What with a church meeting last Sunday afternoon, and the annual Assembly of the Baptist Union of Great Britain this weekend, I am getting quite a lot of experience in the practice of what it means to be Baptist -together discerning the mind of Christ.
The doing of business, whether in the church meeting considering spending money on audio-visual equipment, hearing news of members or making decisions about the future ministry, or in Assembly, hearing news of the wider family in the country and overseas, voting on who will be our auditors or agreeing together on matters of public political interest, one of the distinctive features of being Baptist is on view; the conviction that when we gather, Christ is among us, and as we discuss, debate and sometimes argue, what we are trying to do is listen for the word of Christ, so that we may respond and obey.
We don't always manage of course. Sometimes, we get into power struggles, or get so bored with the minutiae that we opt out, or sometimes we feel all the power is elsewhere and all that such meetings are about is rubber-stamping other people's decisions.
But at our best, we find creative possibilities, hear words we would not otherwise hear and discover ways forward that we would not have thought of.
To do it - and more importantly, to do it well, - requires effort, commitment and trust. It requires us to turn up, and to take part, it requires us to pay attention to the issues and to get involved in the discussing, and to prepare through reflection and prayer before we get there, and it requires us to trust - to trust our own capacity to listen to the Spirit, to trust each other enough so that we do not always need to be right or get our own way, and to trust God to keep the promises we depend on.
One of the things I love about Bloomsbury is its capacity to take church meeting seriously. There is a good tradition - in the best sense of the word - of "how we do things". There may be disagreements, and there may be arguments. But there are not fights. There is a clear recognition that we have to go on living together somehow, even when we disagree, and so we have developed ways of disagreeing well.
But we also have the problems that go along with that - and that are often part of a large meeting. We spend a lot of time listening to reports and accounts of what has happened. We hear suggestions, but have no time or space to discuss them. We receive invitations, but can't respnd to them there and then.
My dream is of a church meeting which will do the "business" that needs to be done well and efficiently, but which will also have time for discussion without needing to take a decision, but which allows the chance to explore and consider. I would love to see a meeting which has time and confidence to stop and pray and wait and wonder. I long to see a meeting which will raise and consider matters that affect us deeply - political national and personal, around our discipleship and what it means to live Christianly today in all our variety of contexts, and do that considering in a way that does not judge, that allows for uncertainty and difference.
All that, and finish within two hours at the most!

Well, I can dream..... and in the meantime, I am preparing to go to Assembly and to see if what we struggle to achieve on a local level has any more or less chance of existing at a national one.

Having just watched the BBC series, Band of Brothers, for the second time, an entirely new range of questions emerges. The series follows the exploits of Easy Company, of the US 101st airborne division, through their exploits in the final year of the second world war. The horror of the series was no shock, having already seen it and having heard and read of it many times over. More disturbing on my second journey through the ten episodes, was the experience of companionship described by members of this company. Survivors of this Company, and their children, were still meeting regularly when the series was filmed several years ago.
In other words, the horrors shared by these people during the course of twelve months, has kept them together for over half a century! Why is that? Sure, it hardly reflects every veteran’s experience of war.
Sure, close community exists between people who have not undergone these horrors together. But is there something about the quality of human company flourishing most fully when hardship and suffering are experienced so deeply? Of course, not all suffering leads to such an experience of fellowship. But the disturbing question it left for me is the extent to which a depth of human fellowship is dependent upon mutual suffering – or ‘compassion’ if we dare to use that word. I’m not trying to make some masochistic virtue out of suffering. Still less would I want people to describe the trivial disappointments of comfortable western living as ‘suffering.’
It’s just a question. In a world obsessed with security, of warding off suffering and hardship and pain, have we made genuine human fellowship impossible. Has our obsession with security (military or financial or relational), dehumanised us?
Simon (uploaded by Ruth)

Lending God a hand, giving God a hand

"Don’t help God across the road, like a little old lady." Those words from U2’s latest album leapt out at me this morning.
It’s Easter. We’re supposed to be celebrating God’s utter power, expressed in love and experienced in the most down-to-earth way. God breaking through our stabilities, our securities, our certainties.
God is worshipped as the one who brings new life.
But I do still wonder how seriously God’s power is really taken, by churches as much as anyone else. Whether our church wants to be engaged in political struggles, or in strategies of church growth, the temptation can be simply to look at Jesus as someone who sets us a good example. And the resurrection just goes to prove that the story has a happy ending.
So we throw our energies into saving the world, and perhaps recruit God, or seek his advice, or ask him to wave a cosmic wand and grant our worthiest of desires. But really, deep down, we know it’s all up to us, all down to our effort. God’s part in daily life, no matter how much noise we make about it, can be pretty small. We do something great for him, and who knows, perhaps he’ll be grateful.
But the God revealed in Easter is too scary for many of us to celebrate. This is a God who pulls the rug from under our feat, who questions our deepest desires, our worthiest ambitions, even our most Christian hopes. This is a God who shows us that he is not bound by the apparent little victories or defeats that can bring joy or frustration. The resurrection of his Son shatters our stabilities, our securities, our assumptions. There is no new life without this shattering. No resurrection without this cross.
And a God who brings such radical, beautiful and disruption into our daily life? Who wants to celebrate that kind of God, honestly? How likely are we to be Sadducees in Christian clothes – too comfortable to take resurrection seriously, keeping God at a safe distance from daily life?
When we hear this week the words, "Christ is risen", who will have the guts to claim from the depths of their being, "he is risen indeed"?

Simon Perry (uploaded by Ruth)