My friend Arnold Bell died yesterday. Just three weeks ago, I stayed with him and his wife Mary overnight in their home in Sheffield, and preached in his church the following day. Either at breakfast or maybe at dinner on the Saturday night, he told me about how when they moved into their new home in Sheffield in the late 1990s, how the new roof was in fact seriously faulty. Arnold was totally entitled to get others to pay for the huge repair because the fact the roof needed replacing, should have been spotted on the survey. At this point, someone phoned Arnold and told him: “I feel that God is saying that if you don’t claim on the roof and if you pay for the repair yourself that God will bless you and also that there will be an evangelistic impact upon your neighbours.” Well it would have been so easy for Arnold to dismiss this. After all he was perfectly entitled to what was his by rights. The survey should have highlighted such an obvious and massive problem as a roof that needs immediately replacing. But Arnold followed the prophetic advice given in the phone call, and paid for the new roof himself, and then, through unexpected means, inherited a much larger sum of money, several times larger than the sum he’d spent on the roof, and he told me a moving story of the impact upon an incredulous neighbour, who was amazed to hear the counter-cultural story of someone not enforcing their own rights, but trusting God to provide money. Arnold said this was a crucial lesson for the church. He told me about the massive challenges he and Mary faced on arriving in Sheffield and how believing God with money in this way, proved instructive to the whole journey the church went on to buy and renovate the enormous Synagogue in Wilson Street where they meet today. Arnold also confessed that his hobby was photographing buses. And that one of his greatest joys was photographing a bus, only to find on closer inspection that he had actually photographed in before when it was owned by a previous bus company and painted a different colour! He told me quirky and bizarre story of how he got the job of leading a church in Odiham in Hampshire where he lived for nearly 30 years. About going off in a camper van with Barney Coombes, when Barney was smuggling bibles into Communist Eastern Europe. For those unfamiliar with the story of Newfrontiers, Arnold Bell was one of a group of pioneers, who in the early 1970s went back to the New Testament and tried to re-imagine and re-think what a church should look like, based upon the New Testament. Arnold was one of a number of key leaders who gained biblical convictions about church, and then trusted God as they worked out the restoration of church life to a New Testament pattern. This of course brought Arnold into conflict with those who resisted all the changes that followed, but there was much joy along the way. What struck me most about Arnold is that above all else he was a man of honour. He honoured God and God honoured him. The joy in all of this is that although Arnold is gone his legacy is everywhere. Most obviously if you go along to City Church, Sheffield any Sunday morning, you’ll find a large group of people there who have been shaped by God through Arnold, and then again all over the UK with people like myself who were taught the bible and taught theology by him. Praying today for Mary & Jonathan Bell and Esther Beale.