Out of the blue

The Psalmist writes of crying to God ‘out of the depths’. I’m sure many of us have been there at times during lockdown.

The job I do at present for the Pastors’ Academy in providing support for church leaders tends to lead me into some pretty depressing situations. I don’t get a balanced view of churches. I’m like a doctor. It’s generally those who are ill and unhealthy who turn up at the surgery.

Recently I found myself once again feeling very low. Everywhere I looked there seemed to be church leaders acting like hard-nosed CEOs rather than loving shepherds, and church members going out of their way to be difficult. There were pastors who had taken a well-earned month off during lockdown, returning to find three or four families had resigned from the church. There were other churches taking in new members to the detriment and discouragement of other churches. There were pastoral issues of adultery, divorce and malicious talk. On top of all this, of course, is the ongoing, overarching discouragement of various abuse scandals in the churches and the unfair witch-hunts that can often follow. The whole horizon looked dark blue. I needed some encouragement. And the Lord knew.

Students

A number of things happened. But one was that an email headed ‘Making contact after 50 years’ (Yes, I am that old) dropped into my inbox via Pastors’ Academy. It was from a man called Simon (I won’t give his full name to save his blushes later). My wife, Ann, and I had known him briefly when we were all students.

Ann had come to Christ through a great but mostly now forgotten Anglican evangelist named David Watson and it was a real pleasure for us to welcome him back to take the University of Sussex mission week of Spring 1971. Ann and I had married, I was beginning a Ph.D. at the university, and we rented a ground-floor flat at 200 Ditchling Road, Brighton.

The mission had been tough going. The Christian Union was small. The students were more interested in Marx than Mark, in sex than being saved. Not many turned up to listen to the gospel. And just a few came back to our flat after the main mission meetings for coffee and an opportunity to ask questions of David Watson. But Simon was one of those and, as we recall, he was only one of two people to make a profession of faith after all the effort put into the mission. At the time it all seemed a bit paltry and something of a failure.

Later

But now there was this email in my inbox. What had happened to Simon during the last 50 years? We had lost touch. We had no idea.

What had happened was that the Holy Spirit had touched him very deeply. He found himself training for the Anglican ministry. He had served as a curate with the father of the present editor of en and then set sail on some 40 years of very fruitful ministry for Christ in a seaside town in the West of England. Out of a forgotten acorn a great oak tree had grown. All our efforts and what seemed like the pitiable results all those years ago had not been the end of the story. The one saved at university had led to many others coming to Christ over the years.

Isn’t it good to recognise that our labour is never in vain? Things which seem pathetic at the time, under God’s gracious hand, bear fruit.