Beckenham Baptist Church

Dear Friends,  I received in my email inbox this week the Christians in Parliament October Newsletter, which began, ‘Th e Lord is close to the broken-hearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit’ (Psalm 34:18). It went on to say, ‘Parliament is reeling at the tragic and shocking killing of Sir David Amess MP. Many will be feeling broken-hearted by the loss of a dear friend and colleague. Some will be crushed in spirit, perhaps numb, whilst others will be overwhelmed by feelings of grief, anger, sadness and fear. Psalm 34:18 reminds us that God is not only present with us in the midst of our pain and grief, but he is also near’. For so many it has brought back the painful memories of the killing of Jo Cox MP in 2016, and as I listened to the tributes paid to David Amess in Parliament this week, her name was mentioned by a number of MPs, none more so than the sister of Jo Cox, who now represents the seat that she once held, Kim Leadbetter, who spoke of her family’s experience wh...

  Dear Friends,  Each year during Black History Month in the UK the Baptist Union of Great Britain along with the Jamaican Baptist Union highlights the Sam Sharpe Project by giving an annual lecture. Sam Sharpe was a Baptist deacon and preacher who was hanged in Montego Bay on 23 rd May 1832 after initiating and leading a revolt for justice. Today he is seen as hero in Jamaica because of his legacy and his story which is one of a Christian liberator of his people. His actions were motivated by his faith and the reading of the Scriptures, and by engaging in ‘liberation from below’, Sam Sharpe demonstrated that true liberation comes when the oppressed and marginalised participate in their own bid for freedom and justice and not wait to have it granted to them by those who have power and authority. The project was set up in 2012 with the aims of encouraging churches and associations to engage with our contemporary multicultural society; supporting the Baptist Union Racial Just...

Dear Friends,  On 10 th October 2021 people around the world mark World Homeless Day. The concept of ‘World Homeless Day’ came out of online conversations between people who were working to respond to homelessness around the world. Began in 2010, World Homeless Day has been marked on every continent except Antarctica, in several dozen countries, and its purpose is to draw attention to people who experience homelessness and provide opportunities and resources for others to respond. 2021 also marks the 30 th Anniversary of the founding of The Big Issue by John Bird and Gordon Roddick in September 1991. It exists to offer homeless people and those at risk of becoming homeless the opportunity to earn an income from selling the magazines on the streets and help them to reintegrate into society. Each year vendors collectively earn around £6 million as they buy copies of the magazine and sell them on keeping the difference. There are some 4,100 vendors working across the UK every yea...

Dear Friends,  October is Black History Month in the UK which began in 1987 as part of the African Jubilee Year, a celebration recognising the contributions of African, Asian and Caribbean people to the economic, cultural and political life in the UK. I was fascinated to read this week in a BBC News website article of the first black Scottish football player to captain the Scottish team. Andrew Watson was born in Guyana in 1856 and came to Britain with his father who was a wealthy sugar planter. As a student at Glasgow University he played for Parkgrove FC, and then for Queen’s Park in Glasgow, which at the time, was one of the best teams in Scotland. It was from here that he was selected to play for Scotland against England at The Oval in 1881 where the Scots trounced England 6-1. The curator of the Scottish Football Museum said of Watson that he was a top star in the 1870s and 1880s, and that ‘wherever he went he was box-office attraction. Everybody knew who he was.’ The theme ...

Dear Friends, Operation Agri is celebrating 60 years of supporting Christian-led rural and urban development projects in three continents, showing the love of Jesus in action. OA was established by the Baptist Men’s Movement (BMM) in 1961 and the initial challenge to was to provide tools, livestock and equipment for agricultural mission workers, and OA grew out of this. Now, a wide range of development projects is linked with OA and support is largely given by the sending of grants rather than goods. The projects provide local people with the means to address their own problems, rectifying injustice, establishing their role within the local community, and responding to their aspirations for a better quality of life, physically, mentally and spiritually. Considerable emphasis is placed on the development work fulfilling two criteria: it should be ‘owned’ by the local people, and where possible, it should be sustainable. With its aim of ‘showing the love of Jesus in action’, OA works w...

Dear Friends,  The death was announced this week of the inventor and entrepreneur Sir Clive Sinclair who invented the first slimline pocket calculator in the 1970s, popularised the home computer in the 1980s with the ZX Spectrum, and launched the Sinclair C5 electric vehicle in 1985, which it has to be said was not a huge success. His daughter announced his death saying that he had been working on his inventions the week before he died because that was what he loved doing. ‘He was inventive and imaginative and for him it was exciting and an adventure, it was his passion,’ she added. Sinclair was a man ahead of his time and his daughter said, ‘He was very good at imagining things that people might like or might need, even though they didn't know they wanted them.’ I was interested to learn that Sinclair was an atheist, someone who didn’t believe in the existence of any deities, but he did believe in his talents and gifts and skills to create such useful and inventive things for p...

  Dear Friends,  So did you enjoy being able to sing in church last Sunday? As I stood at the front singing and listening my heart was lifted and for a moment, I felt a little emotional. Just being able to exercise our singing vocal cords was a joy and delight. The American singer Josh Groban says about singing in the shower, ‘There’s no half-singing in the shower, you’re either a rock star or an opera diva’. Well in church now we can sing our hearts out to God, and I know he is pleased to receive our praise. I’m reminded of the worship song by the band Delirious? , ‘Sing to the Lord with all of your heart’, and which goes on to say, ‘ You are the Lord the Saviour of all, God of creation we praise you. We sing the songs that awaken the dawn God of creation we praise you’. It is just so good to be able to praise God in song once again! Grace and peace, Neil

Dear Friends, In his daily devotional book, Soul Fuel , the adventurer Bear Grylls writes, ‘Success does strange things to people. It can so easily go to the head and lead people to think that they’re special, set apart and somehow elevated above others. People can start to get self-centred, and if it goes unchecked, it makes them unhappy and isolated’. But what does success look like for you? And how do you measure success? Everyone’s answers will be different because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all to measuring success, but things might include, having a sense of giving back to the world and making a difference, it might mean a sense of accomplishment or achieving some recognition or progressing in a chosen field. Success might mean being able to do the things you love to do or feeling satisfaction with your lot in life. Sometimes we can be blinkered in our pursuit of success in things like career titles, money or social status, and yet when they are found we don’t always feel succes...

Dear Friends, So the opening ceremony of the 32 nd Olympiad in Tokyo has taken place, and we look forward to a summer of sport at the highest level as Olympians, and later in August Paralympians, each compete for the medals in their chosen fields. Of course this year the Olympics and Paralympics, which were postponed from last year because of the pandemic, will be very different as there will be no spectators cheering the athletes on in any of the venues because of the rising levels of cases of Coronavirus in Japan. I wonder what it must feel like to be in a competition but not have the support and the encouragement of the crowds to lift you as compete. I’m reminded of the picture from Hebrews 12 that says, ‘Since we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses… let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us’ (Hebrews 12:1). The scene there is likened to a stadium with the cloud of witnesses cheering on the faithful as they complete their journey of faith in Jesus Christ. T...

Dear Friends,  So the dream is over for another tournament. Some 31 million of us watched last Sunday’s Euro 2020 final as England lost to Italy in a penalty shootout, 3-2. In 1996 the pictures were of the then England manager, Terry Venables, comforting the 26-year-old Gareth Southgate having missed a penalty costing England the semi-finals of the European Cup at Wembley. Fast forward to 2021 and the pictures are of the England manager Gareth Southgate comforting the 19-year-old Bukayo Saka having missed a penalty costing England the finals of the European Cup at Wembley. As the former England captain Alan Shearer said the next day, ‘Football can be a cruel, cruel game [and] unfortunately these boys will feel so hurt, so angry, so disappointed this morning and it will hurt them for a while’. Pete Grieg the author, pastor and founder of the 24/7 Prayer movement said in a Facebook post after the final that it was 25 years between the two images of a manger comforting a distressed ...

Dear Friends,  The England football team have booked themselves a date with destiny having won their semi-final match against Denmark to reach the final of the Euro 2020 Tournament. Not since the World Cup of 1966 has England been in a major football final and all eyes will be on ‘The Three Lions’ as they try to make history and bring home the win. It is reported that three of the England team have a faith in God – Raheem Sterling, Marcus Rashford and Bukayo Saka who all have referenced the influence of their early lives and the faith that they were brought up in, and which continues to shape their lives today. Together with Chris Powell, a member of the coaching team, there is quite an influence of faith in the England players dressing room. Powell is quoted as saying of his faith, “It gives me a sort of inner-peace, a sort of well-being. I live my life for this way, and that’s because of the Lord and what has happened, and what he has done to save me, and save everyone. It give...

Dear Friends,  For Christmas last year I received the National Geographic ‘Photo of the Day Calendar 2021’ which, as the name suggests, gives a stunning picture for each day of the year. From the sand dunes in the Sahara Desert to the Okavango Delta in Botswana, a bull sea lion in Argentina to children playing on a beach at sunset in the Seychelles, fruit trees and a field of flowers    in Brittany to a valley and snow-capped mountains in New Zealand, and many, many more, each which remind me daily of the wonder and awesomeness of God’s creation. I guess for so many of us not being able to travel has meant that we have not been able to see as much of God’s creation in other places as we might do in more usual times. But that doesn’t mean that we are bereft of the wonder of God’s creation all around us. I’ve been doing a bit of gardening this week and am always amazed at the wonder of the different plants and shrubs, flowers and trees that are in the garden. Some ...

Dear Friends,  So this week sees the beginning of the Wimbledon Tennis Championship, a staple of our British summer which we all missed out on last year because of Covid. This year sees the well-known players that we all recognise, together with some new kids on the block, battling it out to be crowned Men and Ladies Champion 2021. Of course the strawberries and cream and the Pimms will be on hand, the sun will shine (hopefully), the usual etiquette will be followed as only Wimbledon does, and the matches will be thrilling, although perhaps not as thrilling as the match between John Isner and Nicholas Mahut on Court 18 in 2010, which lasted 11 hours 5 minutes, was played over three days and whose final set was 70-68 to Isner. It is the longest recorded tennis match in history and whilst Isner progressed to the second round, the ‘loser’, Mahut, received a cheque for £11,250. But I’m not sure either player ‘lost’ in the grand scheme of things, because both would go down in tennis h...

Dear Friends,  In the 1994 film Forrest Gump , Tom Hanks who plays the title role is sitting on a park bench and begins a conversation with a nurse by asking if she would like a chocolate and then reminiscing that his mother had told him, ‘Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get’. Of course it means that life is unpredictable and that there will be surprises along the way, some pleasant, some not so. If you were watching the Euro 2020 football match between Denmark and Finland last week, you will have seen the Denmark player Christian Eriksen collapse on the pitch and need extensive medical attention before being stabilised, wheeled off and taken to hospital. It was a reminder, in perhaps one of the starkest ways, that life is fleeting. In the psalms we read, ‘Show me, Lord, my life’s end and the number of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is. You have made my days a mere handbreadth; the span of my years is as nothing before you. Everyone i...

Dear Friends,  Are you familiar with the terms ‘Generation X, Baby Boomers and Millennials’? These are a few of the labels which put together everyone who is roughly about the same age and links them to one of the seven generations, thus, ‘The Greatest Generation (people born between 1901-1927); The Silent Generation (1928-45); Baby Boomers (1946-64); Generation X (1965-80); Millennials or Generation Y (1981-95); Generation Z (1996-2010); and Generation Alpha (2011 onwards). But I wonder if you have heard of ‘Generation Fear’, usually associated with Millennials but which I think can also be given to anyone? There are many reasons why they have this somewhat negative label, one being the rise of social media, where the online world can be vicious, dangerous and unforgiving, and can cause huge anxiety. We only have to think about some of the online spats that occupy the pages of the tabloids and can suck not only those involved in a disagreement, but also many of their online foll...

Dear Friends,  Last week in the Operation World Prayer Calendar we were praying for the small West African country of The Gambia. It was good to hear that Christians have more religious freedom there than in most Muslim countries and that mostly friendly relationships exist between Muslims and Christians. There are a number of ethnic groups living side by side in The Gambia one of which is the Serahule tribe which makes up around 9% of the population. In a section in the prayer diary focusing on unreached peoples it stated, ‘there are probably fewer than 10 known Christians among the 180,000 Serahule of Gambia’. I had to sit for a moment to let that fact sink in. That is the equivalent to the New Forest district in Hampshire or the county of Hereford having only 10 Christians among their populations. And as I was reflecting on this and praying, I was reminded of Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount , ‘You are the light of the world. A city on a hill cannot be hidden’ (Matth...

Dear Friends,  You will likely have heard this week of the death of Eric Carle, the American author who is famous for his children’s book of just 224 words, The Very Hungry Caterpillar . Published in 1969 in has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide, has been translated into 62 languages, and was originally called A Week with Willi Worm . Carle said that he, his editor and his publisher didn’t know the reason why The Very Hungry Caterpillar was so popular, but says, ‘over time,  I've come to feel that it is a book of hope. And it is this hopeful feeling that has made it a book readers of all ages enjoy and remember.’ The sign of hope in the story is one of transformation. That the caterpillar having enjoyed his munching of various foods including, pears, plums, salami, Swiss cheese, watermelon, and a nice juicy green leaf, wraps himself in a cocoon and after a couple of weeks nibbles a hole in the cocoon, pushes himself out and he has transformed into a beautiful butt...

Dear Friends,  You may be familiar with the children’s Sunday School song, ‘Dare to be a Daniel’ of which the chorus is ‘Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone! Dare to have a purpose firm! Dare to make it known!’ The story of Daniel in the Bible is a story of the courage not to give in, but to remain faithful and true to God. In the sixth chapter of Daniel we read about the trap that was set for him by the administrators of King Darius who manipulated the king into signing a decree that anyone who worshipped any other god than he was to be put to death. But Daniel remained faithful and prayed three times a day to God gaining great courage and boldness, but also endangering his own life. The administrators told the king about Daniel’s actions and even though he was greatly distressed and made every effort to rescue him, the king eventually had no choice but to follow through with the decree he had ordered, and Daniel was thrown to the lions. But even in the face of an impossibl...

Dear Friends,  Christian Aid Week this year falls between 10 th -16 th May, and 2021 marks 75 years of the work of Christian Aid which grew out of the need in the 1940s to support desperate refugees following World War 2 by raising some £80,000 (equivalent to £3 million plus today). Down through the decades, Christian Aid has provided humanitarian relief and long-term development support for communities battling poverty worldwide, while highlighting suffering, tackling injustice and championing people’s rights. In the 1950s Christian Aid Week was launched to raise extra funds and to provide support for European refugees together with those from Palestine, Korea and China. In the 1960s Christian Aid made a difference in crises in Nigeria/Biafra, Kenya and India. In the 1970s it drew a link between educating supporters at home about the root causes of poverty and work with partners overseas to eradicate it. In the 1980s Christian Aid fed hungry people during the Ethiopian fam...

Dear Friends,  In a report from last year it was estimated that the fast-food business in the UK was worth almost £15 billion in 2018, with KFC. McDonalds, and Domino’s Pizza coming out as the top three in the UK. The story is told of Colonel Sanders’ restaurant in the US that when a new motorway was built, taking passing traffic away from the store, his business crumbled. Desperate to find a solution he took his one asset, his famous secret recipe to try and find other restaurants to buy it so that he could take a slice of the profit from every chicken meal sold. We might think it would be easy, but it turned out to be anything but. Rejection after rejection came until he had visited over 1,000 businesses when he finally found someone to say yes, and the rest, as they say, is history, and Kentucky Fried Chicken was born. What is interesting is that Colonel Sanders didn’t give up, but kept on going, believing that something would turn up. Sometimes it can be very hard not to give...

Dear Friends,  In the prayers from the Operation World website last week we were praying for China over a number of days and the prayer information referred to Central China which has a population of 250 million people. It revealed that around 10% are Christians and that the province of Henan is seen as the powerhouse of church growth in China with some referring to the county of Fangcheng in Henan as the ‘Jesus Nest’. The Chinese state declared Henan an ‘Atheistic Zone’ in the 1960s, but revival began during the Cultural Revolution with mass conversions, miracles and vision for evangelising the whole of China. One who was instrumental in this growth was a man called Li Tian’en who was called by the Lord whilst studying at college and changed his studies to theological education. He served in various local churches and was arrested and imprisoned for his faith a number of times. On his second arrest in 1973 he was sentenced to death due to his evangelism during the Cultural Revo...

Dear Friends,  I read the story this week of the Grand Chessmaster Anna Muzychuk who is refusing to play in Saudi Arabia because of the restrictions she would face, including having to be escorted by a man if she were to leave her hotel and having to wear abaya. She said, ‘I will follow my principles and not compete in the fast chess and blitz world championship where in just five days I could have made more money than with dozens of other combined tournaments.’ She continues, ‘In a few days, I’ll lose two world titles, one after another, because I have decided not to go to Saudi Arabia’. Giving something up, for whatever reason, is costly, whether it be in financial terms, status, or even losing friendships and family support because of a decision we take. I wonder what you would be willing to give up in your call and obedience to follow Jesus? In Luke 18 we read the story of the Rich Young Man who comes to Jesus asking, ‘What must I do to inherit eternal life?’ Jesus tells him ...

Dear Friends,  As we journey through this Easter season, I wonder if you can sum up in a few words why Easter is so special to you? If you only had, like some of those online forms that we sometimes get, a certain number of characters to say something, what would you include and what might you leave out? In the book, One Body in Christ , the history and significance of the Evangelical Alliance, I was reminded of the ‘March for Jesus’ initiative of the 1980s and 1990s and the involvement of the song writer Graham Kendrick. One of the songs that came out of this period was The Servant King which, perhaps would use more words on our online form than we were allowed, does encapsulate the meaning of Easter. It is that the second person of the Trinity, God's Son, Jesus Christ, came, his ‘glory veiled’, to give his ‘life that we might live’. It is that he chose to bear our ‘heavy load’, the weight of sin of which we could not be freed from in any other way. It is that ‘cruel nails’ pie...

Dear Friends,  Happy Easter! As we celebrate Easter Sunday, I’m reminded that Easter doesn’t finish on Easter Day but that we enter into the Season of Easter, the fifty days until Pentecost Sunday. We might also want to reflect though that Easter isn’t just about one day or even one season, but all times and seasons are Easter days, because we are ‘Easter People’. The phrase Easter People was brought to my attention a few years back when a President of the Baptist Union took as their theme, ‘Easter People Living in a Good Friday World’. It is a powerful image which helps us to understand what our role as believers in Jesus Christ is to be in the world. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells his followers that they should be like a light that is set on a hill, or as salt of the earth. We’re also called to be yeast in a dough mixture and good seed amongst weeds. The message then is plain and simple, as disciples of Jesus we are meant to influence the society around us with kingdom...

Dear Friends, One of my childhood memories is of an Easter poster that used to appear every year in the locality, in porches and windows that announced, ‘This is Holy Week’. I think it was distributed by the local parish church and people were encouraged to display it in a prominent place. It was striking in its simplicity, something akin to a clip art image, that showed Jesus dying on the cross with the letters INRI placed above his head which references the inscription that Pontius Pilate had put on the cross which read, ‘Jesus of Nazareth, the King of the Jews’ (John 19:19). The beginning of Holy Week with the cries of ‘Hosanna!’ and palm waving will very soon be replaced with ‘Crucify Him!’ and the wooden cross as we walk with Jesus in his footsteps the culmination to the Lenten season. During this coming week you’re invited to read the story for yourself from John’s gospel with the Holy Week Readings which were sent out last week, but which are also attached here again. There wi...

  Dear Friends ,  I’ve been looking through my 2020 diary this last week, realising that 17 th March (St Patrick’s Day) last year was the day the deacons took the decision to suspend all church activities because of the rising number of Coronavirus cases, and that 22 nd March (Mothering Sunday) was the first Sunday we went online with our services. The next day, 23 rd March, the first national lockdown was announced by the government, and the rest, as they say, is history. What a year it has been! Who could have imagined that the restrictions would have lasted so long with so much of our daily living curtailed and being told to stay at home with life as we have known it for all our lives suspended? Who would have thought that so many people would have contracted the virus and needed hospital treatment, some suffering long term detrimental effects on their physical, mental and emotional health? And who would have said that over 120,000 people would have died due to Covid-1...

Dear Friends,  I wonder if you like the task of vacuuming. Last year we discovered that our old vacuum cleaner wasn’t being as efficient as it once was and so we bought a new one, this time a lightweight, cordless model which I have to say is just brilliant. In Gordon Giles book At Home in Lent – an exploration of Lent through 46 objects , last week, amongst other things, we considered the vacuum cleaner, of which he says is one of the most significant labour-saving devices. The first patent for a vacuum cleaner came in 1908 building on the previous efforts including the wonderfully named ‘Improved Vacuum Apparatus for Removing Dust from Carpets’, and today he says that ‘millions of people have been grateful for this application of science to an unavoidable chore’. He goes on to highlight the story of Martha and Mary from Luke 10, sisters who are engaged in very different tasks as Jesus comes to visit them. Martha is all about rushing around doing the chores in preparation and du...

Dear Friends,  One of the books I’m reading during Lent is the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lent Book for 2021, written by Hannah Steele who is the Director of St Mellitus College, London, entitled Living His Story . The back cover states that ‘we are fascinated by stories. Every culture has them, passed on from generation to generation. Stories tell us who we are, where we belong and how we relate to the world around us. The gospel of Jesus Christ is the story at the heart of the universe, and yet the Church now finds itself in a culture that has largely forgotten this good news’. She goes on to talk about sharing the story of our lives and God’s presence in them and refers to the Saturday edition of the Guardian newspaper which has a feature called ‘Experience’, focusing on the story of an ordinary individual who has a tale to tell about their life. She writes, ‘These stories range from the near miraculous – the man who survived 76 days adrift in a raft on the Atlantic Ocean – t...

Dear Friends,  ‘Do the little things’ is a quote from the life of Saint David, the patron saint of Wales. The month of March gives us two Saint’s days to celebrate, Saint David on the 1 st , and Saint Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, on the 17 th . Both these saints’ lives reminded me of the old Sunday School hymn, I sing a song of the saints of God . But what is it that makes a saint’s life so interesting? Perhaps it is that their lives were extra-ordinary because they achieved something special under extreme circumstances. Now whilst as Baptists we tend not to have a focus on saints, the stories of the lives of the saints can be a source of courage, strength and encouragement when we have to face something that may be trying and testing. Of course saints are not just the familiar ones that we may have learned about at school. There are very many ‘ordinary’ saints, and the hymn goes on to tell us, ‘one was a doctor, and one was queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green, one...

Dear Friends,  Following the snow of the last few weeks there are once again some signs that Spring is just around the corner. Spring is a wonderful time of year with the emphasis on new life and new beginning, but it is not officially due to start on 20 th March, so we’ve a little time to wait. But Spring also connects the season in the church calendar which have just entered – Lent. T he name Lent is a Western name, from Germanic descent, given to the season which is known more widely around the world by its Latin name – Quadragesima , or the ‘fortieth day’. It marks the 40 days from Ash Wednesday to Holy Saturday, not including Sundays, which makes up this special season which Christians follow. The word Lent originally meant simply ‘spring’, but it was in the late middle ages that it took on its meaning of the Christian festival leading up to Easter. One of the focuses of the season of Lent is the journeying with Jesus to the cross and then the empty tomb. Originally this p...

Dear Friends,  One of my favourite hymns is Thomas O. Chisholm’s Great is Thy faithfulness , written in 1923 to reflect the authors daily experiences of poor health over his lifetime and God’s faithfulness to him. And so we can speak of God’s faithfulness to us, in good times and bad, times of plenty and those challenging times of life. But there is also our faithfulness to God. Our faith in God can sometimes burn brightly like the brightest of night stars, or it can flicker like the flame of a candle. Thankfully, the Bible has some fascinating things to say about faith, not least that, ‘if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to here” and it will move’ (Matthew 17:20). Something to ponder and think over this week: ‘ Faith is... reliance on the certainty that God has a pattern for my life when everything seems meaningless; remembering I am God's priceless treasure when I feel utterly useless; depending on the fact that God is L...