Frank Viola on Don Francisco

In a recent blog post Frank Viola recommends one of Don Francisco's songs, 'He's Alive'. And indeed this is a wonderful song.

Another of Don's great songs is 'And the Spirit Sings', it's one of my all-time favourites and it carries a gentle but strong message that meeting in freedom can be a very special experience because it causes the Holy Spirit to sing. That has been true in my experience, and in Frank's, and in Don's, and in the lives of so many of the people I know and love.

To be in a meeting at home, where Yahshua is welcomed along with everyone else, that is a supreme privilege.

Meetings like this have been the absolute pinnacle of my life - and that's no exaggeration! What can equal his palpable presence amongst his people? He is enthroned in the splendour of holiness yet he is intimately one of us - and the Spirit does indeed sing! Wonderful, wonderful times together over and over again. (Of course it's not being at home that makes this possible, but our freedom in one another's presence and the Lord's freedom amongst us.)

'And the Spirit Sings' can be found on Don's album 'Come Away'. If you like Don's style and you've never heard this particular track I strongly recommend you buy 'Come Away', the other songs are great too. The CD's available on Don's website. As I write, the homepage provides 'He's Alive' as a free listen. Go and hear it! Maybe Don will consider putting 'And the Spirit Sings' up there too - how about it, Don?

If you want to catch the aroma of meetings of this kind (just a hint of what they're like) read the notes on some of our past meetings. But like a great dish, a meeting in which he's powerfully yet gently present is something that can't be fully appreciated without tasting it.

FAMILY - Travelling with friends

Previous | Part 1 of a series | Next

Since 27th July Donna and I have been travelling around the UK with friends from Florida. This has been a time of blessing and fun for me personally, a time I'll always remember.

We have packed so much rich experience into just a few short days of living. And it seems to me that this is the way the whole of life should be lived. Life is short, so everything we experience in it should be treasured as a special privilege.

The holiday is not yet over, but it's getting closer to the end. Thinking about that brings some sadness, but reflecting on what we've done together brings great joy. Perhaps all of life is like this holiday. It has a beginning and a not-yet-experienced ending. It is a journey. It's a far richer journey when we dwell on the good things and allow the less good to flow quietly into the past and learn patience, wisdom, and trust in the process. The quality of our lives, like the quality of a holiday, is based partly on what we choose to hold onto and what we choose to let slip away without bitterness, anger or regret.

Here's a list of the outstanding things we've included so far, the things to remember and dwell on later.

• Travelling home from Gatwick Airport with two friends, and catching up with our news
• Taking the park-and-ride bus
  
• Visiting Oxford and eating ice-cream in 'The Eagle and Child', a popular haunt of CS Lewis
• Preparing and eating meals together, another time for informal chat
• Driving through the British countryside
• Visiting the old cathedral town of Lincoln
• Looking at a Norman house - yes, Norman!!
  
• Spending an evening with my eldest daughter, Debbie, and her family
• Travelling through the Pennines
• Visiting Hadrian's Wall and looking around Vindolanda
• Travelling to Edinburgh via Carlisle and Glasgow (don't ask!)
• Living on the Royal Mile as the Edinburgh Fringe gets under way
• Doing the open-top tourist bus thing
• Viewing the paintings in Edinburgh's National Gallery
• Taking friends who've never seen Edinburgh Castle to see Edinburgh Castle
• The Scottish Crown Jewels
• Driving the east coast road and stopping at the English border
• Durham and it's wonderful cathedral

• Spending another evening in York, with my younger daughter and her family
• Visiting York Minster and the undercroft
• Arriving home again
• Meeting with others at home, sharing a meal, prayer together, bread and wine, a great chance for people to chat, a time of blessing and encouragement
• Another trip to Oxford, a pub lunch, the CS Lewis walking tour
• Taking our friends to the station to visit London on their own
• Collecting them again at Kew Green tube station
• Visiting Kew Gardens
• Visiting 'Talkin' Headz', a drum shop in Woburn Sands
  
• Sitting on the patio chatting
• Taking our guests back to Gatwick to fly home
  

It would be easy to write a whole blog post on each of those events. Maybe I'll do just that, it would certainly be fun to write and would make a great diary of the trip.

So many happy memories, and still a few more to come. Life is rich, and good, and full. Life is like a meadow in the summer, filled with every kind of flower, dancing with butterflies and shimmering on a hot, dry day. As I write, the rain is pounding on the conservatory roof - but that, too, is a wonderful thing, what a sound! In the garden it's soaking into the good earth and making the plants flourish. They need the sunshine, but they need the rain too. Sunshine and water combining to generate abundant and carefree life. The rain today and perhaps the sunshine tomorrow.

We're rather like those plants, we need sunshine and rain in our lives to truly thrive.

Previous | Part 1 of a series | Next

Biblical Church - Beresford Job

Over the last few weeks I've been reading 'Biblical Church' by Beresford Job who lives north-east of London and meets with the Chigwell Christian Fellowship. And what a fascinating read!

The book is well argued and provides plenty of references both to Bible passages and to well known and respected theologians and Biblical commentators. Job uses this as a technique again and again, pointing out that his conclusions about the meaning of Bible texts and Koine Greek words and constructions are in agreement with expert opinion. Job is claiming nothing new, but he is stoutly proclaiming that as believers we are duty bound to put into practice whatever we see in the New Testament concerning church meetings and governance.

He makes it clear that this means meeting in homes not specially constructed buildings, having small meetings as the norm (tens rather than hundreds or thousands), and the absence of any kind of hierarchical structure. He further points out that it's normal for a local body of believers to eat together as well as worship together, and that meetings are not supposed to be a 'service' led from the front, but instead are an expression of community involving everyone in an active, not passive way.

On the whole, this book complements Frank Viola and George Barna's best-seller, 'Pagan Christianity'. The Viola/Barna book explains how the Church came off the rails in the first place, and also describes the changes necessary to get us back on track. Job's work takes the revised, corrected 'version' of local church and fleshes it out with recommendations on how to get from A to B, what difficulties are likely to be encountered, and how to avoid the major pitfalls. 'Pagan Christianity' could be seen as a theoretical analysis, 'Biblical Church' as a practical handbook (although there is plenty of overlap).

There is one area where my understanding differs from Job's, and that concerns the place of women in church life. But as Job himself says, there will always be differences of understanding and differences of emphasis in the Church, but the truly important thing is that we can (and must) love one another through differences of this kind. We must extend to one another the right to be different.

My advice? Read both these excellent books!

MIT's Simile

MIT stands for 'Massachusetts Institute of Technology', right? That's widely known.

But what does Simile stand for? If you don't already know you will never guess, it stands for 'Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments'.

Sooo... why exactly am I interested in this? It has something to do with my day job.

A portion of that day job is hunting for useful technology for the web development team I'm part of, we create intranet websites for Unilever. The thing is, MIT's Simile project 'seeks to enhance inter-operability among digital assets' and is 'fully committed to the open source principles of software distribution and open development'. To put this another way, they develop some very cool applications that work together and they release them for use and adaptation by anyone, anywhere, for any purpose.

The application that first caught my eye is called 'Timeline' and it is amazing. The code is stored on MIT's servers so there's nothing to install and download. The data is stored locally as an XML file. If you're not a techie person and you're still following along, just take a look at a couple of their example timelines, one on religions, the other on dinosaurs. They are so cool. Just drag them sideways with the mouse.

The other applications are good too, if you develop websites many of these may be a perfect way of making your site truly impressive, just by embedding stuff the way you would with Google Maps or You Tube.

• Timeline - timeline generator, described above.
  
• Timeplot - is a similar application but generates time series graphs from the data.
• Exhibit - displays data as presentation graphics.
• Gadget - summarises large XML datasets.
• Welkin - displays data in mathematical graph form.
• Fresnel - is a developers' tool, a vocabulary.

And there are many other projects and services available, just take a look at the Simile home page.

Quite apart from the effectiveness of the individual offerings and the fact that they are free to use, the Simile project showcases how web components should be designed and built. Congratulations and thanks to MIT and to everyone working on aspects of the Simile project.

Great Doddington - Table and vine

This was a great evening. At one point Jody brought oil, feeling we should anoint Peter - so that's exactly what we did.

Rachael decribed a vision of a long, long trestle table in what appeared to be a mediaeval castle hall. The table had an almost completed jigsaw laid out along its entire length. The jigsaw was composed of many scenes from life, and each scene contained something of Jesus. At a time of particular difficulty there was a beam of light or a glass containing the water of life, and in a scene when all was well there was a little bird sitting in a tree or some other little, joyful feature. The long jigsaw represented a person's lifetime, from birth to death.

At the end, the man making the jigsaw had only a few pieces left to add.

Chris saw that there were many tables and they all centred on Jesus and each long jigsaw was actually joined into him. So the place where the jigsaw ended, the point of death, was also the place where it joined with the centre and in reality connected fully with Christ.

We reflected on these pictures and considered again how we are grafted into the one true vine (John 15). We really are a royal priesthood!

Love song of the Welsh Revival

I've just read a post on the Koinonia Life Discussion Forum (KLDF). Someone has recently heard this wonderful Welsh hymn for the first time and was deeply moved by the words and music. A hundred years ago it was popular in the Welsh Valleys during and following the great revival of 1904.

Here it is, explained and sung by Huw Priday, first in Welsh and then in English. The words are very, very moving. They capture so eloquently the purpose in Yahshua's heart, his love towards us.



Here is Love, vast as the ocean,
Loving-kindness as the flood,
When the Prince of Life, our Ransom,
Shed for us His precious blood.
Who His Love will not remember?
Who can cease to sing His praise?
He can never be forgotten,
Throughout Heaven's eternal days.

On the mount of crucifixion,
Fountains opened deep and wide;
Through the floodgates of God's mercy
Flowed a vast and gracious tide.
Grace and Love, like mighty rivers,
Poured incessant from above,
And Heaven's peace and perfect justice
Kissed a guilty world in Love.

There are four verses, you can read all of them on Steph's Blog along with some further thoughts.

The Welsh Language
Welsh is a lyrical language, a beautiful language. It's said to express emotion and poetry more richly and naturally than English. The Welsh are great singers too, wonderful male voice choirs are traditional in the villages of the south, and at the Eisteddfodau (music and poetry festivals) there are competitions for choirs, harpists, and male and female solo singers.

Here are are the first two lines of the Welsh version of the hymn.

Dyma gariad fel y moroedd,
Tosturiaethau fel y lli.

The Welsh Revival
Perhaps this has been forgotten in recent years, but in its time it was a great move of the Spirit just like Lakeland or Toronto. There is plenty about the revival on the web, the Welsh Revival website covers it well.

What does it take to bring about revival? The first requirement is to recognise that there is nothing we can do to cause revival. We could exhaust ourselves with the effort of trying, yet still get nowhere. A revival is a work of the Almighty, not the work of men and women striving. Prayer is surely a good preparation, but quite simply when people put Yahshua in his rightful place at the centre of everything, and when hearts are overflowing with love for him and for one another, then we may see revival. Love must always be at the heart of it because the Father and the Son are Love and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Love. There can be no hint of revival unless Love himself is personally present amongst his people. He is the cause!

It's amazing how many of the old hymns were written during times of personal revival or widespread public revival. We should sing them more often! There are many wonderful songs being written today too, but why throw away yesterday's treasures just because we have found further treasures in our own day?

Thanks for raising this topic. You know who you are.

There are several more versions of 'Here is Love' on You Tube. All worth hearing. There's a delighful recording by the famous singer, Katherine Jenkins, one by Matt Redman, and another by a Welsh male voice choir. (Note: the images in this last video may distress some people.)