Drill for victory!
TWO MEN WENT TO WAR (PG)
This is a film which you might have difficulty seeing. According to The Daily Telegraph the weekend it opened it was only screened at six cinemas in Britain out of a total of 3,100. Why? Is it something totally outrageous? No, it is actually a gentle comedy based on a true incident from World War II, which, apart from its fairly florid language, has more of Dad's Army about it than anything else.
It tells the strange story of two men from the Army Dental Corps, at Aldershot, who, frustrated by their lack of involvement in front-line warfare, went absent without leave one day in 1942 to invade the continent on their own. Sgt. Peter King (played in the film by Kenneth Cranham), then 55 years old, and Pte. Leslie Cuthbertson, then 20, took a train to Cornwall, stole a boat from a fishing village, and went across to occupied France, cut telephone wires and blew up a railway line and a signal box with their grenades. On the return journey their boat was damaged by a mine, and they drifted back to Cornwall half-starved to be arrested as suspected German spies. The cinema version inevitably embroiders the facts a little, but not outrageously.
The theme that comes across, especially as Winston Churchill hears about the incident, is to do with the potency of nutty and absurd (British?) heroism. Is there a lesson for Christians in it? Perhaps there is. Haven't many churches and church leaders become rather too comfortable, academic and predictable? By contrast, don't we find this kind of ridiculous gallantry in the men of faith in Scripture - Jonathan and his armour-bearer climbing a cliff to take on the Philistines, David the shepherd boy squaring up to Goliath, the Lord Jesus refusing to compromise before the might of the Roman empire invested in Pilate? What was that old rhyme that I have heard Bill Bygroves quote so many times? Give me a few of that dare-devil crew/ who carry no thought of retreat/ they fire away, by night and by day/ and never know when they are beat.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
What would you think if you received a letter from your church leaders that read like this? ‘Are church members …