24 people signed up for Alpha on Sunday morning at The Kings Arms Church, Bedford after I spoke on “But you can’t trust the Bible!” at their two morning meetings. As you may know, I have the privilege of speaking at many churches, and I would say that the Kings Arms are two or three steps further down the road than a “typical” church in terms of how very much the people there seem to enjoy the sung worship time, and the church experience more generally! The “atmosphere” – whatever that is – is much more like what you would expect it to be, if we REALLY believed the words that we were singing on the screen. Some of the claims we make in these songs are so massive that you’d expect a hugely celebratory passionate vibe to be coming from the participants. At the Kings Arms that is what is happening and it is REAL The sung worship time at the Kings Arms is marked by a very high level of engagement right across the building at both services. This is particularly striking at the 9.30am service, which in my travels, can otherwise be a rather sleepy affair. The main thing I have learned over the years is that what you get on Sundays is a reflection of what’s happening the rest of the week. So I am very impressed by the devotion of the Kings Arms congregation. In fact in terms of the impact of Sunday upon me I’d go even further and say that in my book, Aftershock some of the characters visit a church for the first time and they describe their visit in detail and I realised on Sunday that The Kings Arms worship time is what I was visualising as an ideal in my novel.
As you can imagine I was keen to ask Pastor Simon Holley what he felt was the key to the spiritual growth that is so evident in the people he leads. There is such a positive feel that it is an inevitable question. After commending his team, I put it to him that the way that he has led the church into taking steps/ acts of courage in terms of going out onto the streets and praying for the sick, meant that all over the building there were Christians who had experienced personal breakthroughs when taking risks in evangelism. They had grown through exercising the muscle of faith. Christians who had broken through personal fear barriers and seen God demonstrate his reality in both public and personal evangelism. When you are depending upon God for a supernatural breakthrough when offering to pray for your sick next door neighbour it does wonders for your devotional life! Simon’s response, was to point out that this was secondary to the most important point, which is the barriers they have seen come down in terms of Christians truly knowing and experiencing the Father heart of God for themselves as a foundation. This is a subject that Kings Arms hold conferences on and minister into. Simon said that they’d realised they were sending people out to do evangelism who had not yet truly experienced walls coming down in their own lives in terms of knowing God’s love, dealing with issues of rejection etc in the lives of Kings Arms people first. Of course there is so much more to it than that, but I couldn’t move on without at least commending the marvellous work that is going on in Bedford through The Kings Arms.
Buzzing after the morning, it was great to have lunch at Michael and Ali Green’s house.
In the evening, I spoke at the Kings Arms “later” event where anyone could ask me any question that was a barrier to faith. Here are some of the ones that I tried to answer: “At the Council of Nicea in AD325, how did they decide which books to leave in the Bible and which ones to leave out?” “What about different translations?’ “How do you know the Old Testament is reliable and not just stories?” “How do you rationalise instances where the Bible is contradicted by Science, e.g the age of the earth?” “What happened to the dinosaurs?” “How does the New Testament do in terms of authenticity when compared to the Qur’an?” “What about genocide in the Old Testament and the slaughter of the Canaanites?” “Isn’t it the case that the Noah flood story was actually borrowed from other ancient cultures and adopted into the Bible?”
All in all it was a great day. I left feeling really encouraged. If this can happen in Bedford then why not all over our country in every town and city.