A Testament: Part Two

People sometimes ask me ‘How did you decide to become a minister?’ I sometimes wonder how it happened myself! It certainly wasn’t something I thought about a lot when I was growing up. In my early teens I loved sea stories and thought I might grow up to ‘join the Navy and see the world’, as the saying went in those days. Later on, when I became a musician, I dreamed about a musical career. Being a preacher certainly wasn’t on my radar screen.

In order to tell this story, I have to go back and explain how God became real to me. That will likely take up a whole post, so I might not get back to ‘How did you decide to become a minister?’ until later!

As I mentioned in an earlier post, when I was a boy my Dad was a commercial artist, but when I was still very young he went away to theological college for two years and was ordained in the Church of England. At that point our life changed; we left the little working class street in Leicester where we had lived since I was born, and moved into a suburb where my Dad became a ‘curate’ – an assistant minister in a parish. My Dad was the sort of minister who moves around a lot – three years here, four years there – so from then on I lived an unsettled sort of life. He served his curacy in Kirby Muxloe, just outside of Leicester, and then we went for a year to the Canadian Arctic. My Dad thought God was calling him to be a missionary there, but it soon became evident that it wasn’t to be, because he had no linguistic ability, and that was rather crucial in those days. So after only a year we returned to England, to spend eighteen months or so in Lytham St. Anne’s before Dad was appointed as vicar of Southminster in Southeast Essex in December of 1969.

Up until that time I’d had the standard churchgoing family experience of Christianity. I was baptized as a baby, and my parents took me to church every Sunday from before the time when I could walk; I suppose I must have gone to Sunday School, although I have no memories of it at all. At home, my parents said prayers with me at night, and we had Bible story books that we read from regularly. I have always known the Christian story and have never in my life been an atheist. As I got older I found that I enjoyed singing and so joined the church choir (we were a musical family anyway so this was not unexpected).

But my relationship with God was purely institutional. I very rarely said personal prayers, and I don’t remember ever having a sense of ‘knowing God’ as a child the way some people do. I never rebelled against church; I just wasn’t that interested in it. I got confirmed in Southminster at the age of twelve, but this was purely because my parents thought it was a good time for it. I have very little memory of the confirmation classes and certainly didn’t see the service as my adult commitment to Christ.

Nonetheless, confirmation did have an impact on me, in a roundabout sort of way. There were about twenty of us in that confirmation class, and after the confirmation we decided to stay together as a youth group. We met on Sunday evenings after the evening service, and for about a year this continued. Gradually people fell away, as was common in those days; confirmation was often a sort of ‘passing out parade’. And so as the year went by the group got smaller and smaller.

One of the people who remained was Jane, a girl about five years older than me. Jane knew Christ in a personal way, and I could see it in her. I couldn’t articulate exactly what the difference was, but I knew that the way she was experiencing her Christian life was very different from my own experience. That intrigued me.

During that period of my life (I was twelve when I was confirmed), my Dad lent me religious books from time to time. I wasn’t that interested in them, but I read enough to be able to make what I thought was an intelligent comment and then gave them back to him. I don’t think he was fooled.

Not long after my thirteenth birthday he lent me Dennis J. Bennett’s book Nine O’clock in the Morning. This was the first religious book I read all the way through. In fact, I couldn’t put it down. I started it at eight o’clock at night and read it ‘til the small hours of the morning. That book changed my life.

Dennis Bennett was an Episcopal priest from the USA, and in 1960 had experienced what Pentecostals called (and still call) ‘the baptism in the Holy Spirit’. In other words, he had experienced for himself the sort of thing the early Christians experienced on the Day of Pentecost, when we read that ‘All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability’ (Acts 2:4). As Dennis pointed out in the book, this was a definite, datable experience for these early Christians; when someone asked them, ‘Have you received the Holy Spirit?’ they could answer that question without any doubt, one way or the other! In his book Dennis described his experience of the baptism in the Holy Spirit and how it had transformed his life, giving him a sense of closeness to God and also introducing him to the supernatural. He had experienced ‘speaking in tongues’ – praying in a language he didn’t understand – and had also been introduced to the ministry of healing, and had seen sick people healed as he and others prayed and laid hands on them.

This was revolutionary to me. This was a million miles away from the staid Church of England with its totally predictable worship and spirituality. This was a real God who did real things in the real lives of real people. When I finished reading Nine O’clock in the Morning, I knew I wanted to know this God. But I didn’t know what to do next, and I was a shy sort of boy and was too scared to ask.

I’m not sure how much time elapsed between my reading of Nine O’clock in the Morning and what happened next. I do know that things came to a head for me on the Sunday evening of March 5th 1972, when I was thirteen years old. At our youth group meeting that night Jane and I were the only ‘youth’ there; my Dad was leading the meeting. At a certain point (I have no idea what the topic was and how this question fit into it) he turned to me and said, ‘You’ve never given your life to Jesus, have you?’ I had to agree that I had not. Then Jane said, ‘I have – although I seem to keep taking it back from him!’ In a flash two of my questions were answered. I knew what made Jane’s Christian life different from mine – she had ‘given her life to Jesus’. And I knew what the next step was for me.

So I did it. After the meeting was over I went up to my bedroom in the vicarage in Southminster, closed the door, sat down on my bed and prayed a prayer. I don’t remember the exact words, and they probably aren’t very important anyway. I simply gave my life to Jesus, as Dad had suggested. I didn’t have a dramatic spiritual experience – I certainly didn’t experience anything like the sort of ‘baptism in the Holy Spirit’ that Dennis Bennett described, and I certainly didn’t speak in tongues or anything like that. Nonetheless, there was a quiet sense of connection with God that hadn’t been there before. I went to sleep that night with a sense that something new had happened to me. And I was right.

I told my Dad what I had done, and he was very pleased, of course. A few days afterwards, he gave me a little booklet called ‘Seven Minutes with God’. It was a book about how to have a daily time of prayer and Bible reading, for people who had never done it before (it’s now available on the Internet here). It was actually very regimented. It suggested starting with half a minute of silence to prepare your soul to meet with God. This would be followed by four minutes of Bible reading, and then two and a half minutes of prayer. The traditional ‘ACTS’ formula for prayer was followed: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. The booklet ended by admitting that although seven minutes was a good starting place, it was unlikely that it would be long enough; anyone who started would soon find themselves taking more time.

So I started, and a habit was born. I was always a morning person, so I got up early and had my seven minutes with God. I soon found, as the book suggested, that seven minutes was not enough. And not long after that my Dad gave me a copy of Ken Taylor’s The Living Bible – a thoroughly unreliable paraphrase, but so easy to read that it definitely made a Bible reader out of me. I’m sure I read it from cover to cover two or three times in the next few years.

So I grew in my newfound relationship with God, but it wasn’t an individual thing. Something was happening in our church, and I was soon a part of it.

I later discovered that my Dad had experienced a personal Pentecost of his own a few months before that night when I gave my life to Jesus (he later astounded me by telling me that he had been praying for this for twelve years!). He had experienced it at a prayer meeting in a home of some Pentecostal Christians (some of whom were members of a Pentecostal church, others the local United Reformed church). He had continued to attend that prayer meeting, and I was curious and asked if I could go along with him.

This was my first experience of informal group prayer. And boy, did these people pray! The meeting lasted for about two hours, and most of it was prayer. In the middle they might stop for a bit of Bible reading and discussion, but it was never (to my memory) a planned and formal ‘Bible Study’. The rest of the time, people prayed – at great length. Some knelt in front of their chairs, some just sat and prayed - out loud, prayers they were making up as they went along – ‘extemporaneous’ prayers, as they are technically called!

Here for the first time I heard ‘speaking in tongues’ in public. From time to time, someone in the group would start speaking in another language (I’d read about it in Bennett’s book, so I wasn’t surprised!). Usually this was followed by someone else speaking in English; God was giving them the ‘interpretation’ of what was being said (see 1 Corinthians 12:10). At times someone would speak out with a message from God to the group, which was understood to be the ‘prophecy’ mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12:10. Some of these ‘words of prophecy' had quite a personal application to some of the members of the group. There was a strong sense of immediacy, of God being at work. I was only a young teenager, and the rest were all adults (some of them a lot older than me), but I found it thrilling.

At some point during this time, I also prayed (on my own) to be filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues. I have very little memory of this event, and it certainly was not as dramatic as Dennis Bennett’s story. I learned the important lesson that God does not work the same way in everyone’s life! Nonetheless, I certainly experienced the sense of closeness to God that Bennett had spoken about, especially when I went to the Tuesday night prayer meetings. I have continued to use the gift of praying in tongues throughout my Christian life, and have often found it very helpful in maintaining a sense of immediacy in prayer.

Gradually the blessing started to spread to our church, St. Leonard’s. My Dad was always a gifted evangelist, and his one-on-one ministry with people was very fruitful. He was a tireless visitor and also used baptism preparation to the full as a chance to share the gospel and invite people to give their lives to Christ. He also talked about the Holy Spirit and invited people to experience for themselves the blessing of Pentecost. And people started to take him up on that invitation.

Eventually we started ‘house groups’ in our own church. There were four at first, I remember, although they didn’t all survive. They were a bit more cerebral than the Tuesday night prayer meeting, but still the study and the prayer was very good. We were encouraged to go to the one closest to us, so I dutifully attended the one held at the vicarage (which, however, was not led by my Dad but by a layperson). However, I think it must have fizzled out after a while (my memory is a bit hazy here), and I ended up going to the one held on Thursday nights at 39 Ely Close, the home of Ken and Kath Dunstan.

I loved those Thursday nights! I remember when I was about sixteen going to school on Thursday mornings feeling excited, because ‘tonight was the night!’ What was so exciting? It was simple – God was there, and God was at work. We read the Bible and applied it to our lives. We prayed together (quite like Tuesday nights, actually). And God spoke, through words of prophecy, or tongues and interpretation. Sometimes those words spoke directly to me. We prayed for each other, too, and saw answers to our prayers.

And we sang. In those days we didn’t have any song books or overhead projectors; someone would come back from a conference with a new song, and they would teach it to us by rote until we’d got it memorized. Fortunately, the choruses we sang in those days were short and easily memorable! Later on as I began to learn to play guitar I learned to play some of these songs, along with John Thain, who also went to the group and had been playing guitar for a lot longer than me (he’d also been a committed Christian for longer than me and he helped me grow in the Lord a lot).

Then along came the Fisherfolk! This group of American charismatic Episcopalians (‘charismatic’ became a code word for people who had Pentecostal-type experiences but didn’t belong to Pentecostal churches) had moved to the UK in the early seventies, and their records of simple folk-worship songs were enormously influential. To this day, I love those songs! ‘Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia Sons of God Arise!’, ‘Alleluia, Alleluia, give thanks to the Risen Lord’, ‘The Bell Song’, ‘The Holy Ghost will set your feet a-dancing’, ‘Fear not, rejoice and be glad’ and so on. I wasn’t a big fan of traditional hymns in those days; Fisherfolk songs were my sort of worship music.

I wish I could adequately communicate a tenth of the excitement and joy I felt as a young Christian in those heady early days of the charismatic renewal. In many ways it was actually quite Anabaptist! There was a lot of emphasis on every Christian having a ministry, rather than just ‘the vicar’. Simplicity of life was stressed (A few years later Ron Sider, a Mennonite, wrote ‘Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger’, and it was well received in English charismatic circles, where people never embraced right-wing politics as enthusiastically as their American cousins). I read the Bible very simply – especially the teaching of Jesus – and just assumed I was supposed to do what I found there (no theologian had yet talked me out of being a disciple!). So, from being an enthusiastic reader of military history I became a pacifist, and I also found I couldn’t justify infant baptism from the New Testament, so decided I didn’t believe in it (although for some reason, it never occurred to me to get rebaptized!).

My Dad had a lot of books and I read some of them. I was much influenced by Anglican charismatic writers like Michael Harper, David Watson, and Colin Urquhart. But some of my reading was a bit heavier; I remember reading Dad’s copy of Bonhoeffer’s Cost of Discipleship and being much moved by it.

At St. Leonard’s Southminster we always suspected that the rest of our Anglican deanery were looking askance at us! We were a growing church, full of young families, using contemporary worship services and music and sitting a bit lightly to some of the Anglican traditions which were still very important to the rest of the deanery. We still had sung evensong and an 8.30 a.m. early communion service from the Prayer Book, but our main 10.30 service alternated between Family Service and Series 3 Communion (one of the early modern language rites in the Church of England). And we sang those Fisherfolk songs, and others like them, and people clapped along and banged tambourines and acted as if they were having a good time in church. Rather suspicious behavior, as Dennis Bennett had once remarked!

One good thing the Diocese of Chelmsford was running in those days was called ‘Seventy for the Seventies’. It was a diocesan youth movement, and if you joined it you committed yourself to a year of training for mission, including regular regional gatherings on a monthly basis and two or three gatherings of the whole group, including a week at the Othona Community outside Bradwell, and a spectacular all-night vigil at Chelmsford Cathedral at the end of the year, at which the Seventy were commissioned and received a special cross. I remember that at one point in that all-night vigil we danced around Chelmsford Cathedral at about 4 a.m. and sang ‘Lord of the Dance’ about seven times!

Looking back, though, I’m glad that I had my early years as a conscious Christian in the context of a church that was not ‘traditionally’ Anglican. I’m absolutely sure I would have been bored out of my mind by sung Eucharist and Anglican chant week after week after week. This was the decade of informality, and informality was very important to me. In my mind in those days, ‘formal’ meant ‘unreal’ and ‘insincere’; prayers from the heart were better than prayers read from a book, and simple worship songs were better than complicated anthems. And of course, that stuff was old-fashioned – another thing I didn’t approve of.

Obviously I’ve grown out of some of the stuff I took on board in those early years, but I’m still enormously grateful for the essential substance of personal Christianity – Christianity as relationship with God through Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit, and Christianity as relationship with one’s brothers and sisters in Christ as well. I’m still essentially loyal to the spirit of what I received in those days. And I have to say that, a few years later when I was thinking of becoming a minister, it was because of what I had received from Christ in Southminster. I had absolutely no interest in spreading institutional Christianity or something called ‘Anglicanism’ (I don’t think I even knew that word in those days!). I had come to know Christ, and I wanted to help others to know him as well.

More anon.