Sunday 1st December 2024 – First Sunday of Advent
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details. The service includes communion.
A recording of the service is available here.
29th November 2024
Today I’m due to take part in a thanksgiving service for the life of a gifted musician who sadly died at the end of last month from a brain tumour. Peter Wilkinson had been organist at Horfield Baptist Church for a number of years before I arrived to be its next minister, and, in truth, he was one of the main reasons I accepted the call there. He worked as a solicitor, mainly in the family courts, but I think his preference would have been to be a professional musician. He never saw himself as a classical church organist, though I was more than grateful for his abilities in that role. His special gift was for more syncopated rhythms, so he could turn his hand to just about any musical genre, including church pantomimes, for which he sole-handedly provided all the accompaniment, musical interludes and sound effects!
Peter set himself high standards, and he expected a similar commitment from any musicians playing alongside him and from the folk singing in choirs he directed. His enthusiasm for the best possible music was infectious, but when it came to congregational worship, his aim was never to show off any personal brilliance or to win the praises of those hearing him. I think for him the organist’s job above all was to enable the congregation to worship, to bring their music to heaven’s door, to lift their voices and allow their hearts to overflow in love and gratitude towards the God who’d made and saved them. Today, therefore, I gladly salute a Christian brother and friend whose life and gifts were truly used to the glory of God.
Ken Stewart
27th November 2024
One of the biggest misunderstandings about the Bible is that it’s primarily a set of moral teachings, a manual on how to be good. But much of the Bible hardly exemplifies virtuous living. Take the (humanly speaking) founding parents of God’s chosen people, the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, their wives and offspring. Their behaviour is often hardly exemplary: often a bunch of rogues, lying in their own interests, quarrelling bitterly among themselves, and going to war with surrounding peoples. Jacob’s sons sell their brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt, and Joseph himself, when the tables are turned, isn’t above playing tricks on them to rub in his eventual success. Cruelty, deception, lust, vengeance and idolatry are part of their story. Shocking! Where is the ‘right from wrong’ teaching in all this? Can these really be the pioneers of ‘the chosen people’?
The Biblical story is not first about humans being good, but how the holy God remains the God of his chosen people even when they choose not to be chosen. It makes no bones about their waywardness (no attempts to sanitise the nation’s historical record!). They are indeed called to account for what they do. It’s really about how God’s loving purpose prevails: in the words of a fine hymn, “sin and death and hell shall never o’er us final triumph gain”. It’s the all-too-real world of sin and violence, the world that still shocks us today, which the Bible talks about. God has immersed himself in it for our salvation, seen in Bethlehem’s crib and on Calvary’s cross: the triumph of grace, to God’s praise alone. Hallelujah!
Keith Clements
Sunday 24th November 2024
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details.
A recording of the service is available here.
22nd November 2024
If I give you a flavour of a Christian Aid email I received this week, maybe it’ll whet your appetite to read the whole article (Why I struggle with hope – Christian Aid)?
Campaigner Jess Hall reflects on how heavy one’s heart can be, watching terrible stories of injustice playing out across the world. It can be hard to hold out hope for the future and even harder to know how we might make a difference.
Even harder perhaps than seeing the pain and suffering in the world, is realising that we’re not just passive observers, but part of a system that contributes to some of the problems. However, even in the midst of such awful events, throughout history, there have also been people recognising the potential to change things. Such thoughts lead to conversations and actions and coalesce into movements for change.
We look back at the Berlin Wall coming down, at the end of Apartheid in South Africa and too easily choose to forget the struggle that went before the ultimate success. The success to come can often not be glimpsed until it is finally upon you.
Jess writes that she thinks hope and the struggle can be held together, just as faith and doubt can be. “This is real hope, gritty hope, hope found in the midst of struggle”.
“As Christians we are called to patient faithful acts of hope even in the worst of situations”.
Pain and suffering are all too real, but we also have a good and a just God, and so we cannot just accept that darkness wins. It maybe Friday – but Sunday’s coming.
Ruth Allen
20th November 2024
Every year there are two events commemorated in November. On 5th we are reminded of the Gunpowder Plot – and we light bonfires and let off fireworks. Then a few days later, on the 11th we remember those killed in the First World War and the many conflicts since, as we stand in silence for two minutes.
On 5th November 1605 Guy Fawkes tried to blow up the King and leading politicians as they assembled in Parliament. On 11th November 1918 the Armistice brought to an end the First World War and so we pay tribute to those who died ‘for King and Country’. Not long after the failed plot in 1605 Fawkes and those behind the conspiracy were also killed.
We celebrate those who were killed in war and perhaps especially in the Second World War, when the evil Nazi regime was being challenged. However, there are some who are largely forgotten – those German plotters who tried and failed to assassinate Hitler in 1944. The plotters in 1605 were trying to destroy what they regarded as an evil regime. Does anyone still regard them as heroes or martyrs?
Some of the plotters in Germany in 1944 had to wrestle with their consciences – was murder ever justified to end a tyranny? Some at least of the 1605 plotters may have faced a similar dilemma.
What would we do in similar circumstances – is assassination – murder – ever justified? Is it different from killing a soldier in the opposing army?
What do you think?
David T Roberts
Sunday 17th November 2024
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details.
A recording of the service is available here.
15th November 2024
Are you familiar with how the gospels skip from one short story to another, often leaving the reader hanging…?
In a recent morning service, the visiting preacher suggested that when we encounter these abrupt changes in narrative we could ask ourselves, “what happened next?” and use our imagination to fill in the gaps.
The lectionary reading for this week is such an example. Mark 1.14-15 introduces the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry as he “came into Galilee, proclaiming the gospel of God”.
Then immediately the scene shifts and Jesus is walking along the shores of the Sea of Galilee. He invites Peter, Andrew, James and John to leave their livelihoods and follow him… and they do! Is this a Jedi mind trick? Has Jesus compelled them to follow him at the sound of his voice? I think not.
I imagine a significant period of time between verses 15 and 16 – weeks, months, perhaps even years. During this time, Jesus travelled throughout the region preaching to those who would listen, teaching in the synagogues, healing the sick, and gradually drawing a crowd. Peter and his companions often returned from a fishing trip and listened to Jesus on the beach as they unloaded the catch and mended their nets. Perhaps Jesus had requisitioned their boat on occasion as a platform from which to speak. Little by little they got to know him, perhaps they were challenged by his teaching, but the time was not yet right.
Then one day Jesus addresses them directly: “’Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.’ And immediately they left their nets and followed him” (v17-18).
Ian Waddington
Sunday 10th November 2024
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details.
A recording of the service should be available here this afternoon.
8th November 2024
HOLY LAND: UNHOLY WAR
Whilst events in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza and southern Lebanon constantly hit the headlines, we learn little of how leading rabbis are guiding their people in these difficult times. May be this is because in a 2015 Gallup Poll 65% of Israelis described themselves as non-religious or atheist, suggesting that Jewish-ness today is defined by blood rather than belief. On the other hand it is stated that members of the Knesset drawn from ultra-orthodox political parties keep the present regime in power, so religion surely remains important.
How to treat foreigners settled in your land in Old Testament scripture seems quite clear. For example, the Law sates, ‘When an alien resides with you in your land, you must not oppress him. He is to be treated as a native-born among you. Love him as yourself because you were aliens in Egypt’ [Deuteronomy 19, 33-4]. And the Prophets: ‘Cease to oppress the alien, the fatherless and the widow, if you shed no innocent blood in this place and do not run after other gods to your own ruin, then I shall let you live in this place, in the land which long ago I gave to your forefathers for all time’ [Jeremiah 7, 6-7].
That seems pretty clear – Israel’s land rights are affirmed, but this is coupled with the requirement to respect the foreigner and his property and the prohibition of killing innocent citizens.
Hamas’ violent actions in October 2023, and the ongoing attacks of Hezbollah on the northern borders of Israel, coupled with Iranian support, were and are, clearly an intrusion on Israel’s right to peaceful existence, but do they cancel out the need to heed the teaching of Jewish scriptures, not allowing even for diplomatic endeavours to secure a ceasefire? Does war eliminate all moral considerations or does it heighten them? And whilst alarmed at the way other countries treat aliens/refugees are we sure that we are without blame?
John Briggs