An Adventure in Ministry

For many people the carol ‘O Holy night’ is one of their favourite carols and when listened to live, it is bound to bring goosebumps! This french song began as a poem written by De Roquemaure, but he soon realised it was better suited to a song and sent it to a friend Adolphe Charles Adams to compose the music. Although Adams was Jewish, and therefore didn’t celebrate Christmas, he composed the tune and it was sung at midnight mass on Christmas eve. It wasn’t long, however, until this song caused controversy with a tune written by a Jew and Roquemaure leaving the church to become a socialist and it was banned in the church. However, people continued to sing it and its popularity grew.  It is an endearing history, however I came across a couple of stories connected to this song that really challenged me, hundreds of years after it was written. There is a legend that in the Franco-Prussian war, on Christmas eve 1871, a French soldier sprung up from the trenches amidst fierce fighting...

  I spent some time last week at The Salvation Army’s William Booth College, learning about the history of the church and The Salvation Army, and it has been absolutely fascinating.  I thought I knew a lot about The Salvation Army, However I have realised that there is so much more to know. There were some things in our Salvation Army history that I thought I knew, but learned that in fact it was different to what I had thought and there were some things that were just plain wrong!  One of the days we went on the ‘Booth Cruise,’ a tour of the East London and some of the significant places in the early days of The Salvation Army. As we walked the streets, we heard stories of how Jesus changed the lives of many people through the work of The Salvation Army. The tour culminated in a visit to the graves of William and Catherine Booth and other people significant in the early history of The Salvation Army, and as we sang ‘O Boundless Salvation’ and considered the people who ga...

In the afternoon we spent some time at the Southern wall of Jerusalem. Here we looked at some of the ruins left from the period of the second temple. We stood on the steps where Jesus would have definitely walked when he came to Jerusalem for festivals.  We sat and considered how the area may have looked when the temple was still standing and what it means for us. Helen set a picture of what the temple would have been like at feast days. The sights and sounds, the hustle and bustle, the mayhem of it all. She then said. "The temple doesn't sound or smell like the house of prayer we imagine today." This really challenged me. I expect a house of prayer to be calm and peaceful but that isn't always the case, God can also be in the hubub.  I also considered that the bible says we are the temple of the holy spirit. Sometimes in church we can discount people because we don't believe they can become our vision of the temple, calm, ordered and compliant bu...

This morning after a beautiful breakfast we left Tel Aviv and headed to Caesarea. Here we saw an ancient town including a Roman theater and a hippodrome where horses raced and eventually gladiators fought. As we sat in the seats of the amphitheater we read from acts 10. We considered Cornelius, the roman centurion, from Caesarea, who was the first gentile to become a Christian. We considered the legacy of this one man’s faith and I was challenged to ponder what legacy my faith will leave. Caesarea was stunningly beautiful. The sea so blue, the sun so hot and the remains so striking. In this place of such beauty we paused to consider the nature of Roman occupation and what that meant for the early Christians. We thought about the counter-cultural message of Jesus and the fact Jesus calls us to still be radical and counter-cultural with his message of love.   I was also fascinated by the archaeological evidence of the excavations found along our walk. ...