It Breaks My Heart (well, that may be exaggerating slightly…)

So, Steve, how do you feel about having to leave Bath CU soon?

I’d say the song Prague (preferably the Muse version found below) gives a reasonable idea of my thoughts on that prospect.

Ok maybe it’s not quite like that, it’s more that I just like the song more every time I listen to it

However, while I do sometimes struggle to feel properly united, the CU is still easily my favourite part of my uni life, and I am gonna miss it a lot.

[[Warning: This post could possibly be described as a bit 'feelings-y'. It's pretty much just me thinking out loud (or on a keyboard) about where my life is going, which is probably not very interesting to read.]]

I assumed when I started uni that 5 years would be long enough to work out what to do afterwards, but apparently not. In fact, while I’ve progressed at the same rate as my course mates, I’ve got to know new freshers in the CU each year. And particularly this year, this has meant that despite my own first year being a distant memory, I still kind of feel like I’m just getting started, when actually, in a couple of months it’ll all be over.

In some ways it’s ok, even quite exciting, that I don’t know what’s next, because God knows… but I would still like to have some idea. Until now, my route through education has pretty much come about without me having to think about it. I now need to go out and find something to do next, but don’t know what I want, or what God wants. At the moment it kind of feels like my life is being cleared out, and I’m intrigued to see what’s going to replace the things that are being taken away.

It’s not exactly making me more pleased to leave the CU that people have recently been thanking me for being so helpful and encouraging. These comments, ranging from the somewhat believeable “just the fact you’re at pretty much every event is really encouraging”, to the plain ridiculous “you’re an amazing man of God”, remind me of something Joel Beeke said at the Aber conference last year:

Joel’s son wrote about his dad for a school report, saying that, while he has flaws, “he loves Jesus more than anyone I know”. Joel admitted that when he read this, he “wept like a baby”, because he feels like he loves the Lord so little.

It’s encouraging to hear that people can see things like that, even if we can’t see it in ourselves, and it’s nice to find that people are encouraged by me even though I feel like I’m doing very little that’s useful.

So in conclusion, to quote the Foo Fighters: “I wish you only knew how good it is to CU.”

…ok, so the actual words are “See You”, but this is how I hear it

Christianity’s Civil War

I just watched Ann Widdecombe’s episode on the Reformation from the Channel 4 series Christianity: A History.

She has an interesting perspective on the whole thing having been brought up in the Church of England but converted to Catholicism about 15 years ago.

In case anyone reading this has no idea what the reformation was, basically a 16th Century German monk called Martin Luther realised that a lot of what the Catholic Church practiced contradicted the Bible. One of the main corrupt practices was the sale of indulgences; these allowed people to buy forgiveness from the Pope so they could go to heaven. Luther posted 95 theses on the door of a church, and worked on translating the Bible into German to allow many more people to read it, rather than just priests and scholars, so everyone could see that the way to salvation was by faith, not works.

Widdecombe acknowledged that the church needed reforming, but wasn’t happy with the chaos that followed, and I have to say, watching this gave me some sympathy for those who argue that religion causes a lot more problems than it solves.

If people believe they are doing God’s will, it turns out they are capable of doing some horrible things, and the Catholics weren’t going to give up their power over the population of Europe without a fight. A five day massacre of protestants in Paris turned the Seine red with blood. And while I don’t remember anything being mentioned that was on the same scale aimed at Catholics, protestants can’t claim to be completely innocent. The attitude towards Catholics can be seen in the tradition that continues in the town of Lewes every Fireworks Night (one of the five best places to see fireworks – alongside the mighty Broughton Gifford – as chosen by The Times) where they blow up an effegy of the Pope. Now I’d say I’m as anti-Pope as your average Bible-believer, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the correct Christian response to people who don’t agree with you.

They say God works in mysterious ways. ‘They’ didn’t get that from the Bible, it’s from a hymn by William Cowper, but it seems proven true in the way the reformation came to England. Henry VIII was named a Defender of the Faith by Pope Leo X after writing a book defending Catholicism. The trouble was he wanted a male heir, and his first wife Catherine of Aragon wasn’t producing one, so he wanted to divorce her. The Pope (quite rightly in this instance) wasn’t happy with this idea, so Henry decided to put himself in charge of the church in England instead. So Catholicism was booted out and Reformed teaching was able to infiltrate Britain thanks to the lust and greed of one of its kings.

Widdecombe explains that she left the Church of England because it had abandoned it’s roots and seemed immersed in liberalism and political correctness. Ok so far, but why become a Catholic? I don’t reckon there’s any perfect church out there, but why not at least look for a church that bases its teaching on God’s Word rather than the Pope’s?

EDIT: I don’t mean to criticise everyone in the Church of England or all Roman Catholics. If people believe in Jesus Christ as their Saviour, Lord and God, and seek in their thoughts and actions to be ruled by the teaching of the Bible, then they’re my brothers and sisters.

CU Weekend Away! Yay!

I'm the one eating a guy's arm

13th-15th November was Bath CU Weekend Away. Until now I’ve somehow managed to find plenty of other ways to put off doing coursework rather than write this.

Spinning Plates & Road Deaths

The main speaker, a guy called Pete Greasley, started out by saying that while he comes away from a lot of Christian conferences feeling guilty and burdened with all the things he should be doing or needs to change in his life, this weekend he was just going to talk about Jesus. I don’t think other conferences are necessarily bad for pricking our consciences and maybe making us think about things we should or shouldn’t be doing that we wouldn’t otherwise have thought about, but I was very happy with his approach.

I do prefer speakers who have a clear structure to their talks, it did seem at times that he hadn’t planned precisely where he was going with things, but he had some very encouraging things to say. Two illustrations particularly stood out for me.

One was related to the introductory statement where we are bombarded with the things we should be doing as Christians, things can easily add up like more and more spinning plates and it’s a struggle to keep them all going. Well, since there’s nothing we need to do to be saved, stop worrying about them. Just concentrate on loving God, and the rest will happen naturally. I don’t think that means we don’t need to put any effort into living a life of consistent Christian integrity (I’ve been listening to Joel Beeke again), but if a plate falls occasionally, it’s not a disaster, thankfully there’s nothing we can do to stop God loving us.

The other challenged how we think about the sacrifice Christ made for us. Particularly for those of us brought up to go to church every Sunday, it’s easy to forget just how much our salvation cost and take it for granted. Pete spoke of a person crossing the road who’s about to get hit by a car, but another man pushes him out of the way and dies himself. All the onlookers would be very impressed by the way the man put someone else’s life before his own, but that feeling would be nothing compared to the man who was saved. For him it’s personal, that man died for ME. He would think about it every day for the rest of his life, “I wouldn’t be here, if it wasn’t for that man’s sacrifice”. Jesus deserves that kind of appreciation from us.

Proper Hymns & Tigger vs. Eeyore

I liked how Pete kept quoting proper hymns like Thou art the everlasting word, Man of Sorrows, what a name, and I Stand Amazed. I agree with him that we should sing about God, not about how much we love him, or what we’re going to do for him, but about his love for us and what he’s done for us. I think a lot of the time, older hymns are better for this, most of the half decent modern songs steal from old hymns anyway (what’s wrong with the original Amazing Grace that people have to extend it? or When I Survey that we have to have that chorus about the “wondeful cross”, the cross itself wasn’t wonderful, it was horrific), and sticking the word Grace or Blessed into a song repeatedly doesn’t mean it has good words. Starting at the weekend we keep singing Grace Unmeasured, Vast and Free at CU, actually it does have some really good lyrics, but the chorus annoys me, it’s mainly the tune that I don’t like (I can’t hit that high note, and was struggling to jump octaves) and that’s just my personal taste. Sooo… I’ll shut up about that now, because I think I sound like enough of a grumpy old man already, and there actually are some really good modern songs/hymns/is there a defined difference? out there.

If I (or anyone who knows me) had to choose between Tigger and Eeyore to describe myself, it would be no contest: I’m Eeyore. Pete kind of used these as symbols of worship styles. An Eeyore attitude “It’s a church, not much of a church…” is definitely not right.

Comparing Cadbury’s & A Ceilidh

Last year was the first time I went on the weekend away. One of the highlights that made me feel stupid for not going the previous 3 years was the games in the afternoon. That didn’t happen this year, so no Wotsit Face, no chance to see the CU President (at the time) eating a banana through a pair of tights pulled over his head, nor the VP eating mars bars out of baked beans using just her teeth to pick them up. Something was supposed to happen in the afternoon, but was cancelled due to the weather, so whatever was planned remains a mystery.

Instead we had a Ceilidh in the evening (more middle of the night, really, started at 11.30pm). I’m really not into dancing but will have a go if I’m told exactly what to do, and even – dare I admit it? – find it quite enjoyable. Apologies to anyone I might have kicked or made a total mess of whatever I was supposed to be doing with them.

The Cabaret was again brilliant, James & Matt’s Fantabulous Band were predictably brilliantly predictable, the Fletch Sketch was hilariously weird, and the juggling and eating simultaneously was very impressive. It was slightly disappointing that 5 West Life couldn’t put in another performance this time around (although the band name wouldn’t make much sense to freshers now anyway), but CU Blind Date made up for it. Genius.

Musings On Religion, Part 3 (Redemption)

I’m thinking that rather than write a trilogy on this subject I should have just cut the material down to one decent post with an actual point in mind. When I started part 1 I did have some sort of plan in my head for what each part of the trilogy would be about, but that’s got lost amongst other useless information acquired since then. Oh well. If you visit this blog often you may have seen my interpretation of the lyrics in Snow ((Hey Oh)), by Red Hot Chili Peppers, this is kind of a similar idea, based on Muse’s Uprising. You might say I’m redeeming the lyrics for my own ends.

I’m currently borrowing 365 days with Spurgeon, Volume 2 from my brother, which contains an extract from a sermon with a relevant passage from the Bible for each day of a year. Monday began with the words “Christians are soldiers.” He then goes on to ask what use would our soldiers be if they dreaded going into battle?
“Christians are runners too.” Would we not laugh at an athlete who could only compete when no one’s watching? We should defy all onlookers. It doesn’t matter who’s watching, a Christian is looking to Jesus.

However, it’s a much more comfortable life to go along with the crowd, and the majority of people, at least in this country, are heading in the opposite direction to Christians.

So, although I’m pretty sure Uprising is actually about a political uprising, I like to think of it as a call to battle for Christians.

They’ll try to push drugs that keep us all dumbed-down,
and hope that we will never see the truth aroused.
Another promise, another seed,
another packaged lie to keep us trapped in greed.

but

…we should never be afraid to die.

…their time’s coming to an end.
We have to unify and watch our flag ascend.

They will not force us.
They will stop degrading us.
They can not control us.
We will be victorious.

Aber

No, it’s not a Wurzels tribute to the group of Swedes that brought us Mamma Mia. It is in fact a Christian conference that takes place in Aberystwyth.

I could just direct you to other people’s blogs about the week, Gary Brady and Guy Davies have both written a fair bit about it. However, although it’s gonna require more thought than a lot of my posts, I actually feel it would be wrong not to write something about a week that I found so challenging and simultaneously so encouraging.

So, Sunday we went for the usual Geoff Thomas option, arrived at the church 50mins before the service started and there was already a queue of about 100* people outside. The stand-out memory I have of the preaching was the brilliantly succint “HE DIE; WE NO DIE.” You can read the sermons in written form here, personally I keep checking the Alfred Place MP3 page hoping to download the audio, especially the Monday morning one that I missed.

*100 is a very rough guess, it could have been less, but I did a more precise estimate of how many people were inside when it was full and reckon it was around 550. Hymn singing sounded better in the church than in the Great Hall, despite the Great Hall containing roughly double the number of people.

Monday evening was Jonathan Thomas, he seemed kinda familiar, I wonder if he’s spoken at Bath CU. I thought he was good, probably my favourite of the evening sessions, we’ll come back to him in extratime.

Tuesday morning the conference was fully underway with the first of Joel Beeke’s addresses on Contagious Christian Living. Each morning he spoke on a different person in the Bible who’s life was a contagious example of a different aspect of how a Christian should live.

Tuesday was Jephthah & his daughter (Judges 11:34-40) and their Sacrificial Submission. I don’t remember hearing before of the theory that Jephthah didn’t actually kill his daughter, I thought he made a convincing argument. It does annoy me though (I’m sure there’s a more appropriate word than annoy, but I can’t think of it right now) that if the hebrew word translated ‘burnt offering’ does not necessarily mean burnt offering, the translators seem to me to have done a pretty poor job on this passage, which begs the question, what else have they screwed up on?

Wednesday was Bartimaeus’ Christ-Centredness (Mark 10:46-52), overall I found this one less helpful than the other days, but in the last 15mins or so it was very encouraging to hear that Joel isn’t quite the super-confident evangelist that might have been expected.

Thursday was Jacob’s wrestle with God (Genesis 32:22-32) leading to Contagious Blessing and Friday was Daniel‘s Consistent Integrity.

I bought the CDs of these main addresses, and spent Saturday afternoon when I got back home turning them into audiobooks for my iPod. So far I’ve listened to the first two again, maybe I’ll add to the above when I’ve listened to Jacob and Daniel again.

I only went to one of the extratime sessions (for 15-25 year olds), but it was a good ‘un, a question panel featuring Joel Beeke and Jonathan Thomas (and a woman I forget the name of). Someone had submitted a question about whether Christians should go to the cinema.

The question was addressed to Joel first, Joel does not watch any films, doesn’t even own a TV and suggested that there are much better things a Christian can do with their time. The question was then passed over to Jonathan, who had mentioned a few films in his Monday evening talk, he describes his thinking here (there’s some amusing stuff afterwards too). Basically the conclusion was that watching films is not necessarily bad, but we shouldn’t be filling our minds with rubbish. I personally know that my head does contain a lot of rubbish (lines from Simpsons episodes, Bill Bailey jokes, song lyrics…), Joel spoke of the thousands of Bible verses his head contains. I’m certainly thinking a lot more about how I’m spending my time than I was before.

A Pretty Epic Sunday

I had a rather busy Sunday 7th June 2009.

First up was the Adult Bible Study at BoA. It seems we’re rather unusual at Bradford (probably in a lot more ways than I’m about to mention), we have our kids’ Sunday School before the morning service. While the kids’ are kept busy, the grown-ups have their own meeting, which for anyone used to Small Groups at Bath Uni (and possibly elsewhere, I don’t know), is a kind of similar thing, but not such a small group.

Recently, we’ve been using these meetings to talk about worship style (I say “we”, I haven’t been during term time, so this was my first one since Easter, and I don’t generally say much myself anyway). Our pastor is keen to introduce some new ideas, while being careful not to modernise just for the sake of it. And by ‘new’, I mean new to Bradders, but sticking to biblical stuff.

I’m definitely up for some new things, for example, having gone to CU meetings for 4 years, I’ve grown to like the use of instruments other than the organ. It is a bit odd that the only instrument we currently have is one that’s never mentioned in the Bible, unless you use the AV, in which case it is somehow mentioned 4 times despite not existing at the time of writing. You’d find it pretty hard to argue with the use of other instruments after reading Psalm 150.

Then, at the end of the morning service, I made my way home fairly sharpish to grab a light lunch before heading to Bath for another Baptism. Rather than write much about it, I’ll just direct you to the guy who got dunked so you can read what he has to say about it.

After spending a while there, I went back home to eat my re-heated Sunday Roast before our Communion service. Again, Bradford seems to be pretty unusual in that we have our Communion before the main evening service.

Then after the evening service I headed back to Bath for cream teas at Jerram’s. I wish I could make scones (scone is pronounced like cone, by the way), my most adventurous bit of cooking this year has been fajitas, which don’t require a lot of effort.

iBautismos!

(for anyone not familiar with Spanish, that’s supposed to be an upside down exclamation mark at the beginning, not the letter i)

Yesterday I went to Holy Trinity Combe Down for the first time, for a baptism. The guy I went to see has a story that features sexual abuse and cocaine addiction, but he’s the happiest guy you’ll ever meet, because he now knows Jesus.

Afterwards we went to Victoria Park for lunch, meeting up with the people who went to the baptisms at Widcombe (there were at least 7 people baptised in Bath on one day). It was pointed out that people in the CU generally formed into groups based on the churches they go to. I’m not sure it’s a completely fair observation, but since we’ve been looking at passages in Romans focussing on unity recently, maybe people should try harder to mix with everyone?

Being a member of Bradford-on-Avon Baptist Church* I don’t really fit into any of the groups that the CU supposedly splits into.

*That’s a bit of a mouthful, so it’s usually shortened, it could be known simply as Bradford, or Bradders, B.o.A., BBC, The Bappy:) It was formerly known as The Old Baptist Chapel, until it was realised that that’s just the name of the building, it’s not really appropriate to call the church that. We’re not all old.

The two biggest student churches in Bath seem to be Widcombe and HT. These are the only two churches I’ve been to in Bath so far.

I’ve been to Widcombe for a total of 3 services, which is apparently frequent enough for some people who go there regularly to forget that they don’t see me there every week. It’s quite similar to Bradders in some ways, in that they really focus on Biblical teaching as the main part of their meetings, while others might focus more on music, for example.

There’s a large difference between morning and evening attendances at Widcombe, I’ve always been to 2 services on Sundays, and Bradford has nearly the same number of people in the evening as the morning, so I find it a bit odd when people only go to one. Now there’s nothing in the Bible to say you must go to church twice on a Sunday, but it does make me wonder what people do with the rest of the day. If I was not going to go to the evening service, I would be lost for what to do with myself. Have people found something that’s better for them than going to church in the evening that we at Bradford have not discovered?

Holy Trinity was a bit different to what I’m used to. Applauding testimonies, baptisms and prayers would not happen at BoA. Of course this is a joyful occasion and it’s right to express joy, but applause usually expresses something like “Well done”, so I was glad to hear my friend make clear that he knew he hadn’t done anything to save himself. I think I prefer what we do at BoA when people get baptised, which is to sing “Praise ye the Lord”, so there’s absolutely no doubt about who’s the object of our praise.

Well, I’m a hypocrite

So less than 2 weeks after my Keep Sunday Special Rant, I got caught out by a sudden change to plans for lunch in Vicky Park after the multiple baptisms, which was announced as a BBQ rather than just a picnic about 1/2 an hour before it started, and found myself in Sainsbury’s with most of the rest of the CU, buying sausages.

In hindsight I wish I’d just decided to stick with only eating food I already had at home, but I’m a bit slow, and when everyone around you is doing the same thing, it’s hard to think differently. All I can say is I don’t intend to make a habit of it.

CU Theme Tune?

Has anyone ever seen Dave Grohl at a CU meeting?

“One thing is always true, how good it is to CU”

or how about Miley Cyrus?

“I can’t wait to CU again”

And Can It Be

The greatest hymn of all time.

For some reason we haven’t had it at Bradford since I chose it for my baptism, back in April 2007, unless it’s been sung on one of the rare occasions that I’ve not been there. We’ve had it at CU a couple of times this year, but as much as I appreciate the effort from Tom and Fozz, it’s not been quite the same.