Beckenham Baptist Church

  Dear Friends,  O come, let us adore him, O come, let us adore him, O come, let us adore him, Christ the Lord! so goes the Christmas carol, O come, all ye faithful . In the Archbishop of York’s Advent Book for 2021, Music of Eternity – Meditations for Advent with Evelyn Underhill , the author writes, ‘for Evelyn, the starting point of the spiritual life is adoration. She reminds us that when we encounter God in His majesty and loveliness, adoring worship is our natural response’. Nearly 400 years ago a group of Puritan preachers and elders came together and produced The Westminster Shorter Catechism , a short document in the form of questions and answers used to teach the basic doctrines of the Christian faith. The first question is, ‘What is the chief end of man?’ to which the answer is ‘Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever’. In other words this is our purpose, this is what we have been created for, this is what the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross has s...

  Dear Friends, I wonder if you enjoy queuing. I guess you may reply that it depends on what I’m waiting for. I discovered this week that on average we spend one hour and twelve minutes as week in queues, and that during lockdown in 2020 this is likely to have been much longer. An hour and twelve minutes seems like a long time to be standing around doing nothing, particularly when we consider the speed at which we tend to live out our lives in this twenty first century. Waiting patiently in line is often thought to be a quintessentially British custom along with our love of tea, fish and chips and cricket on the village green, but in a survey from a few years ago of 2,000 British adults it found that queue jumping is our biggest pet hate. One of the great themes of Advent is waiting, pausing on our busy journey of life and in 2 Peter 3 we read of the apostle urging his audience to make themselves ready for the second coming of Jesus, to be prepared for ‘The Day of the Lord’, the ...

Dear Friends,  During Advent this year I’m using Gordon Giles’ book At Home in Advent – a Domestic Journey from Advent to Epiphany . For this first week we have been ‘Travelling through Advent’ thinking about things like motorways, buses, boats, trains and cars, and also traffic lights, and this quote made me smile. ‘There is an Italian joke that say that in Milan, traffic lights are instructions, in Rome, they are suggestions and in Naples, they are Christmas decorations.’ You may already have put up your Christmas tree with its decorations, or you may be putting it off for as long as you can, but the colours we see – the reds, golds (or ambers), greens and others – can be a reminder of the life of Jesus. Red reminds us of his blood spilled on the cross and his sacrifice for the sin of the world; perhaps the amber reminds us that Jesus is the light of the world, who is our guide, shining in the darkness; and the green can remind us of new life, thinking ahead to Springtime and t...

  Dear Friends, The season of Advent is upon us once again and it is an opportunity for us to slow down and take time to ponder and think, pray and read about what the coming of Jesus Christ as the babe of Bethlehem means for us. I’ve been recently reading a book called The Deeply Formed Life by Rich Villodas who is the lead pastor of a large multiracial church in Queens, New York. In a chapter called Contemplative Rhythms for an Exhausted Life , he references a condition called ‘Newyorkitis’ which a doctor in 1901, John Harvey Girdner, coined to describe an illness whose symptoms include edginess, quick movements and impulsiveness. The point that Villodas is making is that we live at too fast a pace of life stating that ‘the problem before us is not just the frenetic pace we live at but what gets pushed out from our lives as a result; that is, life with God ’. It isn’t easy is it, when there are 101 things to do on our ‘To Do’ list, and the phone is going, emails need to be ans...