading.

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I have been away in the US, but I did see that Downing Street said it remains determined to press ahead with same-sex marriage.

Should the worst happen and marriage is redefined it will have been an astonishing victory for the gay lobby — a whole reversal of a nation’s moral outlook in less than half a century is historically quite unprecedented (except perhaps in Nazi Germany). Of course this has been made possible because public opinion is malleable under the vast influence of the secular media dominated by the liberal agenda. Such is its influence that, testifying at the Leverson Inquiry, ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair spoke of making a decision to manage the media rather than confront it, presumably because he knew he could not win. (This power of the media actually calls into question the whole workings of democracy.)

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How can we make our economy work? That is the question facing not only the UK but the Eurozone too.

Bringing the economies of the 27 disparate member states of the EU under one umbrella so as to be good for all was always going to be a long shot. The initial response to the debt crisis in Europe has been to try to enforce austerity measures. With the accompanying hardship and loss of jobs, this has led to continuing riots and political turmoil in Greece, and a new President in France. Spain also teeters on the brink of needing a colossal financial bailout.

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A delightful incident occurred in April when a friend was flying to Heathrow from Nairobi.

He got on the crowded Kenya Airways flight and, as the passengers settled into their seats, a little girl of around three years old, on her mother’s lap, turned and began to sing, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…’ The whole plane seemed to look at her. Then her mother and a number of Christians on the flight gently joined in. My friend said it was a great witness. If an adult had piped up like that, no doubt people would have frowned and the singer would have been asked to stop. But a child’s voice no one could stop. Sometimes what is weak and small is mighty for God. Psalm 8.2 says: ‘From the lips of children and infants you have ordained praise because of your enemies’.

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Mark Driscoll, the controversial pastor of Mars Hill mega-church in Seattle, wrote a blog in January, in which, among other things, he reflected upon the spiritual condition of the UK.

This came in the aftermath of an interview which appeared in the February issue of Christianity magazine, with which he took exception. It is good to see ourselves as others see us, so here are some of his words.

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US TV shows are not among my favourites, but they are extremely popular. Certainly series like Scrubs and Glee are de rigueur for most 20s and 30-somethings.

These shows regularly promote the friendly face of what we might call ‘secular grace’. The ethos is one in which everyone is accepted. That is absolutely right when it comes to such matters as race or disability. But the agenda of these shows is more generally to do with morality — especially sexual morality. Morals are relative, a matter of opinion. We are all aware of our own failures. So we don’t judge anyone. We just accept — like grace.

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2012 sees the bicentenary of the birth of Charles Dickens.

I am just reading his novel Hard Times, set against the backdrop of the friction between the masters and the workers in the fictional industrial conurbation of ‘Coketown’.

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Away with comments on UK politics and the state of the euro! Let me tell you an encouraging Christmas tale.

In recent years our occasional church choir has become decidedly decent. It is made up of ordinary folk with a sprinkling of true talent and is trained with transatlantic enthusiasm by Steve, the choirmaster, each Sunday tea-time during the run-up to events.

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Let’s start with a history quiz.

1. Which Christian woman brought about a revolution in nursing through her work in the Crimea? 2. Which Christian man started the Ashley Down Orphanage near Bristol? 3. Which Christian MP was instrumental in the abolition of the slave trade? 4. Which group of ‘martyrs’, transported to Australia, fought for workers’ rights and the acceptance of trade unions? 5. Whose motto was, ‘Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the places you can, at all times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can’?

The answers in order are: Florence Nightingale (1820-1910); George Muller (1805-1898); William Wilberforce (1759-1833); the Tolpuddle martyrs (whose letters are very moving. I remember at least one quoting Romans 8.28 expressing Christian faith) and John Wesley (1703-1791).

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A group of pastors got in contact recently, asking for input at an upcoming conference on the subject of re-igniting our passion for Christ.

Their letter concluded by saying that they were worried that their churches were becoming like those at Laodicea and Ephesus, mentioned in Revelation, lukewarm and losing their first love. But theirs are not the only churches in this condition. My experience is that in the more doctrinal churches there appears more correctness than devotion and in churches where there is more excitement in Sunday worship this often seems more to do with that particular church culture than genuine love for Christ.

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Unable to pay its debts without borrowing more, the credit rating of the US was downgraded in August, triggering a fall of financial markets across the world.

It is as yet unclear how severe the consequences will be for the world economy. But this was a calamity waiting to happen. Back in 2007, EN reviewed the book Black Mass by John Grey of the LSE. It said: ‘The US is unable to live on its own economic activity and must be subsidised … at present cruising speed that subsidy amounts to $1.4 billion a day’. Obviously unsustainable. Since then we have witnessed the worldwide credit crunch, the introduction of stringent austerity measures in Britain and now deep financial troubles in the Eurozone.

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The tabloid readership had been rather hypocritical. They accepted the use of phone hacking by journalists and their informants when the practice uncovered the indiscretions of celebrities and the match-fixing of international cricketers.

But it was the revelation that a private detective, working on behalf of The News of the World, had illegally accessed the mobile phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler (and those of the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, relatives of 7/7 bomb victims and families of casualties in Afghanistan) which ignited total public outrage. This resulted in the closing of the Sunday paper, owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International, in July.

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Apart from a few fascinating lectures with colour slides from Quentin Bell at Sussex University back in the mists of time, and reading Rookmaaker’s classic book Modern Art and the Death of a Culture, I am not much versed in the visual arts.

However, for my birthday this year I found myself being taken along to London’s Victoria & Albert Museum to view a special exhibition. It is titled ‘The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900’ and remains open until July 17. It proved an interesting jaunt, not least from seeing Andrew Lloyd Webber with a couple of friends shuffling along with the rest of us punters past the exhibits.

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The present troubles in the Middle East and North Africa should make us very thankful for our system of democracy.

Since the turn of the year, the ‘Arab Spring’ has brought demonstrations in many Muslim countries as people seek freedom. Whereas governments have been toppled in Tunisia and Egypt, popular protests elsewhere are being brutally suppressed. It is arguable that such uprisings indicate deep weaknesses in Islam. Theodore Dalrymple* has highlighted two. The first is political. Within Islam ‘the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad’s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity, or authority... With power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability’. It is such oppression which has triggered the demonstrations. The second problem for Islam is intellectual. ‘In the West, the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment, acting upon the space that had always existed, at least potentially, in Christianity between Church and State, liberated individual men to think for themselves... Islam with no separate secular sphere where enquiry could flourish free from the claims of religion, if only for technical purposes, was hopelessly left behind.’ We wish the Arab Spring well. However, there is a danger. History teaches us that those who start revolutions are not always the ones who come to power.

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The referendum on the type of voting system we should adopt in General Elections in the UK takes place on May 5.

I began to worry immediately I saw a leaflet about it come through our letterbox festooned with the photos of celebrities. ‘Because Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley think a certain way you should too’, seemed to be the message. ‘Oh dear’, I thought.

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If things were not becoming more difficult for Christians in our country there is a sense in which we would be right to be worried. Jesus told us: ‘In this world you will have trouble’ (John 16.33). If we had none we might well be concerned that Jesus had got it wrong or that we were not following him properly.

March 1 saw the latest evidence of Bible Christianity being increasingly outlawed. The High Court refused permission for a Christian couple to challenge Derby City Council who had decreed that they could no longer act as foster carers because of their view that homosexual behaviour is wrong. What is interesting is that Christians are being stopped from doing good deeds which normally are viewed with admiration.

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The Evangelical Alliance (EA) has recently published the results of a survey carried out among 17,000 Christians attending various festivals held in the UK. It is titled 21st-century evangelicals: a snapshot of evangelical Christians in the UK.

The research was not carried out at the more conservative evangelical conferences. But they did include Spring Harvest, New Wine and the Keswick Convention. If EN is regarded as on the conservative wing, this gives us an idea of the centre ground of today’s evangelicalism. The results are mixed, both encouraging and very worrying.

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There are two subjects which need comment, though in rather different ways and not unrelated.

First, 2011 sees the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James’s Bible, known as the Authorised Version (AV). It was good that in January BBC Radio 4 celebrated this historic Bible translation.

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I’m sure you remember that catch phrase. It was popularised during Bill Clinton’s successful presidential campaign of 1992.

Those words may well come back to haunt the liberal democracies. What really holds the people of a modern liberal democracy together? It is not a shared cultural heritage. We are meant to be multi-cultural and diverse. It is not a shared moral vision. Ian Hislop’s recent BBC2 series, The Age of the Do-Gooders, looked back to Victorian times when both Christian and non-Christian still had some common understanding of what was meant by ‘good’. But times have changed. In our contemporary individualistic secular era, it has become clear that godlessness is unable to make the case for any real moral foundations. So this common consensus has almost died. For example, Christians would generally see the promotion of marriage and the nuclear family as for the good of society at large, whereas the hard secularists would claim almost the opposite.

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The Coalition Government’s cutbacks, as they seek to master the huge national debt, are just beginning to bite. The impact on society over coming years will be immense.

The Prime Minister has insisted that he has done his best to spread the load fairly. Others feel that a disproportionate burden has fallen on the poor. While leaving it to the economists to haggle over the figures, the bottom line is that many people are now losing their jobs. There is talk of some 500,000 public sector jobs going. One EN correspondent said they have two families in their church in real difficulty following redundancy. Both have children. The church is trying to help, but in their borough there are hundreds of people seeking employment and the chances of getting work look slim.

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In October, one national newspaper headline declared: ‘Generation Y has no use for God’. The piece said that religion is irrelevant to most young people. Quoting a study published by the Church of England, it explained that youngsters rely on themselves, their family and friends rather than God to give meaning to their lives.

Presumably the church is meant to be worried, to wring its hands and to question how it can become more relevant to those born after 1982. But if the apostle Paul saw that headline would he react in quite that way? I think not. In fact I can imagine him smiling and asking, ‘So what’s new?’ He not only taught us that the world by its wisdom does not know God, but that to the person without the Spirit the gospel is foolishness.

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I have been in Western Kenya over the summer. Each time I visit the country there are invariably advertisements for big ‘Christian’ rallies promising the most extraordinary divine interventions.

One that sticks in my mind from a previous trip was the ‘Holy Spirit Explosion’ crusade. This time a certain well-known health and wealth preacher who frequents London was plying his trade among the poor of the city of Kisumu promising ‘financial breakthrough’. It was the usual approach. People are assured that, as they give their money to finance his ministry (and luxurious lifestyle?), the Lord will take them out of their poverty and make them wealthy.

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One of the highlights of this year has been participating in the A Passion for Life outreach which was held by churches across the country over the Easter period; hard work brought great meetings.

At Chertsey Street in Guildford we had a bit of a miracle meeting, with Rico Tice using a sports theme to introduce the gospel. It was a curry night which attracted 150 men. The minor miracle was that that evening all the surrounding streets were in darkness, suffering a local power cut, but, for some reason we have not yet fathomed, the church had electricity. It was quite a talking point as men arrived out of the darkness wondering why we alone had light and power. It was an excellent event. Our main evangelist Nick Howard also spoke wonderfully well on numerous occasions especially with the church packed with members and friends on Easter morning.

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Austerity Britain is arriving at a platform near you. In June the new Chancellor, George Osborne, steamed in with the first budget of the Conservative/Lib-Dem coalition. It was styled an ‘emergency budget’, aimed at reducing the enormous national debt, and everyone will have to get on board.

The measures introduced included a rise in VAT to 20% from next January, Capital Gains Tax increasing from 18% to 28%, and the freezing of child benefits. In my street already some of the young guys are downsizing from flash cars to motorbikes.

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As pastor I get teased sometimes that it seems harder to become a member of our church than it is to get into heaven.

With a smile I reply that, sadly, that is probably true. The reason is that, whereas the Lord Jesus can see into people’s hearts and so know for certain who is really his, we mere mortals can’t. So, persuaded that we should be aiming at a church membership made up of real Christians, the leadership listens to people’s stories of how they came to Christ and looks for signs of genuine godliness and obedience to Christ and his commands. Obviously, we can’t guarantee we always get it right, but, with God’s help, we do our best.

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A new political era has dawned with the advent of a Tory/LibDem coalition government following the hung parliament produced by the recent General Election.

In its May issue, Prospect magazine published a set of fascinating statistics comparing Britain in 1997 when New Labour came to power with how things stand now. The population has increased from 58 to 61 million. The number of foreign-born people granted permanent right of residence in the UK in those years was 1.6 million. The public debt as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product has increased from 42.5% to 62%. The gap between rich and poor has grown. In 1998 the poorest 1% of people in Britain earned 18.1 times less than the richest 1%. By 2008, that figure had increased by almost a third to 26.6. House prices have rocketed. In 1997, on average a house cost 3.7 times the median annual wage; now it costs 6.5 times as much. But the enormous increase in government spending on health from £44.5b to £110.5b over this period has doubled the number of nurses in the NHS and drastically reduced waiting times for operations.

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The Roman Catholic church has recently found itself embroiled in controversy involving child sexual abuse.

The Pope appears to see the scandal as a conspiracy stirred up by the secular media (e.g. aren’t there paedophiles among secular youth works too?) and said that the Roman Catholic church will ‘not be intimidated’ or bow to ‘petty gossip’. The crisis has arisen as accusations of paedophile abuse by some priests have emerged in many countries. The Pope apologised in a seven-page letter to Irish victims in March. He himself has been accused of covering up at least one such case in Germany while he was a cardinal.

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A Passion for Life is a great evangelistic project and there is much excitement in our own congregation as we have seen many outsiders attending events as part of the build up to the main mission during Easter week. I am sure it is the same in other churches nationwide and we thank God for this.

If we long to see A Passion for Life being effective then we need to give ourselves to prayer, perhaps even prayer with fasting.

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The Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq war is expected to offer its findings after the General Election, which is due before June 3.

When ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared before the panel, there was a TV frenzy and many people watched the proceedings live on the web. In February, the former Secretary for International Development, Clare Short, who resigned over the war, brought applause from the public gallery when she gave evidence confirming the beliefs of many, that the country and the Commons were misled over the legality of the war by Tony Blair and Lord Goldsmith (then Attorney General). She said that when she wanted to raise questions in cabinet she was ‘jeered at to be quiet’. There is a widespread feeling that if the public had known the truth we would never have gone to war — and perhaps that is right.

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The Evangelical Alliance reports that the numbers of 20-somethings attending church is in steep decline, falling 62% from over half a million in 1985 to less than a quarter of a million two decades later.

Thankfully that does not appear to be the case in congregations I know where there is lively expository Bible ministry.

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A new year and the war in Afghanistan rumbles on with the increasing body count of British soldiers. It reached 100 for this year in December.

We are told that the war is being fought to prevent the country reverting to extremist Muslim Taliban rule, who would again allow it to become a training ground for al-Qu’eda terrorists who will launch attacks on Britain.

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During November the European Union’s Lisbon treaty was finally ratified. Without any kind of public referendum on this in the UK, a great deal more power has been ceded to Brussels.

But beyond the politics, what kind of entity is the EU spiritually? Some have warned us of the power of Roman Catholicism behind it all. But if a recent trip to Paris is anything to go by it is far worse than that. The same spiritual deadness of secularism, which manipulates all public life here (from government, through education and the media), seems to hold an even greater sway there. Catholicism in France’s capital shows every sign of being in decline. A poster outside many of the churches of a smiling woman declaring ‘There is a church in my life’ turned out to be nothing more than an appeal to the French public for money. The campaign said that anyone baptised as an infant in an RC church belongs to the church and is responsible to meet the church’s needs. It all looked a bit desperate.

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Recently we had a couple of folk baptised at our church. It was a great Sunday evening service and afterwards I got talking to one of the Christian relatives who had come to see his niece baptised.

‘Do you have any baptisms coming up?’ I asked. ‘Yes’, he replied, ‘we are due to baptise 13 people in November’. ‘Wow!’ I thought, ‘13! We hear of ones and twos being converted [we’re talking believer’s baptism here] but 13 is wonderful’. He did explain that it wasn’t quite so dramatic as might first appear because, for building reasons, they had not been able to hold baptisms for the earlier part of the year, so this group included a little backlog of candidates. But, nevertheless, it was great to hear of 13 folk coming to faith in one ordinary church.

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Three pieces of recent news have spoken eloquently of the desperate state of our country.

First, the shadow home secretary, Chris Grayling, made a speech comparing parts of Britain to The Wire, a US television drama which portrays the reality of inner city drug gangs and violence. He may have been making a political point, but it resonated with many ordinary people.

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Demographically, in order for a society to maintain itself for 25 years, there needs to be a birth rate of 2.11.

The last set of birth rates for countries within Europe I could find independently confirmed was from the BBC in 2004. They were as follows: Ireland 1.99; France 1.9; Norway 1.81; Sweden 1.75; UK 1.74; Germany 1.37; Italy 1.33; Spain 1.32; Greece 1.29. The birth rate in Britain, along within those of many other EU countries, as you see, is well below the required level. This inevitably means that the West, as we have known it, is in decline. Indeed with booming Islamic birth rates in Europe, Colonel Gadafi of Libya is quoted as saying, ‘There are signs that Allah will grant victory to Islam in Europe, without swords, without guns…We don’t need terrorists… The 50+ million Muslims will turn it into a Muslim continent within decades.’

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‘What do I think of Christians? I think most are hypocritical. I also think most are judgmental and are not very accepting of most others.’

That online comment may well fit the bill for some of us, in which case we must repent. But there are good Christians who are not like that. However, what tends to happen is that we are all tarred with the same brush. That means that people are wary of us and will not be open to giving the gospel of Christ a fair hearing from us.

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There is so much happening in Britain which is both depressing and quite frightening for Christians at present. How can we keep our spirits up?

The great anchor for the Christian’s joy is the sovereignty of God which does not diminish when times are bad. To encourage our own congregation recently we have been looking at the Old Testament prophecy of Habakkuk. They were dark days for the prophet. Because of their sins, his nation was facing invasion by the brutal Babylonians at the behest of God. Habakkuk had to work through some agonising questions about what God was doing. But one of the standout features of his book is his great prayer: ‘LORD, I have heard of your fame; I stand in awe of your deeds, O LORD. Renew them in our day, in our time make them known; in wrath remember mercy’ (3.2).

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I know this will not make happy reading, but the woes of our country are piling up.

First, of course, our economic problems are now enormous. The City has been a major contributor to the exchequer in recent years, but the economist Ruth Lea has written, ‘in the wake of the current crisis, this sector is not expected to be a major source of growth — on the contrary it is likely to contract’. Then there is the loss of manufacturing. The French President has described Britain as a country that doesn’t manufacture anything. In fact, manufacturing still accounts for 13% of GDP, but, with the recession, companies are closing. The steel producer Corus is under pressure. Then there is the depletion of our oil and gas reserves.

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The National Union of Teachers conference in April heard of schools hiring bouncers for classrooms. The magazine of the NASUWT, previously reported on the problems which teenaged gangs bring to many schools.

The main conclusion was that, because gang problems often have their origins in the communities in which the schools are located, schools cannot be expected to spearhead combating gang culture, but can only work in conjunction with other agencies. Related to poverty and poor parenting, the evidence is of gangs being formed around divisions of race or background within communities and that, therefore, teachers should address equality, diversity and community cohesion within the classroom. But this alone can’t solve the problem.

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Global problems, global solutions?

Increasingly the signs seem to be that we are moving towards some kind of world government. This phenomenon (much loved by those who deal in prophetic timetables of the last days) may not happen soon, but it seems fairly clear that it must emerge sometime on the long-term political agenda.

The need for such a body is argued from many starting points. First, there is the current widespread economic recession. As he met President Obama at the beginning of March, Gordon Brown insisted that our financial difficulties stemmed from a failure of the banking system worldwide. ‘Bold global action, a global grand deal, is not now just necessary, but is vitally urgent to deal with the challenges of the world economy’, he said. In April, a meeting of leaders is scheduled in London, hoping to take decisions to secure the world’s economic future. Wouldn’t an authoritative body to oversee the planet’s economics make sense?

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Despite the impression given by the BBC, all is not well with Darwin’s theory of evolution on this 200th anniversary of his birth.

For example, I noticed that Sir David Attenborough’s celebratory TV programme was titled Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, but at the end of the January New Scientist magazine’s front page headline was ‘Darwin was wrong: cutting down the tree of life’. It reported that the data concerning the perceived connections between living creatures simply does not link together in a Darwinian tree-like fashion.

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At the end of December, the noted gay journalist Matthew Parris published an article in The Times, which encouraged many Christians but simultaneously left us sad for him.

It was titled ‘As an atheist, I truly believe Africa needs God’. Parris was brought up in what today is Malawi and he returned there recently in connection with the charity Pump Aid. It caused him to reflect on the impact of Christianity. Here is some of what he wrote: ‘In Africa Christianity changes people’s hearts… We had friends who were missionaries and as a child I often stayed with them… In the city we had working for us Africans who had converted and were strong believers. The Christians were always different. Far from having cowed or confined its converts, their faith appeared to have liberated and relaxed them… They stood tall.

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At the beginning of December, Michael Donovan and Karen Matthews were convicted at Leeds Crown Court of kidnapping and falsely imprisoning Karen Matthews’ daughter Shannon at Donovan’s flat a mile or so from her home in Dewsbury.

The search for Shannon had cost £3.2 million and many people kindly volunteered their time in looking. Donovan later told the police that he planned to release Shannon and to pretend to have found her, so claiming the £50,000 reward money which he would later share with Shannon’s mother. The idea for this scam seems to have had two sources. First, the pair had seen the media interest and reward money offered in the case of Madeleine McCann who disappeared in the Portuguese resort of Praia da Luz in May 2007. Second, an identical plot had featured in an episode of the Channel 4 series Shameless, which is set on a sink estate in Manchester.

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Back from the dead

The little Grace Baptist church in Watford, North West of London, had closed some time ago. However, driven by concern for God’s glory a Christian worker was stirred to seek to reopen it.

There was a promising initial meeting in the old chapel on Easter Sunday this year, with 22 people, including many well-wishers, present. But the following Sunday showed the cold reality of the situation. The preacher was the only one there for the morning service.

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In October a friend organised a trip for our congregation to tour the Houses of Parliament and then spend an hour with our MP. I would recommend the exercise. The decor of the building is beautifully steeped in Christian tradition and the MP emphasised that she was glad to meet us be-cause Christians need to make their voices heard much more. (Perhaps she says that to all her visitors?)

However, in passing, the MP mentioned that when she is asked to go into schools to speak about her work to teenagers she often finds herself having to talk about sex and drugs. The implication was that this is the only way to get the youngsters’ attention; much else would be dismissed as boring. This is not the first time that I have run into the idea that to make young people sit up and take notice something salacious or even shocking must be presented.

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The person who had died would have called herself a humanist. She was in many ways a lovely person and always concerned to be fair and just in all her dealings, and a person to whom we owed a great deal as a family.

Originally, the plan was for the funeral to be conducted by a member of the Humanist Society, but as it turned out it was simply a civil ceremony. The waiting room at the crematorium in which we assembled prior to the ceremony in early September had a sentence etched in the glass of the large window which read: ‘There is only one religion although there are many expressions of it.’ In this case it would mean avoiding any reference to God altogether.

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Pray on!

Facing many challenges at this time, from both outside and inside the church, what are Christians meant to do?

Jesus showed his disciples ‘that they should always pray and not give up’.

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Violence for church?

The beginning of July saw a large march in London against knife crime, following the murder of Ben Kinsella, 16-year-old half-brother to an actress from the TV soap EastEnders.

One cannot but sympathise deeply with the family, but the killing brought home what was pointed out in this column last month. I am sure there are some redeeming features and portrayals of humanity in the series, but EastEnders often glamorises drinking, casual sex, aggression, petty crime and thuggery. If our TVs pour out violence, we must not be surprised when it invades our streets.

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God’s judgments show a profound appropriateness (Proverbs 1.25,26, etc.). And what our society is experiencing currently appears to have a shocking fittingness about it.

For instance, the prevalence of youth violence, and particularly knife crime, on our streets has hit the headlines. The liberal press has tried to dismiss this concern merely as the product of media hype. But the fears are not ill-founded. Though figures for violent crime have fallen, it has been mainly due to a halving of domestic violence. What the broad statistics hide is an increase in ‘stranger’ violence, up 14% since 1997. In London 26 teenagers were murdered in 2007 and 16 have already been murdered this year. The mother of teenager Arsema Dawit stabbed to death in a lift in her block of flats in June said, ‘I came to this country from Eritrea to live in safety. When my daughter was threatened I went to the police seeking protection. Sadly, this did not happen’.

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Trustworthy Scripture

Many truths central to classical evangelicalism are being called into question at present, by those known as evangelicals.

We have had the attack on the cross of Christ as the penal substitution for our sins from Steve Chalke. The doctrine of justification by faith alone is contested by many who have adopted the so-called New Perspective on Paul. Now a new controversy concerning the inerrancy of Scripture is brewing since the publication of A.T.B. McGowan’s book The Divine Spiration of Scripture. There is a thorough review of that book in this issue of EN.

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In the last few weeks the six-month inquest into the deaths of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her boyfriend, Dodi Fayed, in a car crash in Paris back in 1997 finally came to an end.

The jury decided that they were unlawfully killed, laying the blame at the feet of the chauffeur, Henri Paul, who had been drinking, and the paparazzi who had recklessly pursued the princess’s car in the quest for photographs. The coroner, Lord Justice Scott Baker, said that there was ‘not a shred of evidence’ in support of Mr. Mohamed Al Fayed’s conspiracy theory that the princess and his son were actually murdered as part of an Establishment plot. But, despite the verdict of the jury, Mr. Fayed subsequently promised that his campaign to prove an under cover MI6 assassination would continue.

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Changing the nation?

Though in their manifestos for the 2005 general election, all three political parties had promised a referendum on the European Constitution, yet the voters were given no say as, in March, Parliament adopted a document which is 90% the same.

William Hague for the Tories spoke of yet more powers going to Brussels. Labour rebel Frank Field said that this kind of thing leads to a real ‘falling out of love with democracy’. The present government came to power with only 31% of electorate behind them, and now clear promises made to voters had simply been ignored.

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The lecture given by the Archbishop of Canterbury in early February, ‘Civil and Religious Law in England’, has stirred a deep controversy which has brought calls for his resignation.

The talk addresses the increasing difficulty over matters of conscience for religious believers in general when faced by the demands of contemporary secular law; things like Christian doctors or nurses who are expected to set aside religious scruples over performing abortions, etc. However, the majority of what he said, being framed in terms of the problems which confront Muslims, means that it comes across first and foremost as an argument for the accommodation of shari’a law into the English legal system. Although Lambeth Palace denied this, the text commends ‘a scheme in which individuals retain the liberty to choose the jurisdiction under which they will seek to resolve certain carefully specified matters’. Williams goes on to admit: ‘It is uncomfortably true that this introduces into our thinking about law what some would see as a “market” element.’

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Marathon men

I have a photo of him on the landing. His eyes twinkle from behind his wire frame spectacles under his fuzzy hair and above his tidy blond moustache.

His name is John Peters and he was the pastor of our congregation for around 40 years through two world wars, the onslaughts of theological liberalism in the early 20th century and a move of building. As a church leader he was not there for a brief sprint, but for the marathon.

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I have had a dreadful cold-cum-flu thing which may yet turn me into a Darwinian.

At present I am sneezing up something green, reminiscent of the ‘primeval soup’. I am expecting life to evolve from it anytime. (Perhaps you didn’t want to know that.)

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There used to be an Asian building firm which advertised its services around the West London area. Referring to the notoriously slipshod workmanship of many of their rivals they advertised themselves with the wonderful slogan painted on their vans, ‘You’ve tried the cowboys, now try the Indians’. It made many people smile and probably got them a lot of business.

There can be no doubt that immigrants have been greatly beneficial to this country in many ways, not least in terms of the economy. But now a great debate is raging as to whether the government has allowed immigration to get out of hand. Since 1997 some 1.1 million people from abroad have taken jobs in Britain, some 300,000 more than the figure the government originally published. 52% of jobs created since New Labour came to power have gone to people from overseas. The government defends this policy, saying that foreign workers are needed partly to redress the country’s aging work force and partly to meet labour shortages in a range of jobs. Certainly many foreign workers, especially those from Poland, have the reputation for being very reliable and hardworking.

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Against church plants

I thought that headline might be intriguingly provocative!

There are large areas of our land where there is no witness at all for the biblical gospel of Christ. Vast areas of rural Britain, enormous run-down housing estates and many new developments on ‘greenfield’ sites have no gospel church holding out the word of life to them. Here, for certain, we should be doing our best to plant new churches.

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Rhys and Jamie

Even before late August’s tragic incident of the murder of little Rhys Jones in Liverpool by a teenaged gunman, politicians were talking of ‘breakdown Britain’.

The Bible spells out certain fundamentals on how fallen human society works. It therefore enables us to foresee the future. Anyone using God’s Word could have predicted what would happen to our land years ago. In fact they did. Back in 1971 many Christians came together in London for the Nationwide Festival of Light to warn the government which had presided over the permissive society and the ‘swinging 60s’. But their warning was ignored. Now we are reaping the harvest. It is not just gangs and guns on our streets. There are, as we all know, epidemics of family breakdown, drug culture, binge drinking, teenaged pregnancy, sexually-transmitted diseases, gambling addiction, abuse of the elderly (and terrorism).

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Back in the days of Margaret Thatcher and the Australian ‘Spycatcher’ trial, Sir Robert Armstrong brought the phrase ‘being economical with the truth’ into contemporary usage. It means conveying an untrue version of events.

Over the summer we have seen a crisis of trust developing between British audiences and those responsible for what is shown on our TV screens. Broadcasters have been caught manipulating the truth; perhaps they would say being ‘creative’ with it in order to produce greater impact. The latest example emerged at the beginning of August. ITV was to transmit a documentary titled Malcolm and Barbara: Love’s farewell, on the tragedy of an Alzheimer’s case. No doubt this is a worthy and moving subject. But before it was broadcast it came to light that the final scene was intentionally misleading. Here the patient ‘passes away’. The man’s brother blew the whistle. Malcolm Pointon actually died three days later.

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The ways of God’s providence can sometimes hit us quite forcefully.

It was our church prayer meeting on June 28, the day after Gordon Brown had become our new Prime Minister. A Muslim convert to Christianity, with much experience of the workings of Islam, was speaking.

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Government by TV?

It has been one of those months when the TV has not simply reported the news but has been making some of the biggest news headlines.

Channel 4 has been to the forefront. First it was surrounded in controversy as it defied calls to pull a programme featuring graphic images of the car crash which killed Princess Diana in Paris in 1997, despite this being requested by her sons. Then more trouble erupted as, for the second time, the Big Brother show broadcast racist language from one of the housemates. This time the Channel 4 chiefs took swift action and Emily Parr was dismissed from the programme.

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I confess I may be being premature but we must all have begun to wonder how long it will be before we see the fragmentation of our country into separate nation states.

The elections in May brought extraordinary success to the Scottish Nationalist Party, finishing the Labour Party’s 50-year dominance north of the border. Whether he will be able to do it with his wafer-thin majority is debatable, but Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, was looking for a referendum on Scottish independence within three years. Having given regional assemblies to both Scotland and Wales, many would say to Tony Blair as he steps down this month as PM, ‘Well what did you think would happen?’

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Not long ago I had a conversation with a man who works for the Gideons, the organisation which puts Bibles in hotel rooms, etc.

He told me that recently he was driving in the Midlands towards Leicester when he zoomed by a young man with a big haversack and a cross on his back walking by the side of the carriageway. On the cross the words were written for all to see, ‘Jesus is Life’. Being a Christian and involved in the Lord’s work himself, he was intrigued. So further down the road he found a place to turn the car around and drove back. He was able to stop and talk to this guy. What was his story?

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I think it was the evangelist of a previous generation, David Watson, who told of presenting the case for Christ at a university to find a student responding aggressively: ‘I know what I believe. Don’t confuse me with the facts!’

But that same attitude is becoming increasingly commonplace in our public life. At the beginning of March, Prime Minister in waiting, Gordon Brown, again ruled out tax breaks to encourage marriage. Earlier the Education Secretary Alan Johnson gave a speech in which he was reported as ‘attacking marriage’, saying that children can be brought up just as effectively by single mothers. Now, whereas individual cases might happily buck the trend, the clear evidence of all the research is that ‘children of two-parent families just do a lot better on every measurement than those from single parent or step-families’ (Robert Whelan, Civitas).

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I was rather hoping to be able to write a more upbeat editorial this month, but circumstances have conspired against me!

Two matters have continued to dominate the headlines — the gay agenda and Islam. Tony Blair has explained that the major conflict of our world today is a confrontation between the forces of liberal democracy and those of totalitarian fundamentalism (with extreme Islam in mind). If we take that as a model for what is going on in our own country, then, apart from some marvellous intervention of God, there are only three possible outcomes, none of which looks comfortable for Bible-believing Christians and churches.

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I read recently that the essayist and statesman Lord Macauley (1800-1859) said that the world’s greatest democratic nations had a life expectancy of about 200 years.

In a letter to a friend he wrote that they go through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith, from faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to complacency; from complacency to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; from dependency back into bondage. If Lord Macauley’s assessment of the rise and fall of democracies is true, it is not hard, in general terms, to see where our country is located in that progression. What amounts to the criminalising of Christian morality by the House of Lords decision in January to accept the Sexual Orientation Regulations, underlines where we are.

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In our town we are involved at present in fighting to prevent the closure of the Royal Surrey County Hospital. The initial rumour was that only the A&E would shut, but now we are in a stand off. It is either us or St. Peter’s at Chertsey. But why should either close?

As we travelled recently we passed a campaign march in Westbury, Wiltshire, and many other areas of the country are threatened with similar hospital closures. What is going on?

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This last autumn has seen an ongoing debate about the fact that Britain has too many offenders and has run out of prison cells in which to keep them.

There are 140 prisons in England and Wales with a capacity for 79,900 prisoners. The numbers in prison have risen from 60,000 in 1997 to the full capacity this year.

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Back in September, the Pope’s use of a medieval quotation in a speech in Germany concerning violence and Islam, taken out of context, led to ‘outrage’ in the Muslim community. Since then, among other things, the Pope has been warned not to visit Turkey on pain of death. The threat seems to many to prove the point about violence and Islam.

More recently, in October, former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s suggestion that community relations in Britain might be helped if Muslim women did not wear full veils was reported as having ‘provoked anger’ among many Muslim spokesmen.

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Our country is now in a time of change politically. At the beginning of September the ongoing battle between Tony Blair and the chancellor Gordon Brown came to a head. The result is that Mr. Blair has promised to step down as Prime Minister within the next 12 months.

The expectation is that Gordon Brown will move into Number 10 Downing Street, but a number of prominent Labour Party voices have questioned whether he really is the man for the job. Hence, the country is entering a time of uncertainty. And, with the terrorist threat and British soldiers under pressure in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is not the best time for the Government to be in a state of flux.

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Thankfully the ceasefire has now come in the Middle East. But whether this will mean a lasting peace is yet to be seen.

The conflict is between Israel and the Islamic militant group Hezbollah. But behind Israel stands George Bush’s America and behind Hezbollah stands Iran with its desire to take on the West in the name of Islam brandishing its own nuclear weapons. Israel and America wish to humiliate Iran by wiping out Hezbollah. Iran and its allies wish to humiliate the United States by damaging Israel. Meanwhile, ordinary people on both sides have been caught up in war.

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Please forgive a rather personal editorial column this month, but I hope that it will be of general encouragement.

Recently my dear father died, but in the middle of the sadness of that event I was led to reflect again on the strong Bible truth of God’s plan and sovereign rule over our lives and our world.

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July 7 brings the first anniversary of the terrible atrocity when four fanatical suicide bombers blew themselves up on the London transport system killing many innocent people.

Since that horrendous event I have often pondered the story of the Rev. Julie Nicholson who lost her daughter Jenny in the Edgware Road attack. In March it was reported that she had resigned her post because she found it too hard to forgive the murderers. ‘It is very difficult for me’, she said, ‘to stand behind an altar and celebrate the Eucharist and lead people in words of peace and reconciliation and forgiveness when I feel very far from that myself.’ One feels both the greatest sympathy for her and at the same time real admiration for the transparent integrity displayed in her decision to resign.

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Cultural relativism is the idea that no culture should be seen as superior to another. It is the inevitable concomitant of the postmodern mindset which denies the possibility of truth which is true for everybody.

The evidence of cultural relativism in social policy — multiculturalism we call it — is all around us in our land today. At one level it is a concept with which Christians should be very comfortable. We believe that all people of whatever race or culture are created equal in the image of God. We believe that God loves the whole world. A proper tolerance is, therefore, something for which we should work. The idea generally that minorities from different backgrounds should not face unfair discrimination and that all people should be treated with respect is something the Bible argues for very clearly, e.g. Exodus 22.21; Psalm 94.3,6,7. And, indeed, cross-cultural interchange can be a very healthy and rewarding enterprise. But at another level there is a different kind of multiculturalism. It is an ideology which looks not just to respect other cultures but insists they must be actively promoted. This kind of multiculturalism is beginning to cause big problems to surface.

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In April, the Gospel of Judas was unveiled to the world’s press at a ‘launch’ in Washington. The crumbling papyrus document was found in an Egyptian cave in the 1970s and is said to be at least 1,600 years old. It purports to record conversations of Jesus which teach things very different from the New Testament and vindicates Judas Iscariot.

This follows hard on the heels of the success of Dan Brown’s fictional thriller The Da Vinci Code, the film of which is soon to hit cinema screens now that he has won his court battle against the charge of plagiarism. Again, one of the central accusations in Brown’s novel is that the NT does not represent the true teaching of Jesus. Instead of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we should all be reading the Gnostic Gospels (discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945), like The Gospel of Thomas and The Testimony of Truth.

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The first time I ever got involved in a newspaper was 25 years ago this month. I began as assistant editor under Bob Horn at what was then Evangelical Times.

The front page story for the April issue of 1981 was that of the death of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones who went to be with the Lord, very appropriately for the great Welshman, on Sunday March 1, St. David’s Day. As we put the paper together at that time, the office conversation centred around how evangelicalism would develop in the future now that the doctor’s illustrious figure had been removed from among us. Grounded thoroughly in Scripture, his incisive mind and the sense of God’s authority upon his preaching had made him both a wise and dynamic influence across the evangelical spectrum for 40 years or more. What would happen now?

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‘Truly marvellous!’ ‘I stopped where I was and thanked God.’ ‘We could hardly believe it!’ These were the kind of reactions described by many Christians as they heard the news of the Government’s defeat in the Commons over the Religious Hatred Bill at the very end of January.

There still is a Religious Hatred Bill, but much curtailed in its scope, as the Government was forced to accept changes it did not want. The recent conviction of the radical Islamic cleric Abu Hamza shows that there were laws in place already able to deal with real incitement to religious hatred... but with those historic words, ‘The ayes to the right 282 the noes to the left 283’, surely God himself is saying something to us. The old adage, ‘God plus one is a majority’, is still true (even if in a sense, with the Prime Minister being absent from the crucial vote, the ‘one’ is ironically Tony Blair himself).

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The Daily Telegraph| called it ‘the most sweeping social reform for 40 years’. It was speaking of the first gay ‘weddings’ celebrated in Britain recently, and referring back to the legalisation of homosexual acts between consenting adults brought in during the 1960s.

Among those getting ‘married’ were rock star Sir Elton John and his partner and actor Sir Antony Sher and his partner. With high profile celebrities like these involved and the Prime Minister welcoming these civil partnerships as a ‘modern and progressive step’, Christians who believe the witness of Scripture that God views homosexual acts as sinful, will no doubt be branded intolerant, antediluvian bigots, upon whom it is already open season for the liberal establishment to pour its self-righteous scorn. Truly our cup overflows!

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According to Government statistics, in 2003/04 some 4,647 children were admitted to hospital suffering from mental and behavioural disorders caused by the effects of alcohol, liver disease and the toxic effects of bingeing. The figures were up by around 11% from 1996/7.

During the same period, adult hospital admissions resulting from the effects of alcohol rose 15% from 35,740 to 41,122. Yet, against this background, the Government recently pushed through legislation relaxing the licensing hours. This will mean that many bars will stay open later at weekends and some outlets are now able to sell alcohol around the clock. As we enter a new year, we wait to see the consequences.

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While we can rejoice in all that God is doing through big churches — and we have an article about large Anglican congregations in this [December] issue — many Christians involved in smaller churches need encouragement.

In a world dominated by the idea that only what is big is worthy of attention, we often need to remind ourselves that we have a God who delights to choose the weak, the lowly and the despised things to shame the huge and glamorous (1 Corinthians 1.27, 28). Where would you start if you planned to begin a way of salvation which would span all of history and reach a fallen world? God decided to begin with one old man and one old woman — Abraham and Sarah. God’s strategy often takes us by surprise. It has lots to do with faith and the Holy Spirit, and little to do with numbers and state of the art equipment. So the truth is that God can and does use small churches, small services and small evangelistic events.

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In October Britain’s Catholic bishops published a document, The Gift of Scripture, in which they say that some parts of the Bible are not actually true.

While we need to allow for the different genres within Scripture — we would not expect poetry to be necessarily taken literally, for example — yet the bishops are indicating something far more drastic. They say the Bible must be seen to be ‘God’s word expressed in human language’, and that, while it is true when it speaks about salvation, we should not expect total accuracy from the Bible in other, secular matters. It is then a Bible with holes.

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Britain’s churches are well on the way to extinction, according to a new report, The Future of the Church, published at the beginning of September.

If current trends continue, churchgoing will drop by two thirds in the next 30 years, while Islam will mushroom. The average age of Christian congregations will have risen to 64 as young people react against the church under the catalyst of secularisation. 18,000 more church buildings will have closed. So, if you needed reminding, we are up against it.

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There appeared to be fewer in the audience for our annual trip to the Proms, and many more police, their luminous yellow jackets over their uniforms, patrolling the railway stations. The tube passengers seemed more subdued.

The two bomb attacks in July, one successful and the other a failure, have left their marks on London life.

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One lunchtime my wife and I were celebrating the decision to give London the 2012 Olympics. The next lunchtime we were stunned to hear the terrible news of the London terrorist attacks. Our hearts went out to those involved and those who had lost loved ones.

In the space of one hour, four bombs went off on Thursday July 7. Three were on the Underground and one in a double-decker red London bus. Hundreds of people were injured and at least 50 are dead. Police have made unexpectedly quick progress in their investigation, and it is now believed the attacks were carried out by extremist Muslim young men, mostly from Leeds, who acted as suicide bombers.

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The apostle Paul is arguably, after Christ himself, the greatest advocate of the Christian faith, and just as some people wanted to kill him in his own lifetime, those who hate Christianity do their best, even today, to do a character assassination job on Paul. ‘Radical’ academic theologians have described him as narrow-minded, a woman hater, a bigot, a fool and more.

But as we read through the New Testament’s eye-witness accounts of Paul, we realise that such slanders could not be further from the truth. We see this particularly in the later chapters of Acts. As we follow Paul on his return journey to face danger in Jerusalem, we see that such was the attractiveness of his personality that at virtually every stop along the way people had real difficulty in letting him go (Acts 20.36-38; 21.1; 21.5; 21.12). And it was not just Christians who loved Paul. On the ill-fated sea voyage towards Rome which ended in shipwreck on Malta, it is clear that many on board had taken to him (27.31, 32, 36, 43). Paul was actually a deeply sympathetic man, who, except for those already spitefully prejudiced against him, spontaneously generated warmth and affection from those he met. Once he had indeed been the narrow-minded murderous persecutor, Saul of Tarsus. But since meeting the Lord Jesus he had wonderfully changed. Instead of wanting to get away from him, people couldn’t get enough of him. What an enormous evidence for the truth of the gospel.

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On May 5 the General Election saw Tony Blair returned for a third term as Prime Minister. This will be the first time that a Labour Government has ever enjoyed three consecutive terms in office. Thus Mr. Blair’s place in the history books is assured.

Like many others I am not too displeased with the outcome of the election. With a greatly-reduced majority the country showed its displeasure with Mr. Blair, and he seems now somewhat chastened and humbled by the experience. Humility in leadership is never a bad thing. But there has already been quite an outcry from rebel Labour backbenchers, blaming the electorate’s lack of trust in the Prime Minister for the haemorrhaging of Labour’s vote and for Mr. Blair to step aside, as he reportedly promised, in favour of the Chancellor Gordon Brown. Whether this will happen, only coming days will tell.

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The recent death of Pope John Paul II received an astonishing amount of media coverage. ‘What a fantastic publicity machine’, one person commented to me. ‘For the amount of air time given to it all you would almost think that Britain had become a Catholic country again’, said someone else.

However, what we saw in this coverage of the papal departure is probably a mixture of two things. First, it is true in our spiritually arid society that people are sheep without a shepherd looking for some kind of figurehead. Actually they do not need a pope, but the Lord Jesus. Secondly, it is down to society’s current appetite for celebrity and everything to do with those who are famous. It does not even matter what people are famous for. Nothing could be more out of tune with the way most people in Britain think than the Pope’s opposition to contraception and to abortion. But nevertheless he was famous, he had been on TV a lot with his world tours, he wore a striking costume and he had been around for a long time, so he had become part of the celebrity club. Hence he was given the full treatment.

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It is around this time each year that the Christian conference season bursts upon us, and thousands of evangelical and charismatic Christians go off to various seaside holiday complexes for worship and teaching, fellowship and fun.

My own experience of these events in the past has been on the whole very positive. It is not often that many of us get the opportunity to hear gifted expositors like John Piper or John MacArthur, or Alistair Begg from the USA. Bible overviews, (usually from gifted young Anglicans), have opened up the Scriptures as never before for some people. Then there is usually some kind of arena in which missionary societies, Christian publishers and community projects have their stalls and capture our interest. Probably most encouraging of all is seeing Christians of all ages, students, young families and elderly, all mixing and praising God together. Wonderful.

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My father has been in hospital since last September. He is now 87 years old and is very frail. Visiting him there, and taking my mother each day to visit, I have, over the last few months seen a snapshot of the workings of the NHS for the elderly. Unfortunately, what I have seen has not been good.

There have been many incidents which have disappointed us including my father contracting a number of conditions with which he did not enter the hospital. An infected toe did not have the dressing changed for well over a week, despite my mother pointing this out on a number of occasions. Another man in the ward was moved out by his family to a private hospital. The nurses had accidentally thrown away his false teeth but had done nothing to replace them. The man was having great difficulty even eating. The stories could go on.

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Freedom is a Christian ideal and should be one of the hallmarks of a democratic and healthy society.

Recently, however, the whole issue of freedom of speech has begun to run into many difficulties. Back in December, the Sikh community understandably felt very aggrieved over the play entitled Bhesti (Punjabi for ‘dishonour’), which portrayed immorality and abuse in a Sikh temple. There were angry scenes on the streets of Birmingham and police had to be involved in holding back the protesters. Eventually the play was closed down by the theatre’s executive director.

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For some years now evangelicals have been renewing their response to the needs of the homeless, the disabled and the poor. This is absolutely right and as it should be.

However, there are a number of subtle dangers involved of which we need to be aware, which can draw us away from the biblical gospel.

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One evangelical leader, who phoned EN having received the news of Roy Clements ending his ministry

and leaving his family to pursue a relationship with another man, commented: 'If I had been asked to dream up what could be the greatest blow to the evangelical cause in Britain at the present time, I am not sure I could have come up with anything worse than this'.