Forty days minus one

Posted by David Ward on 09/02/2016
Posted in: Books/Articles, Lent, Personal thoughts, Spirituality. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Shrove Tuesday 2016

LentSo, tomorrow is the first day of yet another Lent. I find that the seasons of Lent and Advent provide a wonderful and necessary focus for my monkey-mind. During Advent my focus is on waiting and watching, antidotes to both the fast-food culture of today, that has so often spilled over into our spiritual lives, and to our sense of inertia as we grapple with the tension of being people of faith moving to the rhythms of grace rather than the pressures of our culture.

Then there is Lent, with it’s traditional emphasis on prayer, giving things up and giving to those in need. As I’ve got older I try to do these things throughout the year, but I find it really helpful to have a season when I really try to focus. More than anything, I try to use the time leading up to Easter as a time for a kind of spiritual check-up…am I more like Jesus than I was this time last year? What new things am I struggling with? What sins and habits are diverting me from being like Jesus? What do I need to change to get back on course? Who do I need to forgive? Who needs my help?The Journey cover

This year I’ve chosen John Pritchard’s book, “The Journey” to be a guide and companion during this time. The book provides a creative journey with Jesus to Jerusalem and the cross, as told through the eyes of John, probably the youngest follower of Jesus.

Today I read the introductory chapter, in which he sets out what he is hoping to achieve through the book. These words in particular caught my eye:

 

“He had a way of speaking that turned everything upside down in a way that made it seem the right way up. He cut to the heart of faith, bursting through tired ideas and pointless rituals. Sometimes he fretted over the slowness of people’s response, but still he kept to his patient programme of travel, teaching, healing and prayer.

Until the time came for him to turn towards Jerusalem and to say to his friends, ‘Let’s go.’

“The Journey”, John Pritchard

Sometimes it’s not just individual believers that get off track…it’s the whole church. We all have a lot of praying, giving up and giving away to do if we’re to make up for our terrible mistakes of the past so that we can re-capture our reputation as a group of people who look a bit like Jesus and behave a bit like Jesus in the way we treat each other and those who don’t know Jesus yet.

On Sunday someone in our church shared a passionate word of prophecy which included the scripture “For the time has come for judgement, and it must begin first among God’s own children. 1 Peter 4:17 (NLT) Our minister later suggested that among other things the time had come to stop focussing on the wrong stuff (which is often stuff that divides us and gets us off track) and to put Jesus back at the centre.

Britain in 2016 could use people like that.

 

Notes from a Musical Life 2…

Posted by David Ward on 03/02/2016
Posted in: Communication, Music, Personal thoughts, The Arts. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

2. Bands

“Why should the devil have all the good music”

Singer/songwriter Larry Norman, quoting William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army

Access August 1971

Having learned to play the guitar, it wasn’t long before I started to look at ways I could fulfil my promise to ‘use my guitar playing for Jesus’. No Christian born after the 60s and early 70s can understand how it was, to be trying to share faith or worship using more contemporary music, in those far off days. Today we take it for granted (although in some quarters the controversy rumbles on) but back then, using guitars and drums in a Christian context was pioneering and controversial to say the least.

It wasn’t long before my teenage-self got together with others to form a ‘beat group’. At first it was just a couple of acoustic guitars and five singers, then adding drums and an electric lead guitar, members coming and going and, much later, adding bass guitar (our bassist was a complete novice., but willing to learn. Although early bass parts were taught by rote he soon picked it up for himself).

We took our music to schools, prisons, youth groups, beach barbecues, harvest suppers and occasionally churches. We played our self-penned songs and talked about our own faith stories anywhere we were offered an opening.

One of the elders at my church, Bill, took me on one side after a Sunday service and started to harangue me about using pop music in a Christian context, telling me it was dishonouring to God and would do harm not good. I remember telling him about the opportunities to talk about Jesus in places where Christians seldom ventured. I told stories of lives influenced and changed. He would not have it!

Fortunately the rest of the church leadership made their support for what we were doing evident in a multitude of ways. I owe much of the ministry that I’ve been involved in over the years to the open-handed, encouraging environment of the church in which I grew up.

Solo c.1977Band line-ups came and went, and eventually I spent a long time working as a solo singer/songwriter, before eventually giving up my day job as a teacher to work for British Youth for Christ as a member of their national staff band ‘Alphabet’.

When I left the band to work first of all for The Message and then for Ivy Cottage Church in Manchester I continued to do the occasional concert, but increasingly used my guitar in the context of musical worship, which I still do, occasionally to this day. Promise kept, I hope!

The picture with this article is of a band called “Access” which I played in in the early 70s. When my 12 year old daughter saw it she said, “Dad, you looked like one of the Beatles!” I was reminded of a much less complimentary comment, delivered after one of our concerts somewhere in the UK in the late 60s, when one of our audience caught me afterwards to say, “I could listen to John Lennon’s voice for ages, but your voice…”

The voice was rough, the song lyrics primitive, the arrangements predictable (all sounding very amateur compared to today’s professional Christian musicians) but we were young, and as we pioneered something new somehow I believe we made a difference to many lives. We shared the story of our encounter with Jesus in unlikely settings to often very receptive audiences.

Notes from a Musical Life 1…

Posted by David Ward on 28/12/2015
Posted in: Communication, Music, Personal thoughts, The Arts. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

“There is something about music that lifts our spirits and touches our hearts. It is, therefore, perfectly natural that the Christian faith has such a close relationship with music.”

Trystan Owain Hughes (from “Real God in the Real World…Advent and Christmas readings on the coming of Christ.

“You know what music is? It’s God’s little reminder that there’s something else besides us in this universe.”

Robin Williams (character in the film “August Rush” 2007)

1. Beginnings

I’m not quite cYouth-Praise_thumb.jpgertain when it was; it must have been some time in the early 1960s.

Inspired by the sounds of ground-breaking Christian beat music from the 45 rpm discs that filled the juke box in the coffee shed at the Herne Bay Court Christian Conference Centre and, later, a visit by American folk-pop group ‘New World Singers’ to Canterbury Baptist Church…I bought my first guitar.

Being just a poor boy from a poor family (I need no sympathy) it was my mum who ordered it from the Kays catalogue, as a birthday present paid in instalments.

When it came, it was a cheaply made classical style guitar with a black painted neck, fashioned in Georgia, USSR, with such a high action that its metal strings shredded the tender tops of my learner’s fingers like cheese-wire. To me it was a gateway into another world.

I struggled to learn from the chord sheets that came with the guitar as I strained to force my painful fingers into hitherto unimagined contortions. Many times I was close to giving in, but somehow I stuck with it.

Breakthrough came with a book, a promise and a companion.

I had been a follower of Jesus since my 10th year. A family from church invited me to a missionary conference (Sudan United Mission) at The Hayes Conference Centre, Swanwick, in Derbyshire. Not only was this my first Christian Conference, it was also my first trip to “The North” on the fairly recently (1959) completed M1. The road was quite deserted as we made our way north through the driving rain, and I remember stopping on a slip-road for lunch!

I also had my first introduction to a motorway service station (I think it was Newport Pagnell), and here, whilst browsing books on a revolving stand I came across the book…”Guitar”, by Dan Morgan (1965). I’ve since discovered that many guitarists owe their initiation into the world of frets and chords to this book, and for a while it became, alongside the Bible, the most read book in my life (well…actually, at times it was probably read more than the other book I mentioned).

Even so, I still struggled. I had been taught that God was interested in the smallest detail of our lives, so I decide that guitar playing probably qualified. One day I prayed one of those ’bargain prayers’…”Father, please help me to learn the guitar and I promise I’ll always use it for you. Amen”. Despite my self-interest, I think the prayer was answered, which probably explains why, even today, I know more Christian songs than popular ones, have never sung in a band that didn’t have some Christian connection (with the exception of the school Folk group at Simon Langton Grammar school in Canterbury) and why, maybe to remind me to be humble, when I left a church in North Wales the leader told me in a farewell speech how much the church would “miss my guitar”. He had nothing to say about how my departure would be mourned!

The third string in my development as a guitarist came when the musicians at a beach mission that, even as a young teenager, I was encourage to help out with (Sunshine Corner, Whitstable), invited me to play along with them.

In particular, George, a Bible-college student from the North East who drove a Mini and played a cool guitar with f-shaped sound holes, became my mentor. For the four weeks of the mission he not only let me ride in his Mini but also gave me 1-on-1 tutoring as he encouraged my guitar playing.

It was also him that introduced me to the recently published (1966) “Youth Praise”, and when I learned the classic 4-chord trick song “Can it be true?” the future beckoned…