September marked five years since Stephen’s ordination in Stranraer. In a recent sermon he reflected on some of the reasons that led to him accepting the call to come here, as he preached on a verse that is particularly relevant to the situation of the congregation both then and now. You can listen to the sermon below:
Good news for drug users
We had hoped to have Trevor Wills speaking at a special meeting last month about his drug use and the hope and new life that enabled him to break free. Sadly the meeting had to be postponed due to coronavirus restrictions, but you can watch a five-minute version of his story below:
It’s part of a series of videos posted by Convoy Covenanter Church. Other videos in the series include: Good news for those who have messed up, Good news for difficult times, Good news for those searching for God, Good news for the sick and Good news for those in isolation.
Evangelism in the local church
At our Bible Study this morning, we ended up discussing the topic of evangelism, and what it should look like.
It’s a topic we touched on in a recent sermon, on the Lord’s Day the GO Team should have been with the congregation, when Stephen asked what the cancellation of the team (due to Covid restrictions) means for our evangelism as a church.
In the sermon, Stephen noted:
“Focused weeks of evangelism can be helpful. But the main work of outreach in a healthy congregation will be people sharing the gospel with their friends, and inviting them to church. That tends to bear a lot more fruit than trying to evangelise people we have no prior relationship with.”
He also quoted a follow-up comment by R. Scott Clark to a post entitled: ‘Does Acts 8 Provide a Warrant for Every Member Evangelism?’:
“I have spent plenty of time in the streets doing evangelism. To borrow from Paul, I must be out my mind to talk like this but I’m a certified Evangelism Explosion trainer [but] there’s a reason I don’t do it any more. It might have been emotionally satisfying but it didn’t produce much visible fruit for the visible church… I’m not saying that no one should do it but I would certainly say that there’s no moral obligation for us to be “on the streets.”
Relative to strategy, I think it’s much wiser for God’s people to be concentrating, as it were, on those with whom they actually have a relationship.”
The question of ‘What’s the best way to do evangelism in the local church?’ was helpfully addressed by Rev. Paul Levy (Ealing International Presbyterian Church) in a recent podcast episode. You can listen to the relevant clip below:
Paul was interviewed today on Premier Christian Radio as the co-author of a letter signed by more than 500 UK pastors (including Stephen) calling on the Prime Minister and First Ministers not to close churches again:
A few years ago, Paul wrote a blog entitled ‘A year in the life of a Minister’ which Stephen reviewed in the Messenger magazine.
Update: The following interview with Paul’s brother, Steve, is also very helpful on the subject of evangelism and the local church - stressing the importance of Public Worship and the means of grace.
The Beauty of the Bramble
The RP Global Alliance website recently featured an old meditation by J. P. Struthers on the humble blackberry, which Stephen had transcribed. It first appeared in Struthers’ children’s magazine, The Morning Watch, in 1906.
One day when his companion on a walk amused himself by slashing off the juicy tops of the brambles in the hedge with his walking-stick, the late Dr. Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, stopped him sharply: “Don’t do that; it’s breaking the Third Commandment!”
When Dr. Benson made that remark about the Third Commandment no doubt the young man was greatly astonished. A little thought would show him that he was doing a useless thing and a wrong thing, but what had slashing brambles to do with the Third Commandment? He wasn’t speaking, much less swearing, or saying bad words! How then could he be taking God’s Name in vain? And one may be sure that that is what he would say to the Archbishop.
But if that lad had learnt the Shorter Catechism in his childhood, he would instantly have said to himself – What is required in the Third Commandment? And then, What is forbidden in the Third Commandment? And he would have repeated the answer in his mind – “The Third Commandment forbiddeth all profaning or abusing of anything whereby God maketh Himself known.” That is one advantage in being brought up a Presbyterian! We are “rooted and grounded” in the faith. Indeed I am pretty sure Dr. Benson himself had got his knowledge of what the Third Commandment means either directly or indirectly from that very Shorter Catechism.
A Bramble-berry, like every other berry, is one of God’s works. It is good for food, and a delight to the eyes, and it grows in waste places, and by the roadside, for poor and weary travellers, and it costs nothing, and it comes late in the year, just before winter, when the harvest is all over and the time of other fruits is past, and it is full of honour, for it plays hide-and-seek, and smiles and beams out of the darkness on the diligent that find it. Yes, there is a lot of love in the making of a bramble-bush, and that is how it is one of the things “by which God maketh Himself known”, that is, shows us what He is.
O the Bramble-bush is the Poor man’s tree,
For it loves the king’s high road,
And none dare say, “It belongeth to me,”
For it roams like the winds of God.
O, the Bramble-bush for me!
O the Bramble-bush is the Bairnies’ tree,
For it loves to trail on the ground,
And by little or big, whatever you be
There are berries to be found.
O the Bramble-bush for me!
And the Bramble-bush is like God’s own tree,
‘Tis the place where dwells Goodwill;
For its thorns are hands that say, “Come, see,
Eat every one your fill.”
O the Bramble-bush for me!
But the Bramble-tree improves by cultivation. I knew a man once one of whose hobbies it was to gather every kind and variety of bramble he could find or hear of, and in his grounds he had specimens of bushes from every part of Europe.
But the special beauty of the Bramble as of every other tree is this. Its thorns remind us of Paradise Lost, but its fruit tells us that Paradise has been regained. Every green leaf, every flower, every whistling bird, every drop of water in the world, proves that the great gulf between us and God is not only not yet “fixed,” but has been bridged by Christ; they all prove to us that God is still in the world, and that he is not far from any one of us. Everything God gives us brings with it an offer of Christ and his salvation. The God Who gives us these little things wishes to give us more, wishes to give us everything He has.
Hope for today from a past crisis
In 1836, a typhus epidemic hit Scotland. The minister in my own congregation in Stranraer at the time was William Symington. As both his unpublished diaries and a memoir written by his sons reveal, the epidemic took a huge toll on both his family and congregation, and it seems a particularly apt period in our town’s history to revisit at the current time.
In the winter of 1836, William’s older brother Andrew, who was a minister in Paisley, lost a son and daughter ‘in the prime of youth’ to the disease. A few weeks later, the grave was reopened to receive the mother and one of her new-born twins. William travelled to Paisley to attend the funeral and stay and help his brother, but news reached him that the disease had reached his own manse. He hastened home to find three of his own children suffering from the same illness. On New Year’s Day, 1837, he made the last entry in his diary for three months. Soon, all six of his children were suffering from the disease, and three weeks later he contracted it himself. While it was initially assumed to be influenza, the true nature of the disease soon became clear.
Looking back on this sombre time, his sons comment that ‘during the remainder of the winter the manse was turned into a hospital’. William himself was confined to bed for eight weeks. He wrote in his diary: ‘From the infections nature of the disease we were forsaken by those friends whose kind aid we had received in other times of distress. In this I cannot think that they acted right; for if others, on whom we had no such claim and who might have reckoned themselves exempted from the obligation to attend us, had stood also aloof, our whole family must have been left to perish’.
The epidemic also brought financial consequences, just as coronavirus has done for many of us. Reflecting on it, he wrote: ‘The expenses incurred during this sickness have been such as my ordinary income could never have enabled me to meet. Had it not been that I had something of my own, and that the Lord had put it into the hearts of a few friends to aid us I must inevitably have been brought under a heavy load of debt. When all things are taken into account the expense incurred during these few memorable months of affliction cannot be much less than a hundred pounds. But he whose are “the silver and the gold” will not leave us unprovided for. Indeed we have already seen much reason to remark his goodness in this matter. We must not forget that his name is Jehovah Jireh’ [‘The LORD will provide’].
His recovery was hindered by news reaching him of the illness and then death of his younger brother Walter, also of typhus, at the age of 33. William wrote in his journal: ‘He has left a widow and four children for whom my heart bleeds’. The illness also took the lives of a ‘considerable number’ of people in the Stranraer congregation. Symington lamented the fact that he had been unable to be with them on their death beds or visit their mourning families.
On the 2nd of April he took up his diary for the first time since January, and recorded reasons for thanksgiving to God in the intervening period – not least in sustaining his wife who had only had snatches of sleep for five weeks, but ‘her calm trust in the promises of God served to bear her through’.
By the 22nd of April, he was well enough to visit friends in Dumfries for a fortnight, dining with the Editor of the Dumfries and Galloway Courier and managing to preach for the first time in 14 weeks. However, he still did not feel up to resuming full duties, noting: ‘I have had to wait for recovery as my progress has been exceedingly slow’.
On the 7th of May, he preached in his own congregation for the first time in four months. ‘The church was very full and the audience most attentive’ as he preached, very significantly, on Lamentations 3v22: ‘It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not’.
Our times are very different in some ways, but not in others – and as some form of normality returns in the wake of COVID-19, we would do well to take those timeless words to heart.
Published in the Stranraer & Wigtownshire Free Press, 17th September 2020
You can listed to a talk that Stephen gave on the life of William Symington at the Wigtownshire Antiquarian and Natural History Society in 2019 here.