It seemed like a good idea at the time. The plan was to avail of one of the really good hotel deals at this time of the  year- they want to make use of their rooms at  a slack period so they make an offer you can't refuse. A weekend in romantic Donegal to help in my rehabilitation and give Gillian a break what could be better?

It all started well and we enjoyed a nice dinner by the Foyle estuary and Gillian's favourite wine. Some time during the night it all wdnt wrong. She became violently sick and I was fast asleep. Normally speaking I am the one who struggles to get asleep and am very easily roused but not this time. The lights went in and the sickness was vicious and projectile bzt I was oblivious to it all.

Obviously the best laid plans of men do not always come to fruition. Sonetines we like to think  we are masters if our own lives and we can control things but it is all a myth. 

Conflicted mind

For nearly three weeks Gillian and I have enjoyed spending some time with our son, Peter and his wife, Malia in Seattle. To make it more sweet we came to meet our first grandchild, Jack, who was born on the 6th January 2013 six weeks premature. When he was born he weighed just over Four lbs and now he is over ten lbs.

His arrival into this world was more than a little traumatic so seeing him and spending time here has been very special. He shares my name and I also had a traumatic Christmas. Just a few days before Christmas I was taken into hospital and had surgery on the 21st December. While I lay in my bed he was making a bud for freedom and his mum was struggling with a collapsing placenta so there was no way they were coming to see us in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Al in all we have shared bounds. So it will be difficult saying goodbye come Friday knowing we will not see him again until next Christmas when he will be nearly one!  We will be full of contradictions as we get on that plane. Thankful fir his safe arrival into the world and for his mother' safety also but part of us will die within.  We will be happy that he has family around him but envious that his other grandparents will be able to drive to his house and share his life as we will not. We will be conflicted, as my son was at Christmas when he wanted to with his father but also with his son and wife. We will be conflicted because we have a daughter in Dublin whom we also love and two other sons. Since my illness I been made aware again that I am greatly blesssed by my family for their love and support. As we leave Seattle we leave part of us behind, no longer able to walk the floor with Jack when he needs comforting, no longer able to help his parents but looking forward to seeing the rest of our family and very grateful to our heavenly Father for His incomparable love.

Being a father teaches you about God's love but being a grandfather and watching my son become a loving father reinforces those lessons and makes me appreciate the circular nature of life were the man becomes father. Now I can appreciate some of the cost of being a parent from my parents' point of view. I think I was a better father than I was a son but I am hardly the one to make that judgement call.

How much more has it cost my heavenly father to be my father! In that respect there is no conflict.

Weak or Deep?

                                               
I don't know about you but I get confused and a little irritated by the deep desire so many church experts have to pigeon hole people. They used to talk of,  protestant and Catholic and then it was Charismatic but that was not enough as there always were liberal and conservative churches and some who were millennial and pre-millennial or even post millennial.

Today we could add missional, gospel-centred, seeker friendly, emergent and emerging and now we have Deeper Churches. When will it all stop?  I want to make a plea that we stop putting people into boxes and let them develop their relationship with God.  Don't let yourself get side tracked by trying to be like some other church even if it has been successful.  Just be true to yourself. The truly authentic church will not copy others but will carve out an identity and ministry like no other. The truly real church will be Christ-centred and people - orientated. Every Christian is called to be a witnesswhere God has placed them. It frustrates me no end when every church in a community, even when there are many churches in that comity feels the irresistible pressure to compete with each other. If one church has a youth club, senior citizens club, Sunday School and day care then my church has too also. It seems very sensible to me to say that the principle is that we should not have a program unless we can do it better than everyone else or if no one else is doing it. It seems clear to me that 

Christians and the churches they belong to should be community involved and should be without walls. 

God works in us for our good?

Some of you will know that I have been recovering from illness for the last few months. The good news is that I am about to get back to work in the next few weeks. At Christmas it semed that my world was crumbling before my eyes. It was supposed to be very different: the intention was to have the while family together.Mark was flying in from Sierra Leone, Peter and Malia from Seattle,  due on the 20th December, and Ruth was coming for a whole week from Dublin. Stuart,Gillian and I in Belfast were very excited. Then it  all went squint.

It was the Friday before Christmas and the pain was becoming unbearable. At one point the pain was so bad that I cried out to God, asking that he take the pain away and sort out the problem once and for all. The last time I  experienced such discomfort was 46 years ago when I  was diagnosed, eventually, with Ulcerative Colites. It came in waves of cramp which made me curl up in the featel position. I was in''' no position to make any decisions so it was left to Gillian to make them for me and that she did. Ringing the after hours doctor an ambulance arrived to take me to the Accident and Emergency. From that moment it was like events had a life of their own.

The surgeon recognised the probem immeditely but waited to see if it progressed or even, as unlikely as it was, it might respond to treatment. After a week of antibiotics and painkillers progess was the result and surgerz te onlz waz forward. Athis pint I  entered a dark time. I knew there was a distinct possibility that while surgery would deal with the pain there could be complications which would impinge on my lifestyle and, of course, all surgery was dangerous. In my mind I travelled back forty years when I had some pioneering surgery in Leeds General Infirmary following the emergency surgery of six years previously.

When the surgeon, whom I trusted completely from the start, asked me what I thought we should do he agreed with me that there was no alternative to surgery! It was very early in the morning and he stood by my be,d in his characteristic way. shirtsleeves rolled up and his tie tucked into his shirt with his hand behind his back  almost leaning against the wall looking directly into my eyes. This was the moment of no return, it had to be done and done as quickly as possibly. It was no longer relevant that any procedure might not work, the old was finished. I knew as he explained that he could not be sure what he would find once he had opened me up. He proceeded to tell me they would try and open the old wound along the scar line down by abdomen. Later he returned himself to get me to sign the consent form. It was just his way, unlike other surgeons he did this himself rather than delegating to a junior doctor. This was the decision I had feared would be made as it took me back to the days of 1969 and 1975 when recovery from surgery was painful and prolonged but pain control had come a long way since those days and so had the after-care which was completely absent for me.

I had my wife and three of my children around me much of the time and right up to the moment they came to wheel me off to theatre. Peter, my eldest son, was in Seattle, torn by the need to be with his wife and unborn son and wanting to be with his father, had delegated Mark, the next in line, to gather us all together that he would pray for God's healing-that was one of the most emotional and meaningful moments of my life. Stuart and Ruth were there in support and Gillian, my soul mate and devoted wife was at my side. That was a difficult time for her too as she was also helping with the care of her elderly parents as well as her, not so elderly husband. Once again the "in sickness and health" was being tested.

Today Gillian and I stand on the threshold of going to Seattle to meet my grandson and spent quality time with them. In the time of recovery I have had plenty of time to think and contemplate about many things. I am greatly indebted to a lot of people ranging from my family to the surgical and nursing team and my congregation and colleagues who had deputised for me at various engagements and have visited me but it is to God that I am the most grateful. In this society pain has been banned as something we all deserve to be protected from. Difficulty and  the challenging path of life is to be avoided but the Bible makes it clear that this is the way to fulfilment and happiness, this narrow way is the answer and antidote to the hedonistic lifestyle which has become the hallmark of 21st century western Christianity. Truth be told, in  hindsight and retrospect, I would not want to escape the last few months as I am in better condition today than I have been for  at least five years. In the end I accepted my abnormal life as normal ignorant that inside me my body was scarred and the bowel perforated to the point of  being poisoned by itself. God truly works things out for those he loves for the best and I, for one, would have it no other way. This is why we worship our God through Jesus Christ in the power of His Holy Spirit.. Does God work for our good? Yes He does and we should embrace His ways even when we are unable to understand them, that is the essence of faith, yes? Yes

At this advanced stage of my life and ministry I have come to appreciate that Christian faith is relational. Yes, I know that's hardly rocket science, but I think many people live their lives in boxes. I lived like that for many years. I used the bible as my manual of, or for, behaviour. I guess my Calvinism gave me a structure to do that. The irony of this evangelical position was that I was living life from the outside in. Those criticisms of my perception of Catholicism  were faith and works are reversed had become part of my faith.

My boxed faith provided structure and security as long as I stayed inside. In terms of living that made my life all about apologetics so the usual suspects raised their heads:abortion, homosexuality, the resurrection, speaking in tongues etc. After all these years the penny has finally dropped. The bible, which is God's inspired word is a record of God's people and how he has worked with them over the centuries and the chapter still being written is the 29th chapter of Acts. I want my life to be about winning the battle. I want to read the stories and watch the movies of people who win the battle  despite the difficulties and sometimes the battles we fight are very difficult.

.Because my faith is relational, with doctrine init and with poetry , history  mystery etc it is dynamic and does nit always give the answer simply because it asks questions about faith. The bible is about trusting God and we are called to walk by faith and nit by sight. What rocks my boat today is hearing about the struggles that people have and how they win their way through, winning the battle. I know the end of the story is that God wins because because he has already and that means we win but the battle is still to be fought. Recently I watched the remake of Karate Kid in which  this comes across very clearly:like all Hollywood productions we know the kid wins  but we get caught up with the fight and the tension asks the question," does he really win?" Of course he wins but he still has to get up of the floor after being brutally attacked. His opponent tries to break his leg but he does get up, he shows honour in the face of dishonour and courage in the heat of battle.

At this stage in my life I want to leave the box and live in the real world, not that I no longer believe in the contents of the box but I want more of the relationship and the only way to experience that is to put my faith to the test. Staying in the box raises questions which only counteract other questions. My faith is not static and fixed but dynamic because my life is changing also. The box makes me feel secure but I need testing.

The Future is SMALL

Having lots of time on my hands these days due to the emergency surgery I had over the Christmas holidays I have time to do some more reading and a little bit of writing. My family have been encouraging me to take my doctrinal dissertation as a point of departure and to flesh it out with some of my ministry memories over the last 20 plus years in various forms of ministry and in different congregations up and down this island of Ireland.. I guess the fact that few or maybe even no one might actually read what I write is not the issue but putting it down on paper could well prove therapeutic .

In preparing for my dissertation I "happened upon" a book which appealed to me greatly. It is called "the strategically SMALL church"  by Brandon J.O' Brien- at this point I chuckle to myself because the spell check has underlined in red O'Brien-the reason is that in the computer world the default spelling is always the American version of English so when an "Irish" spelling appears there is no hope of recognition but then I have the joy of informing the program of the correctness of the spelling. I had a long battle with Bakke Graduate University as i wrote for the D.Min over the spelling issue because I saw no reason for writing in, what for me is a phony way, but,in the end I decided, once they allowed me to be an exception, to tow the line and make life easier for the weaker brethren! No matter how many times the spell check is altered to make it UK friendly (never mind Irish) it always diverts back to the mother tongue!

Recently I also came across Brandon's blog (outofUR)and this piece is partly a response to it. Since confession is so good for the soul I should make some here before I declare my hand. Leslie Newbigin makes the point that the gospel cannot be declared culture free. My background and experience is such that the American obsession with "bigger is best" has escaped me. I also need to confess that, despite my apparent negative attitude to all things American I do have an American born grandson (my son is married to a lovely American girl) and I have worked with many American brothers and sisters in Christ by virtue of working on Campus Crusade staff for several years and doing my D.Min at Bakke Graduate University in Seattle so I think i have earned the right to speak as a critical friend recognising that I could be wrong that there is much in American culture which is better than the cynicism of the Irish. I need also to say that my ministry experience has been bathed in small and intimate ministries and do struggle with the notion that God ALWAYS blesses his servants with bigger and greater numbers of people.In short I do have my baggage yet I do make these comments in good faith in the hope that someone, somewhere will respond in kind.

I find myself in agreement with Mr O'Brien (I am very glad that his parents or by his own decision to spell his name in the Irish way) when he says that the issue is not really about numbers as there are good and bad or not so good congregations in both categories. The real issue, for me, is about accountability as well as authenticity and relationships across the generations. One of the strengths of my congregation in the heart of urban Belfast is that we have an inter-generational community. Sitting as we do on an inter-face between the nationalist and unionist communities our greatest opportunity for ministry is to be a people of reconciliation and while, at the present, reconciling across the peace walls is limited we can be reconciled across the generations. The fact that we meet together with our very young babies and the very elderly senior citizens has real potential for peace and harmony.

I also worry about the thinking unearthed by the political pollster John Zogby who predicts that the small church will be the most popular in the years ahead. yes people do want community. I know that the American experience is way ahead of us in this and, by comparison, community still exists here-the irony, of course is that we are also, at the very same time, fragmented and divided along community lines and within community. Living in a post Christian society the idea of a "bungalow on the Main street, not a mega structure ." is very appealing. about ten years ago I  went with a group from Belfast to a Mega church  which is well known to most Christians. I went in the hope of learning something about the mission of the church and how we might apply some lessons to our situation. It left me quite cold-yes I really enjoyed the worship, or the singing anyway and I enjoyed the company of the cool people but this world were car parking assistance is needed every Sunday and a one way system applied, where everything is done to professional standards is just a world away, its like the alternative world of avatars. The experience was also ruined because the two other key people who went from our congregation left us shortly afterwards. Now I have to say that they did not leave because of the experience but for other reasons entirely but in my mind they are linked in an unfortunate juxtaposition.

I have to agree with the challenge to the assumption that bigger is best and that god blesses his servants with more people when they are faithful. as I think of the ministry of the Old testament prophet Jeremiah I am amazed at his faithfulness in spite of apparent failure and then there is the ministry of Jesus himself as his followers left him in droves. Years and years ago i heard Howard Hendricks say that Christians are called to be faithful even ion the trenches.

What concerns me the most about the Mega Church structure is the danger of giving the impression that Christians are in the imperialist army designed to take over the world when the Bible speaks of vulnerability and poverty and weakness. Newbigin tells us, in "The Gospel in a Pluralist Society" that we should be on the side of the crushed people of the world, he tells us that all too often the church is perceived to be on the side of the rich and powerful. I have a question in my mind about the symbolism behind the massive, hotel-like structures of the (for us anyway) new non-denominational churches because I feel they are breeding a "hermeneutic of suspicion". I have a question about a church which is made up exclusively of the young and the powerful.because they say, as those made up of the grey brigade, this church is for you IF you are like us.

I think, much more positively that the while a church may be small, and the understanding of what"small" means is debatable, its missional impact can be massive. as we began to think through our mission one of our desires was that without wishing to be a big church we did want to be a church which was big, big in ideas, big in impact, big in our desire to serve a big God who was not too big to be bothered with a small people like us. I rejoice that we no longer have all those organisations which make ministry inside the building more stressful and demanding and make mission outside all but impossible.I rejoice if setting the congregation free means they can work more effectively for the peace, the welfare of the city "because as kit prospers so we prosper"

When I was a young Christian my desire was to live a significant life for God and when I began ministry I wanted to be really successful and when I was called to congregational work my dream was to be in a church with many people. I really enjoy preaching and find it easier when the church is filled to capacity and the greater that capacity the better. i find preaching to a small number very demanding. In the humour of God he sent me,initially as a student, to a number of very small congregations. There was one Sunday in Cavan Presbyterian Church when the entire congregation was my family and some friends who had come to visit us for the weekend. In my present congregation I have watched as the congregation has halved in number and that has been painful. I have never thought of myself as being called to bury a congregation. Yet, at the same time, we have been able to begin some initiative approaches to ministry in a community of division and fragmentation and I have been able to give time to working in the community outside the church to get alongside people.

Yes there are times when I am jealous of the resources of the big churches and times when I am impatient with them for an unwillingness to share what they have with those who do not have. Sometimes I wish I was called to that ministry but then I do not think I could cope at all with the responsibilities of being more of a Chief Executive Officer and less of a minister/teacher/pastor.

One plea I do make to those who have gravitated to the big causes is that they do not forget us little people as you pray and as you consider your budget for the year. do not restrict your thinking to imaging that god could not possibly bless a church by making it small, or smaller. Remember Joshua who fought against impossible numbers, remember Jeremiah who preached the need to repent and remember Jesus who was oppressed and rejected.

TRYPRAYING

If you are anything like me there will be times or have been times when you have felt like walking away from ministry. At this moment in time the thought has gone through my mind that the best thing I could do is to walk away and let someone else, more successful, take up the post. In a declining congregation there is nothing more debilitating and more challenging than to get one of those letter of resignation from a key member. I would have hoped that after ten years of working with a person the least expected would be to have a face to face conversation about the unspecified issues which have remained. Sometimes I think people loose all their sense of corporate responsibility and all sense that the minister, pastor or church leader, or whatever title they give, will actually take this personally. I understand perfectly that there are many pressures on people today and we live in a high pressure situation where the vast majority of the population have taken the decision to walk away from the Church and in a situation where passion replaces reason and reaction pro-action. I understand that we are a church in trouble-by church I mean the whole institutional church and I mean that all the churches are living in and involved in a thoroughly dysfunctional community.

For 40 years the community was torn apart by violence and sectarianism and by poverty (not the poverty of a developing nation but a poverty which touches every part of the being) and we all have our baggage but issues do not get sorted by a short conversation where the people with the issues (usually we all have issues and we need to recognise that it is not always the other person who needs sorted). Talking or even shouting at people will not do it and logical reasoning won't do it either. the only way forward is to accept people with unconditional love and allow God to do the sorting.

 I was involved in a very heated conversation where the small group of participants, when there should have been many more, were happy to point fingers or even to imagine that blame was being attributed.  and look for someone to blame. I was sitting listening and looking for an opportunity to make, what I considered, a positive contribution.This body has lost its vision and so when things go wrong they turn in on each other. This is how issues are dealt with because it is still a community under attack and on the back foot ( a cricketing term meaning to be on the defense. In this community there is a deep seated paranoia. How could you not expect the church to reflect this?

If a person, who has been deeply involved for most of their lives feels they want to walk away it is probably time to. Living in the community and ministering in the community I need to understand that sometimes things get the wrong way round and instead of the gospel challenging the community its the community that challenges the gospel. All of this drives me to the conclusion that I can do it no longer, I do not have the strength, the skill or the ability but God does. the only way forward is to bring it all to God. this is God's mission. Outside our church we have two banners saying "TRYPRAYING". 

Here is the old lesson learnt the hard way again, TRYPRAYING. Will you join with us as we pray? Every Wednesday night 7-30-9.30pm the Gathering Place ( The coffee area at the front of the church) will be open as a space for prayer. We welcome all people-we have no barriers of religion or class or profession just a desire to reflect and bring all our concerns to Jesus Christ. 

Time to walk away? Only God can tell me that, only God can tell you and only God can transform this and other communities. The Apostle Paul sets out the context of corporate and systemic sin in Ephesians 6 and pleads with his people in that great city to pray without ceasing confident that at the end of the battle they will be standing tall in victory.