President's diary - August 2024
One of my regular tasks as a local pastor was to write a monthly article for the church magazine. I recall producing something about the church year. Lots of us get taught that the liturgical year begins at Advent. This makes sense given that we start that season by thinking about the coming of the kingdom in its fullness before thinking about the stories that lead up to the coming of Messiah Jesus.
Churches also mark the calendar year. It’s always an opportunity to talk about resolutions and to use words from the poem that begins ‘I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year’. I also liked to choose Bonhoeffer’s hymn written for new year 1945, By gracious powers, so wonderfully sheltered.
Then of course there’s the tax year and there may be others that have slipped my mind.
However, in our church, as in many others, the church’s activities were linked to the academic year. Everything restarted in September after the summer break and the autumn schedule raced towards the Christmas celebrations.
We’d kick on in January as we turned to the season of Lent and then Easter. After the Easter season came Pentecost and then things started to slow down as we moved towards summer.
The point of all this was that August was the time when the pause button was pressed. People were away. We took stock and recharged. The church where I’m now a member is in a holiday town and so there have been quite a few summer activities.
However, I suspect that the pattern I noticed as a pastor persists in many places. One outcome, as you will see if you read on, is that I’ve received fewer invitations to visit other churches during August. It’s been good to have a change of pace before an autumn schedule that looks fairly busy.
In the circumstances, this diary takes a slightly different format for August.
A first grandchild
Our daughter gave birth early in the month. It wasn’t a straightforward delivery but by the time we heard about it both mother and baby were doing well. That afternoon we went to the hospital to meet the new arrival. I’m sure lots of people have the same feelings, but the sight of your children’s children produces a deep sense of joy, of continuity, of privilege, all mixed with a little apprehension about having a new role to play that will involve being available without imposing. We’ll try to get the balance right.
Of course, we were also conscious that this was one of those moments when you are especially aware of God’s blessing. We’ve seen the parents and baby a few more times since she was born and I’m delighted to say that all is well.
Activities
I’ve always loved live music. Becca and I like to go to concerts when we get the opportunity. This summer we visited the folk festival in Sidmouth, went to Cardiff to see Billy Joel – Becca’s a big fan, and to Taunton for a Status Quo concert. All great fun. I really enjoyed the band with the Latin name, but I found myself wondering how much longer they can carry on without becoming their own tribute act. I was also impressed with their special effects: just as they played the song Rain, it started to drizzle! Fortunately, it stopped by the time they got to the next number.
I shouldn’t grumble. I like my phone as much as the next person. But why do people feel they need to record concerts on their phone? They end up watching them through the screen. At the Billy Joel concert one person in front of me had a phone pointed at the big screen. So rather than being fully present, she was watching a picture of a picture of the event. I’d say that I don’t understand young people’s culture these days but lots of those doing this were my age and older. I remember one occasion when I was forced to watch a Paul Simon concert through the bank of phones held up by the people in the row in front. You can find plenty of concert footage on YouTube. Surely live music is to be enjoyed in the moment. But maybe that’s just me.
One Saturday morning, I enjoyed an outing and lunch with the discipleship triplet. This time we did archery and axe throwing. We enjoyed ourselves but it quickly became clear that I would not have survived for very long in the Dark Ages.
On another weekend we visited a family member who has bought an old house set in a few acres of land in west Wales. He and his partner have two horses, two sheep, a dog, and lots of hens and ducks. The whole thing is a work in progress and there are some interesting drainage issues. The dog mostly had a great time. Some people say that dogs are descended from wolves. They haven’t met our dog. The moment the sheep were released from their pen, she became nervous and then allowed herself to be herded by them into a corner.
I haven’t yet given up on golf even if it has clearly given up on me. One afternoon our pastor collected me for a trip to the golf driving range. There’s a camera and computer system at the range that enables you to play against one another. Once again, I demonstrated my amazing ability to find the bunker and stay there. I kept trying to hit the ball out of the sand and the computer kept saying ‘no’. As a result, I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. I played golf. I lost. And golf lost too.
Theology
I spent the last few days reading a doctoral thesis on the concept of sin in Chapters 5 – 8 of Paul’s letter to the Romans. It’s a remarkable piece of work that helped me understand just how seriously Paul takes the idea that sin, this ‘antiperson’ that has broken into God’s world to disrupt and corrupt humans and everything else. It also reminded me of the astonishing way that God has intervened through Messiah Jesus to confront and defeat sin.
Today, along with an external expert, I examined the writer about his work. Fortunately, the external and I agreed about the quality of the project. We ended up talking with the student for about an hour and three quarters and by the end we were sure that we wanted to recommend to the university that they should award the doctorate.
There were a couple of supervision sessions this month. The first was a discussion with a doctoral student who is working on 1 Corinthians. Today was about Paul’s observations on the Lord’s Supper in Chapter 11. The key issue for the student is church unity and its limits. I think it will be an interesting thesis once it’s finished.
The second was about a project on the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s decision towards the end to go to Jerusalem. This one is certainly changing some of the ways I’ve understood the narrative up till now.
Church
One Saturday morning, I drove to Bristol to talk to the pastor and elders of one of our churches. They’d asked me to participate in their day apart. They wanted to think about their leadership structure and their vision. My task was to remind them about what the Bible says about church leadership and how Baptists have usually interpreted it, as well as saying something about articulating and implementing church vision statements.
It's been great to be able to attend our home church a bit more regularly this month. Last Sunday, the band was great. Confession time. There are lots of old songs that I’d be happy never to sing again. If you’d asked me beforehand then the first three songs that morning might have made the list; ‘How great thou art’, ‘Give me oil in my lamp’, and ‘This little light of mine’. But the fresh arrangements, energetic delivery and hints of a jazz rhythm convinced me otherwise. Wonderful.
Preparation
In early September we are off to the US to visit elderly family members (even older than us), so I’ve spent time making sure that everything is in place; bus to the airport, flights, ESTAs to get into America, car hire, car excess and travel insurance, room bookings, banking arrangements, currency, packing lists, dog care, adaptor plugs…And then I’ve tried to make sure that I’ve prepared as much as possible for the events that I’m due to attend once we get home.
The summer has brought a refreshing change in my schedules, but the autumn looks as though it will see things pick up again. I’m grateful that I can see something of the grace of God in all the seasons and all the patterns of life.
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