Minister’s Message – Page 7 – Christchurch United Church

Minister’s Message – July 9, 2023

July 10, 2023

Moira and I made a pact with each other when we got married: she would come with me to steam railways and I would go with her to dance performances. I can say that, since then, Moira has consistently refused to learn about such fascinating subjects as locomotive valve gear, single-line working or facing-point locks (I can’t imagine why) while I have learned a lot about dance and have even managed to make some sensible or critical comments about it. However Moira has totally failed in one aspect of her ambition for me: she has never managed to persuade me to dance myself. That’s because I’m self-conscious, uncoordinated and find it impossible to remember even the simplest sequence of steps – saying that I have two left feet is only the start of my difficulties. So I prefer to leave dancing to the experts!

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Minister’s Message – June 25, 2023

June 27, 2023

Jesus longed for his Church to be united yet there are many issues, trivial and important, which divide it. One of those issues is baptism, which often causes disagreement among Christians. For there are some churches which believe that children should be baptised, and others which say, “No, no, baptism is for older people who have come to their own place of faith”. Some churches baptise people at a font, with just a small amount of water, while others believe that the candidates should be completely submerged (although stories of Baptist Deacons examining the hair of a recently-baptised person to make sure that every strand has got wet are, as they say, “greatly exaggerated”!) And then there are various understandings of what baptism actually means: some traditions say that it washes a person from sin, gives them salvation or confers the Holy Spirit, while others say that it is nothing more than a public witness to faith, a symbol of something spiritual that has already taken place within a believer. I could go on, and indeed finding out what some ordinary Christians in my own Baptist tradition thought about it was the subject of my Master’s dissertation many years ago.

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Minister’s Message – June 18, 2023

June 20, 2023

I very much doubt that any of you follow the inner workings of the Church of England – after all, we’re in Wales! So you probably don’t know that the Church’s Liturgical Commission (which, according to its webpage, “prepares forms of service and promotes the development and understanding of liturgy and its use in the Church”) has a new project on the go. This is to consider whether it should develop new forms of liturgy – that is, the words which are allowed to be used in its services – which incorporate more inclusive or even gender-neutral language. A Church source suggests that it’s time for a change as its so-called “contemporary” liturgies are now over twenty years old and many people are interested in “exploring new language for worship”.

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Minster’s Message – June 11, 2023

June 11, 2023

Jet aircraft revolutionised travel. Journeys which took weeks by sea, and days by noisy and uncomfortable piston-engined planes, can now be taken swiftly, smoothly and – yes – cheaply by jet. We think little (although we should, because of the environmental impact of air travel) about boarding a jet airliner as we journey for business, go off on our holidays, visit our families in distant lands or follow our favourite sports. Indeed, boarding an aircraft with whirling propellers (which may in fact also be jet-powered) feels like taking a step into the past. Jet planes are an amazing technical achievement, yet we take them for granted.

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Minister’s Message – June 4, 2023

June 4, 2023June 4, 2023

Many years ago, something I said led to a Pastor getting sacked. (Let me add straightaway that that wasn’t my intention!). I was a student in Glasgow at the time, and sometimes attended a small and rather obscure Pentecostal church. This church had recently called a new Pastor who was young and enthusiastic; they were very pleased with him although I personally didn’t much like his style.

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Minister’s Message – May 28, 2023

May 29, 2023

Learning a language is a complex process which involves learning grammar, syntax, verb tenses, noun cases, intonations, sounds and, of course vocabulary. Children manage to do it naturally (some of them actually learn two or more languages at the same time); adults may well find it even more difficult. I studied Portuguese for eighteen months before going to West Africa; it was an enjoyable but sometimes frustrating task (and I loved living in Lisbon). Since we moved to Wales Moira has been determined to learn Welsh – she’s invested a lot of time and effort in it and folk say that she’s doing very well; however she’s aware that there’s still a long way to go before she’ll be reciting poetry at the Eisteddfod!

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Minister’s Message – May 21, 2023

May 29, 2023

Have you ever been ticked off by an angel? Indeed, have you even met an angel? It seems highly unlikely, doesn’t it – although we must remember that the Bible tells us that people can encounter them without recognising them for what they are. However, the eleven disciples who’d witnessed Jesus ascending to heaven from the Mount of Olives definitely did receive an angelic rebuke! For, once Jesus had vanished into a cloud, they stayed rooted to the spot, gazing skywards and no doubt hoping fervently that their Master would soon reappear. According to the author Luke, what happened next was strange. For he tells us that two white-robed men appeared as if from nowhere, and “had a go” (as we might say) at the distraught disciples: “There’s no point in looking for him to come back, you know. He will return, as it happens, in clouds of glory and power – but that’s not going to happen today. What you need to do is remember his final words, and act upon them. So don’t just stand there: Move!”

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Minister’s Message – May 14, 2023

May 14, 2023

We’d probably agree that truth is at something of a premium today. When the fact-checking team of the “Washington Post” started to catalogue President Trump’s false or misleading claims, they recorded 492 in the first 100 days of his presidency alone. And that was just for starters: by the end of his term, they reckon that he had uttered 30,573 untruths, which comes to about 21 erroneous claims – or should we say “lies”? – per day. What’s especially striking is how this “tsunami of untruths” kept rising the longer he served; it increased steadily from about six per day in his first year as president, to 39 per day in his final year. And, of course, we all know how he attacked incontrovertible, proveable facts which he didn’t want to hear as “fake news”; I’m troubled by the fact that so many people, including Christian pastors, believed (and still believe) that he is a truthful man.

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Minister’s Message – May 7, 2023

May 8, 2023

One of the trials of modern life is being asked to fill in Evaluation or Feedback forms. You go to the theatre, you buy plants at the garden centre, you catch the train to London or a flight to Spain, you ring the company that insures your car, you get someone in to service the washing machine … and, within minutes, an email cheerfully headed “How did we do?” plonks into your Inbox with the assurance that your view is important. Your heart sinks as you read the questions whose responses, you are promised, “will help us to improve our services” – you cynically wonder if they’re more about telling the company that they can now bombard you with advertising? Perhaps we should start asking all of you to fill in a questionnaire after every Sunday’s service – although I’d dread reading the answers on Monday morning!

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Minister’s Message – April 30, 2023

May 3, 2023

I did old-fashioned maths at school, the kind that Rishi Sunak wants us all to learn, with arithmetic, algebra, geometry – and calculus in the Sixth Form. But, as a spot of light relief in the last week of summer term in the year before my A-levels, our teacher introduced us to “new maths” – which, just a few years later, was being taught to young children in primary schools. At the heart of what we learned that week was “set theory”, a way of doing maths by grouping or placing objects together. I won’t go into this any detail, but simply say that we were shown how it could be illustrated with Venn Diagrams: you’ll know what they are even if you don’t know what they’re called. For each circle represents a set of objects. If you have more than one set, they may be quite distinct or overlap: a bigger set may even envelop a smaller one.

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