This year, there has been a stand-out new genre on streaming services: the scammer show.
These dramatic reconstructions of ‘fake it until you make it’ chart the rise and fall of charismatic individuals who persuaded people to depart with eye-watering sums of money. Among them, Inventing Anna is the story of the fake German heiress Anna Sorokin, WeCrashed tells of the Neumans who raised billions of dollars whilst running at a colossal loss and, in my opinion, the best, The Dropout charts the fall of the biotech company Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes.
In January, George Linnane joined the South and Mid Wales Cave Rescue Team. He volunteered after he had spent 54 hours trapped in a cave in the Brecon Beacons and was rescued by 300 volunteers. He joined the team ‘so I can help the next poor soul who finds themselves in this situation’.
As we approach the A Passion for Life Mission, and our churches begin to return to normal ministry after Covid, this story is a reminder of the essence of evangelism.
Jimmy Carr’s comedy is certainly not to everyone’s taste: he has built his career on telling risky one-liners.
In his Netflix show His Dark Materials (the clue is in the name), he played with the idea of career-ending jokes, and one such joke may have proved his point.
en continues to seek to provide a forum for us all to learn as broadly as possible from sinful and shameful abusive actions. Our foremost thoughts and prayers must be with the survivors and victims.
It is the straw that broke the camel’s back. The final straw is small; it barely weighs anything but, added to the burden already carried, it crushes.
About 300 yards from my house is the grave of an 18-year-old paratrooper killed in Helmand province.
I’ve never been convinced by the reasons given for our Afghan adventure, and why this young man was put in harm’s way by our government. We have now abandoned Afghanistan and we are left wondering if there is any hope for that country.
I have found a new role model. A woman prepared to act against her family for the sake of the Lord and his people.
She used her abilities and the resources at her disposal to serve the Lord’s cause even at the risk of her own life. She is a little intimidating because she seemed so in control despite her vulnerability. Her nerve extended to extreme violence. She is Jael, and we read about her in the book of Judges.
The Psalmist writes of crying to God ‘out of the depths’. I’m sure many of us have been there at times during lockdown.
The job I do at present for the Pastors’ Academy in providing support for church leaders tends to lead me into some pretty depressing situations. I don’t get a balanced view of churches. I’m like a doctor. It’s generally those who are ill and unhealthy who turn up at the surgery.
This summer has seen the start of a new cricket competition, The Hundred. This has been developed to make cricket more accessible.
Each side faces 100 balls, bowled in lots of t e n balls rather than six- ball overs. The shorter games produce greater excitement, are more attractive to families and provide entertaining television. Needless to say, traditionalists are outraged. Simon Heffer has written that it is a ‘bastardisation of a once-great game.’ Many have repeated the obvious cliché that The Hundred is ‘just not cricket’.
If you are able to enjoy a holiday this August, why not give a thought to the unsung heroes of the last year.
As I write, the news is full of the resignation of the Health Minister, Matt Hancock, for breaching the Covid guidelines; no one seems to me much interested in his breaching of the seventh commandment on adultery, though I hope he will become repentant about that as well.
If you want to waste time on the internet, put church names into the search engine of the Charity Commission and see how many ‘volunteers’ they have.
Lots of churches do what ours has done. The number of volunteers recorded is the size of the church family – it seems that everyone who belongs to the church is a ‘volunteer’.
One of the stranger things to make its way to the editor’s desk this month was the rather zany (for want of a better word) video from which a picture is shown here.
It is safe to say that the photo is probably quite unlike any other you have seen recently! But all credit to the ministry team behind it, for it has achieved its purpose – raising the profile of world mission. Now not only do the members of St Giles’ Church, Normanton, where the video originated, have more awareness of the mission work going on in Namugongo, Uganda – but so do you. You may even be inspired to find out more about the Uganda Martyrs’ School there, which commemorates 32 young men who in 1886 were burned to death for refusing to renounce their faith.
When the Equalities Act was passed more than a decade ago, it seemed to limit the freedoms that Christians had long taken for granted.
It became unlawful to discriminate against others on grounds of religion or sexual orientation with the result that, for example, a Christian-owned hotel could no longer refuse a room to a same-sex couple. Similarly, a Christian could not serve as a magistrate and take the view that children were always better adopted by a heterosexual couple. New laws against hate speech meant Christians were more fearful of preaching the gospel in case they offended others; and they faced the possibility of disciplinary action in the workplace if they challenged transgender ideology. These changes reflected the fact that we live in a secular, post-Christian context. Christian views and values are no longer widely shared across society and deemed worthy of privileged status. Instead, government has to balance the interests of competing opinions in a multicultural society.
Instead of hosting a party to celebrate her son’s tenth birthday Seema Misra was sent to prison. She was eight weeks pregnant.
What was her crime? She had run the village post office in West Byfleet, but had unaccountable shortfalls in her accounts. She put in £20,000 from her family savings to resolve the issue, but the problems continued and, eventually, she was convicted of stealing £74,000. The local newspaper described her as the ‘pregnant thief’. Her life was in tatters.
Wrestling
is
a
strange
image of prayer. If you
read some of the pieces
written
about
prayer
today,
it
seems
even
more strange.
They
tell us
(rightly)
that prayer is about intimacy
and relationship, about knowing God. The
Bible’s image of wrestling suggests instead
conflict and hard work. It may be an intimate
way to fight, but it isn’t sweet. This kind of
fighting is sweaty, painful – and all about
endurance.
I have a great love for cities;
especially London, where
I was born and bred.
However, despite
their
attractiveness as major
centres of cultural and
intellectual activity, when
we consider the UK’s soaring
urban crime rates and the relatively higher
incidences of self-harm and suicide in our
cities,
it’s clear that something has gone
seriously wrong.
Last year, in our urban cities and towns,
there were 34.7 recorded acts of violent crime
per 1,000 population, compared to 6.8 in
rural areas. Additionally, there were more than
double the number of vehicle offences per
1,000 in predominantly urban areas, when
compared to predominantly rural areas.
While social scientists have discovered an
exponential relationship between population
density and both deprivation and the crime
rate, unravelling
the underlying causes –
and, more importantly, potential cures – has
proven far more difficult.
Frederic
Le
Play
was
a
celebrated
19th-century French
sociologist, engineer
and economist, who,
in his twenties, was
converted to Christ from atheism. He was also
the first scholar to investigate shifts in family
configurations systematically. His ability to
speak five languages and understand eight
facilitated his extensive surveys of working-class families in different European, North
American, Asian, North-African and Asian
countries.
Although a pioneering technologist, one of
the key findings from his 1855 publication
‘Les ouvriers européens’ (‘European workers’) was that, despite the benefits of
industry
and urban development, the major social
upheaval that they caused had resulted in
smaller nuclear families replacing traditional
extended
families. He also explained that
the resultant
loss of
intergenerational ties
(including moral and
religious
traditions)
had led to moral decay.
Despite this evidence, Le Play’s findings
were keenly contested by some of the 20th
century’s
leading
sociologists,
until
his
position was eventually vindicated by later
studies.
‘These are difficult times when there’s not that much good news. And I think this is one of those things that is universally good. No matter where you are on planet Earth, this is a universally good thing.’
Those words were delivered earlier this summer. So quick quiz (without cheating and looking down this column for answers): who said them, and about what?
‘Money can’t buy life’ (Bob Marley). ‘We are beggars – this is true’ (Martin Luther). ‘Happy…’ (Raphael). ‘Now God be with you, my dear children; I have breakfasted with you, and shall sup with my Lord Jesus Christ this night’ (Robert Bruce).
As the regular writer of this column, I believe that last words are important. Although I confess both a foolishness and a propensity to go over my word count, I disagree with Karl Marx, who on his deathbed apparently barked: ‘Go on, get out! Last words are for fools who haven’t said enough.’
No Evangelical worth their salt would want to argue that evangelism doesn’t matter. For a movement so closely connected with the evangel that we enshrine it in our nomenclature, it would be a surprise if we said otherwise.
Whilst Evangelicalism has been notoriously difficult to define as a term, you would be hard pressed to find any attempt to do so that doesn’t land on our activist tendency to go and share the gospel.
‘Drink silver particles in water.’ ‘Make your body more alkaline.’ ‘Drink water every 15 minutes.’ These were just three online cures which circulated at the start of the Covid-19 (C-19) pandemic.
All such claims were plainly ridiculous, but there were others that sounded more plausible, due to being wrapped up in nice ‘science-y’-sounding language.
Evangelical churches are busy places, aren’t they? There is so much to do.
There are, of course, all the usual rotas that one might be on: music, Sunday School, tea and coffee, welcome, etc. Then there are all the opportunities for mission and discipleship. Add to that the endless calls for training on every point of minutiae that ever takes place and, before long, you can find yourself swamped with stuff to do.
Most of us claim to want freedom. We don’t like being constrained. We want to do things our way, according to our pref-erences, how things suit us. We can get behind the concept of personal autonomy.
What we’re less happy about is when the autonomy granted to us is extended to others. Though we perhaps acknowledge the world would be a very boring place if we were all the same, there’s that little part of us that thinks – despite that – we’re basically right, the way we do things is best and so if everyone was a bit more like us the world would be a happier place. We are the arbiters of normal, moderate credible living and others are different shades of weird based on how closely they ape the way we do things.
I’ve been visiting Athens annually for the last eight years to speak in various Greek Evangelical churches and lecture at the Greek Bible College.
It’s always a fascinating cross-cultural experience, and it’s not unwelcome that the weather in Autumn is always much nicer there than it is in Cambridge. My last trip was the strangest yet, however, as I had also been invited to give a lecture to a large audience containing the Papal Nuncio, the Catholic Archbishop, Jesuit priests, lots of nuns, some Reformed Presbyterians, and the odd Anglican.
As we look ahead to the coming year, what may happen?
According to American pastor F. Kenton Beshore, the second coming of Jesus will be between 2018 and 2028, with the Rapture by 2021 at the latest. Well, who knows? Maybe F. (as I affectionately call him for short) will be proved right. Or maybe not. F. reckons it’s all got to kick off within a generation of the founding of modern Israel in 1948, with a generation being 70-80 years. He’s not one for vagueness, our F. He’s not Church of England.
New homes are being built near us, as in many places up and down the country. I can see them from our bedroom window.
I can only dream of living in one of these places – they’re completely out of my price bracket, but still, I couldn’t help but have a nose around the show home. I got ready for this exciting excursion by looking up the details online. After all, if you can’t afford something, it’s reassuring to know how much you can’t afford it.
Do we tell half-truths?
This year, there has been a stand-out new genre on streaming services: the scammer show.
These dramatic reconstructions of ‘fake it until you make it’ chart the rise and fall of charismatic individuals who persuaded people to depart with eye-watering sums of money. Among them, Inventing Anna is the story of the fake German heiress Anna Sorokin, WeCrashed tells of the Neumans who raised billions of dollars whilst running at a colossal loss and, in my opinion, the best, The Dropout charts the fall of the biotech company Theranos and its founder Elizabeth Holmes.