Becoming a Servant in a Serve-Me World

Today I’m writing about another ‘backlist’ title. (That’s publisher speak for a book which is no longer ‘new’.) It’s great to talk about the new books coming along, but there are lots of real gems which are easy to forget with all the hoopla surrounding the new ones.

Today’s choice is The Outward Focused Life, and it’s about expressing a ‘doing faith’, not simply a ‘believing, static faith’. Let me share a bit of it with you.

“For years I’ve held on to a letter that reminds me of what’s really important. A woman wrote to me:

We live on a busy street. There are lots of kids who ride by our house on their bikes. I am probably overly protective of my children because I don’t want them to get in with the wrong crowd. Perhaps not a very Christlike move on my part, but I feel I need to protect them. There is a little girl who rides around here named Annie. I have had to talk to her before, because she turns our water spigot on until she has made a mudhole of our yard. She is always dirty, and I, ashamedly so, hate to see her coming. [My six-year-old daughter] Becky was outside playing today, and her older sister came inside to tell on her. Becky was playing with Annie. I told my older daughter to ask Becky to come inside for a minute. I asked Becky why she was playing with Annie.

She said, “Mom, I am playing with her because she has no friends. She rides by here every day by herself and never has anybody with her. I thought that I would not like to have to ride my bike alone all day, so I asked her if I could be her friend. She is sitting out on our porch right now waiting for me. Can I go back out and play with her?”

I was dumbfounded. I get so wrapped up in what I am doing and in trying to raise good kids that I forget what God wants us to be doing. I took a Popsicle out to Annie, and she thanked me and smiled the prettiest little smile through that dirty face. Then I thought of that verse about “whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me.”

This letter makes me think about what’s really important in my life. And maybe I should stop asking, “What’s important?” and start asking “Who’s important?” “Who” is always more important than “What.” The question all of us have to ask is, “How important to us are people who don’t yet know Jesus?” There are adults who ride their bikes past the doors of our churches each day and don’t know that Jesus – the friend of sinners – is their friend. They have dirty lives and play in dirty mudholes, and we, the church, have all the Popsicles.

We just need to step off the porch and ask them if they’ll be our friend.

Harvest Thankfulness

“Having received the gift of daily bread from your gentle hand, O Lord and heavenly Father, and been satisfied with it – this gift which you give to us in such abundance, just as you do all your other gifts – we ask you through Christ, your Son, to make the power of the Holy Spirit complete in us. We desire to love you with our whole hearts and bless you with our mouths so that we who receive your gifts do not become proud and arrogant, nor forget your love and sacred commandments. We desire to love you with our whole hearts, not just with our mouths and lips but with our works and deeds and all that is in us. We thank you; we honour, praise, and bless you as our Creator and Sustainer, not just in this life but also in the life everlasting. Amen.”

Last weekend I visited my Dad’s church, where they were celebrating Harvest Festival. Successful harvests have been celebrated for hundreds of years by decorating churches with gifts of food which are then given to people in need. I once attended a wedding which took place during the Harvest Festival weekend. The church windowsills were decorated with onions and potatoes and there were stooks of wheat at the doorway. Unusual decorations for a wedding, but striking and memorable!

On Sunday the church held a lunch after the Festival service, to raise money for the charities Compassion and Operation Agri. Perhaps the way we bring our food offerings to church for Harvest Festival has changed over the years: we see more packets and cans and less bread and home made goods, but it is right that we are still reminded to provide for those in need, and that this is still a fundamental part of our harvest thanksgivings. The Amish have been praying for many years: “We desire to love you … with our works and deeds and all that is in us.” A reminder of the importance of living an active faith.

Journeying Through Loss

“People around us don’t understand grief unless they’ve been through it themselves.”
H. Norman Wright

Kirk Neely’s son Erik died suddenly. On a Tuesday evening he spoke to his son on the phone. Early the following morning his daughter in law called to tell them Erik was on the way to hospital, and asking Kirk and his wife to get there as quickly as they could. Halfway there, they received the call every parent dreads. In his book When Grief Comes Kirk wrote “I had been through valleys of grief before, but this one was deeper, longer, and darker than any other.”

Grief is often referred to as a season, and it seems as though this season has come around again, sliding in alongside autumn and being somehow emphasised by the golden colours of the dying leaves, and the promise of austere weather and short cold days ahead.

Perhaps, since I walked my own valley a few years ago, I am more aware of the grief of others than I would have been before. I think H Norman Wright’s comment is true. When we’ve grieved deeply, we understand better the pain that others are going through.

This time, the grieving is not mine personally, but the loss and pain affecting close friends. One recently lost her father, less than a year after losing her closest friend. Another has lost, only last week, her dearest friend of many years. Maybe it’s my friends’ loss which makes me feel so sad for Emma Egging, the brave and proud wife of Flt Lt Jon Egging who died just last month when his Red Arrow Hawk aircraft crashed. Seeing her speak of her husband on TV on Sunday at the Great North Run, and watching the Red Arrows fly their own tribute overhead brought a lump to my throat.

Grief is a strange thing. It is not linear, and doesn’t follow a prescribed pattern. The ‘big things’ can be faced and got through. The small things trip you up, sometimes months or years later. We know these things, but we don’t really understand them until we’ve been there. And when we find our friends there, the challenge is how to support and care for them while they walk through their own dark valleys.

I chat to my bereaved friends, but I also like to send them things. Perhaps something small which I know they will like, and often a book. Kirk Neely’s book is not the latest book out, but it is a very personal walk through the grieving process. It’s written in a way which makes reading it easy. Like grief itself this is not a linear book. You don’t have to start at the beginning and work to the end. You can dip in and out. Kirk says he tried to write it “remembering how difficult it is to read when your heart is broken and your eyes are blurred with tears”. It is a book of comfort, of encouragement, and of hope. In short, highly recommended.

Bill Coleman and a Quilt

Pray for a good harvest but continue to hoe.
Amish Proverb

Bill Coleman ran his own photography studio for thirty years, before a friend took him to visit a remote Amish village.

That journey changed his life.

At the age of fifty, he closed his studio and began photographing the Amish. Now eighty-five, he continues to photograph the same village as often as he can. His work is acclaimed and exhibited around the world. Yet his interaction with the Amish people and their values and ways has altered his own values in ways he believes are for the better.

You can read his story in Amish Values for Your Family: What We Can Learn from the Simple Life. And yes, an Amish quilt does get a mention!

In this engaging book you can learn from the Amish about prioritising what is truly important, simplifying decision making, safeguarding time together, letting go and slowing down.

You can read a sample chapter here.

By the way, if you enjoy Christmas novellas, as I do, you are likely to spot a link between this story and the forthcoming A Lancaster County Christmas, due for UK release in October.

A review of this is coming soon, but if you would like a sneaky peek, click on the link for a sample chapter. The sample chapter doesn't give away the connection, so you'll have to read the whole book to find out what it is!


If you'd like to see some of Bill Coleman's photos (they're well worth a look), you can find them here.

Amish Values for Your Family
Price: £7.99
ISBN: 9780800719968
Published by: Revell (Distributed by Lion Hudson)
Available through any good bookshop or online

Coming Soon from Baker Books!

What if preaching isn't just one part of worship? What if preaching is worship?

Michael Quicke explores the role of preaching in the church in his new book Preaching as Worship.

At the start of the book Michael says "in recent years, I have been propelled into a fresh understanding of how worship includes everything. Whenever definitions of worship limit and shrink it down to small scale stuff, great damage is done to God's cosmic purposes. We need to see not only how preaching belongs within worship but also how the whole of church life and mission is part of worship too. My convictions about worship have grown in dimension so much that they have radically deepened my life and ministry and reordered its goal. That's why I hope you will take the time to read this book."

Even though this book was written in the US much of it came out of Michael’s UK background and experience. Michael says “I really do see it as the outcome of my own journey with preaching and worship which all began in England, and some of my illustrations come straight out of the UK.”

Sample chapter.

Preaching as Worship is out in the UK in October.


Bringing the Bible to Life.

The Baker Illustrated Bible Handbook is colourful, informative and easy to read and use. It is a big book - over 1100 pages long, and is full of photos, illustrations, maps and charts as well as articles by leading scholars. Split into three sections, it covers:

God's Story (and Your Story), which includes sections on how the Bible is organized, and the history between the Old and New Testaments.

The Spirit and the Scribes (How the Bible Came to Be), which includes sections on the production and shaping of the Old Testament Canon, the Dead Sea scrolls, and Bible translations.

Digging Deeper into the Bible, which considers elements usch as how to read, interpret, and apply the Bible; Use of the Old Testament in the New Testament and responding to contemporary challenges to the Gospels.

There is a vast amount more than just those sections outlined above!







The Baker Illustrated Bible Handbook is published in the UK in October.

Then the Lord shut him in. Genesis 7:16

Consider these three lessons. First, when the Lord shut Noah and his family up in the ark, they were totally secure and thereby become an illustration for us of the believer’s perfect security in Jesus Christ. The rains would come. The floods would rage. But nothing would touch these who had been sealed in the ark by Jehovah. The Lord does not place the safety of his people in others’ hands. He himself throws the lock. It is said of him, “What he opens no one can shut, and what he shuts no one can open” (Rev. 3:7). The shutting in of Noah was the equivalent of our being sealed with the Holy Spirit (Eph.4:30). Like him, we are not only saved; we are secure as well.

Second, there is a lesson of God’s great grace. The last thing we are told in this story before the waters actually begin to come is that “the Lord shut him in.” Presumably this was done at the last possible moment. Noah had been preaching God’s righteousness, man’s sin, and the coming of the great flood for 120 years, but no one had believed him. They were refusing to believe now. But still the door to the ark remained open, and any who wanted to could have gone inside. What great grace! What magnificent forbearance on the part of God! Since Noah had believed and had gone in, no one who stood without could say that the possibility of belief was closed to him. “Whoever willed” could come.

So also today. All who will may come. Many do not, but none of these can say that the possibility of repentance from sin and turning to Christ are beyond them.

Finally, there is a lesson in that there is an end to grace. Grace is great but it is not unending. If it is spurned, the day of reckoning eventually comes. For one final week the door stood open. But the week ended, the door was closed, and the flood came. The same God who opens doors is himself the door (John 10:7, 9). He also closes doors and refuses to open them — when the time for grace is gone.

For you it is not yet past, whoever you may be. This is still the day of grace,and although it will end, it has not ended yet. Won’t you come while there is still time? God said to Noah, “Come . . . into the ark” (Gen. 7:1 KJV). At the end of the Bible we read, “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come!’ And let him who hears say, ‘Come!’ Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life” (Rev. 22:17).

Taken from: Come to the Waters, publishing in the UK in October.

Sample chapter.

August Bank Holiday = Greenbelt!

Over 20,000 people attend the Greenbelt festival at Cheltenham every year. A huge programme offers music, talks, debate, performing arts, and worship. Are you you going this year? If so, are you going feeling exhausted with all the negative news you hear? Negatives which are often even worse within the church than outside it. If this is you, then Upside may be just the book for you. Full of surprising good news about the state of our world, it's a refreshing antidote to some of the negatives we so often hear.

If the whole 'religion thing' is just making you tired, and part of the reason you're going to Greenbelt is to refresh your spiritual energies, then God Without Religion might be the one to read.

You will be able to find both books in the festival bookshop, together with The Great Emergence by Phillis Tickle who will be speaking during the festival.