Defending Life, Celebrating Life, and Rebuilding the City of God

An Update on Recent Activities and a Hope for the Future

Well, quite a lot has happened in the last week…

Last weekend I was speaking at Cedarwood Festival alongside Andy Bannister, at the invitation of my friend David Stretton-Downes. As I mentioned on social media, he told me upon my arrival on Day One that he’d already received six emails from anonymous concerned folk telling him he ought not have “extremists” like me at his conference. I wondered if at least some of these may have been Methodists, who have always shown an especially devoted concern for my disreputation.

It was the Methodists, of course, who once swept through this nation with a “bad” reputation of their own for being “extremists” too. That’s how they got their name, and that’s why they were so effective in and beyond this nation, because they heard God’s Word and put it into practice. Sadly, in our time, the institution of Methodism in Britain found a more convenient location among the houses on the sand. Many of its people followed suit, often without realising how far they had drifted.

Nowadays, you’re a Christian extremist simply for believing the Bible without being embarrassed by it. If that be the case, long live the extremists!

This tied into our theme for the live Pod of the Gaps podcast which Andy and I were recording with David at the festival: “Can We Make Britain Christian Again?” I won’t go into the content of that discussion too much here as we haven’t yet released it, but safe to say, it was interesting. Stay tuned.

Prior to our main live podcast on the hay bales, Andy and I did manage to squeeze in a couple of other episodes based on our respective seminar talks on evangelism, one of which is already available here:

Our children, of course, had an absolute blast at the conference. The younger ones were going through Ephesians 6 in the kids sessions, making different bits of the armour each day. Elijah (4) was basically inseparable from his helmet of salvation and breastplate of righteousness for the remainder of the festival…