Youth for Christ

All posts tagged Youth for Christ

Day one of forty…Cost

Posted by David Ward on 10/02/2016
Posted in: Bible, Lent, Personal thoughts. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Ash Wednesday 2016

Ash Wednesday

[51] As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven, Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem….[57] As they were walking along the road, a man said to him, “I will follow you wherever you go.”[58] Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head.”[59] He said to another man, “Follow me.” But he replied, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.”[60] Jesus said to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”[61] Still another said, “I will follow you, Lord; but first let me go back and say goodbye to my family.”[62] Jesus replied, “No one who puts a hand to the plough and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.”

Luke 9:51; 57-62 NIV

“Family life is holy ground”

Northumbria Community

I am challenged to think that sometimes we followers of Jesus get a bit hung up on the sanctity of family life to the point of almost making it an object of our worship. It is possible to read the gospels with an awareness that Jesus sometimes consider family to be more of a hindrance than a help, which I find quite shocking, if a practical possibility.

I’ve always believe that if Jesus is at the centre of my life, then other relationships will fall into place, and family life will be holy ground, in the sense that it’s the environment in which my faith in Jesus is worked out. So what do we make of Jesus harsh words to the people who expressed a desire to follow Jesus.

A number of years ago the Youth for Christ  band, Alphabet, that I worked with, visited Zimbabwe where we were able to sing and speak to people about faith in Jesus.

Shortly before our visit, a well-known evangelist had visited Bulawayo and reported mass conversions to Jesus. When we arrived the local pastors told us that there was very little evidence that these new converts had ever found their way into the local Christian community.

The first time I spoke about my faith in Jesus, I think it was in a Bulawayo factory, at the end I gave people the opportunity to respond by standing if they wanted to know more or to become a follower of Jesus. I was stunned when every single person rose to their feet. This did not indicate a lack of faith on my part…I’m from the UK where people keep their bottoms firmly on their seats rather than drawing attention to themselves unnecessarily!

Afterwards a local black pastor who’d been with us took me on one side. Rather than encouraging me in my effective evangelistic ministry he delivered an encouraging education on local culture.

“You have to understand,” he explained, “that because you are a visitor people want to please you. If you ask people to stand, they will, out of respect for you, and not necessarily in response to the content of what you’ve said. They’re standing for you, and not for Jesus.”

So, from that time on, whenever I had opportunity to speak, I spent at least as much time spelling out the cost of following Jesus as I did talking about why it was a good thing!

As Jesus “resolutely set out for Jerusalem” he must have had an inkling of what sort of reception awaited him. His followers, still refreshingly naïve, seemed to have little clue about what was happening. In that context his determination to make people face up to the consequences of following seems less cruel.

This was not a jolly jaunt to Jerusalem…it was a date with a destiny that might well include death.

cost

 

 

 

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.

The Accidental Pilgrim…

Posted by David Ward on 09/08/2012
Posted in: Pilgrimage, Theology. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Accidental Pilgrim book coverWhen I worked for Youth for Christ I worked with a singer called Maggi Dawn on a couple of occasions. Although I didn’t get to know her well I remember her positively as a good person to work with. She has subsequently gone down the path of Anglican ordination (so many of my friends and former colleagues have gone down that route – despite persuasions from some of these friends I haven’t yet followed ) and has made a name for herself  in theological circles.

I recently noticed that Maggi has written a book called “The Accidental Pilgrim”. The title intrigued, and I’m always keen to get any new angle on this life we call pilgrimage, so I ordered it up and have started to read it.

So far it charts the changes in Maggi as she discovers that pilgrim places are not just about facts and first-hand knowledge, or even about having a ‘religious experience’, but about changing our perspectives and even transforming us. Along the way she describes some well-known pilgrim destinations and recounts the history of pilgrimage…it makes for a great cocktail!

Quotable:

“And, as in most religious gatherings, there was a pair of irritatingly over-keen evangelists who seemed to think that their God-given role on this trip was to correct everyone else’s point of view, interspersing every conversation with somewhat Pharisaical interjections about the ‘true meaning’ of the Bible.” p7

“Our scholarly adventure followed in the footsteps of worshippers who seemed to care little about the authenticity of the place (Jerusalem); their interest as they clutched prayer beads or sang with arms raised to heaven, was in an encounter with their God.” p15

“Looking back from the perspective of Christian history, it might appear that the crowds of people turned up especially to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem, but it’s thought that on the first Palm Sunday Jesus and his disciples joined an existing pilgrimage into Jerusalem, which every year marked the hope of the long-awaited Messiah. It was only as the procession moved down the hill that Jesus gradually became the centre of attention” p19

“…my view of pilgrimage was a scattered collection of images like random pieces from a jigsaw with most of the bits missing and no picture on the box to help put them together. Was pilgrimage really about the journey or the destination? Did it matter whether the destination had any historical verification, or was it entirely a matter of tradition, or even superstition? Were pilgrims supposed to suffer penances, or – like Chaucer’s pilgrims or the pilgrims on the tourist coach – was pilgrimage equally valid made in comfort?” p25

“The difference between a tourist and a pilgrim is that, while a tourist travels to get away from it all before going back to reality, a pilgrim is transformed by the experience and returns home changed.” p48

I’m looking forward to the next chapter…”Pushchair Plgrim”.