Skip to main content

Goodbye Paul

I've spent an emotional afternoon at Central Baptist Church, Chelmsford marking Paul Beasley-Murray's retirement after 43 years in ministry.  For the past 21 years Paul has been senior minister at CBC, and I attended the church for ten of those years, having arrived as a very new Christian.  I was nurtured in the Christian faith at CBC; baptised by Paul; became an intern to test my calling to Christian ministry; served on the staff team as an evangelist; was commended for ministerial training by the church, and supported through three years at theological college; was married by Paul, to a very nice man I had met in the young adults group at CBC; and finally I was ordained by Paul and sent out to begin my own ministry at Leigh Road.

It is quite something to have the opportunity to look back and see where you have come from.  To see so many faces who have meant so much over the years, not least Paul, who has been present at all the significant milestones of the last ten years - and it's been quite a decade.  There can't be many people who have been baptised, married and ordained by Paul - certainly not in such a short space of time!

Leaving my sending church to go out into the big wide world has happened in stages, the first of which was leaving for college.  My first term at Regent's was a bit of a shock to the system; although I was excited about the opportunity to study again, I hadn't quite prepared myself for the assault on my faith that in-depth theological study can bring.  Studying the gospels, as we did that term, forces you to deconstruct very familiar texts in a way which can be quite alarming.  Jesus can start to seem like a historical or literary figure rather than the living Lord.  About four weeks into the term, I attended an ordination service in Bristol at which Paul was preaching.  My then boyfriend and I arrived late halfway through the service, and had to sit in the balcony directly above the stage where Paul's sermon was in full swing.  The reassurance of hearing my pastor preaching the gospel which I had been picking apart in tutorials for several weeks was immensely reassuring.  It was like coming home.

I guess I'm all grown up now.  Thanks, Paul, for your part in that.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Making the best of a bad situation

This morning, instead of going to church, I put this note through all the houses on our street. Despite being an extrovert, I have a tendency toward social anxiety. Despite being an evangelist, I really hate door knocking. As I approached each door, I noticed lots of “no junk mail” stickers and felt briefly worried. One sticker said “no unaddressed mail”. Putting notes through the doors of people I’d never met - even though we live within a few dozen metres of each other - felt risky. Even worse - some people were outside their houses. I actually had to talk to them! “Don’t worry, I won’t come too close,” was my opening gambit. As someone who suffered from OCD as a young adult, fear of contaminating others is quite a familiar sensation. We Brits have the reputation of being standoffish and maybe a bit antisocial, and the virus is not helping in this regard. And yet, I live in the commuter belt; many of us on our street go off to London on trains every morning and come home late
Post a Comment
Read more

Halloween

It's that magical time of year again - that one night when my small neighbours knock on my door asking for sweeties.  This year, I'm properly prepared: I have two pumpkins (I wanted five, but decided to be thrifty), a big tub of sweets and a tube of 100 glow sticks.  The sweets are my concession to popular demand; the glow sticks are an attempt to represent light in darkness (a symbolism which will doubtless be lost on the kids).  I'm seeing the pumpkin as my main opportunity to communicate something of my Christian faith to my neighbours. One year, while I was at theological college, Halloween fell on a Sunday.  The new housing estate church I was assigned to met in a church hall on Sunday afternoons and many of the congregation were unaccompanied children.  I googled 'Christian pumpkin carvings' and guess what - there are a lot of ideas out there, America being a country which is big on Halloween and big on Christianity too.  I decided to carve a simple fish and c
6 comments
Read more

Only connect

Last year on Ash Wednesday I attended an ashing service at St Paul's Cathedral.  The service focused on confessing our sins and asking God's forgiveness.  During the service a berobed priest made the sign of the cross in ash on my forehead.  I thought this was pretty cool and refused my husband's request that I rub it off for the train journey home.  Then we ran into an old work colleague of mine and I felt rather stupid. Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, is all about sin and repentance - 'sackcloth and ashes' and all that.  But I wonder how many people in the UK today identify with the idea that they are sinners in need of forgiveness?  My final year dissertation at theological college focused on the dilemma of how to call to repentance people who do not think they have anything of which to repent.  I certainly didn't think of myself as a sinner when I first started exploring Christianity.  I knew I wasn't perfect, but hey, who is? I have heard sin desc
4 comments
Read more