President's diary - November 2024
2nd – 3rd November
Today I drove to Oldham. I’ve had relatively few invitations to the north, and I was pleased to be visiting another part of the country. I had been invited by the church’s pastor who is a former student and who was a great person to have in college and who has been a wonderful encouragement ever since.
He would write to me at the start of every college year expressing appreciation for his time at Bristol and assuring me of his prayers. On the Saturday night he and his wife took me out for a meal, and I stayed over in their spare room.
On the Sunday morning, we went to church, and he showed me round the building. He had invited me to speak about discipleship in the church. I said something about the Great Commission, but the main text was Colossians 3.12–17.
I rewrote a previous message for the occasion and spoke about the clothes that the Apostle Paul expects us to have in our wardrobe and dress in daily, things like compassion, humility, patience and, most of all, love.
4th, 7th – 8th November
The college in Bristol operates in a very close partnership with our Anglican brothers and sisters at Trinity College. Their New Testament tutor is on study leave this term and I’ve been invited back to do some teaching. This week I am leading a course on Galatians.
Here are some of the questions we discussed.
What has made Paul so agitated? What happened after his disagreement with Peter? Why has Paul used the story of Sarah and Hagar in this way? And what relevance does the letter have for today?
The students engaged well, and we explored approaches to these and other questions. It was a treat for me to be back in the classroom and looking in some depth at the Scriptures.
5th November
Today I drove to the Heart of England Baptist Association (HEBA) offices in Birmingham to speak to a gathering of ministers at their theology symposium. The title I’d been given was ‘The Bible in our story, tradition and practice’.
It gave me another opportunity to talk about the centrality of the Scriptures to the way Baptist churches first emerged, and to talk a little about the way Baptists have interpreted the Bible.
The morning sessions seemed to be well-received. In the afternoon, I talked about our current use of the Scriptures and at least one person felt that I was wide of the mark in some of my comments. I’ll have to rethink some of the material.
The experience led me to reflect again on how to evaluate your own reception. I recall going to hear students lead worship and preach and then meeting them a couple of days later to talk it through. They’d often received encouragement from the members of the congregation who’d spoken to them. It was my job to point that sometimes people are just being nice and that there were lots of people in the congregation who hadn’t said anything to them. I had to help them to learn to be self-critical and to figure out ways that they could do better.
Of course, I also have to learn to take my own advice, and to learn from people’s reactions the ways that I might be more effective.
The lovely people at HEBA were very kind and hospitable and I greatly enjoyed my day in the Midlands.
7th November
After teaching in the morning, I met up over lunch with one of the doctoral students that I’m blessed to be involved with. This one is writing about apocalyptic texts and issues of international relations.
As ever, I am learning a great deal if only because I’m having to read lots of books just to keep up with his ideas.
9th – 10th November
About lunchtime on Saturday Becca dropped me off at the local railway station and I caught the train to London. I made my way to the hotel I’ve had booked for months, dragging my smartest clothes and shoes with me because on the Sunday I would be representing Baptists Together at the national remembrance ceremony at the Cenotaph on Whitehall.
On the Saturday evening, I met up with my younger daughter and her husband for a meal. We ate in a tapas restaurant on the Strand. We worked through about a dozen different small plates each offering a distinct and delicious taste. It was lovely to catch up with family and to be reminded that the Spanish have some great ways with food.
On Sunday morning, I got up early and dressed very carefully. At one level I knew that nobody at the event would be in the least interested in me, but on another level, I was keen to treat the service with respect and do a good job of representing our churches.
It was just as well that I allowed lots of time, it took quite a while to get through the crowds and find my way to the allocated waiting area. At one point I was escorted down Whitehall by a harassed civil servant who passed me on to an equally busy police officer. I got there eventually.
I had been told that I might get opportunities to meet some of the politicians but apart from a couple of sentences in passing, this proved tricky. Since the pandemic the different categories of participants have been put in separate waiting areas.
So, instead, I spent time with the representatives of other faith organisations. I suppose I was expecting the major faiths and the main Christian traditions, and assumed I’d be representing one of the smaller faith groups to be invited. But I found myself talking to the representatives of the Bahai faith, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Unitarianism, Mormonism and Spiritualism. People kept telling me that we were all really the same and I wasn’t sure I agreed but it hardly seemed the place for a theological argument.
At about ten minutes to 11am we were all lined up in our predetermined positions so that we could process out of the Foreign Office building onto Whitehall. As you walk out the first thing you notice is the large number of people who are gathered.
Then the silence hits you.
You are in the middle of one of world’s great cities and there’s nothing to hear. They lead you to the white dot in the road that you have been allocated and you join the silence.
I found myself in the second row, immediately behind some representatives of Commonwealth countries who would later step forward to lay wreaths. The silence is eventually broken by the sound of Big Ben and by the firing of a cannon. After the chimes fall away, the silence intensifies until the buglers sound the Last Post. After that the wreaths are laid.
I found the whole experience deeply moving. It was a remembrance ceremony, and these moments of national ritual have a profound significance.
But there was part of me that pondered how a Baptist might find themselves quite so close to power; royal, political and military. We are committed to the separation of church and state and were for many years excluded from active participation in the official life of our country. Yet here I was, invited to represent the Baptist tradition in a moment that is at the heart of national life. I found much to ponder.
The next adventure was the journey home. The train company had decided to cancel every other service to the west. Lots of older people in military uniforms were wandering around Paddington wondering what they should do. The train that should have taken me directly to our local station was not going to run. There were trains to Bristol Parkway but no onward services in the direction I needed.
I caught a train to Temple Meads. As we approached the west country, they announced that the train would go on to Taunton. I checked the online schedules, and it seemed that if the train went quickly, I could change at Taunton and get home a bit quicker.
Once we got past Bristol, it was clear that we weren’t going to make it. I’d have to get a later train back to Highbridge and Burnham. I needn’t have worried. The train I was on terminated at Taunton, turned round, and became the slow train back to London that I’d been hoping to catch. I’m sure that somewhere there’s a spiritual lesson in that experience. My prayer had already been answered but I just didn’t know it.
12th – 14th November
Today is the first day of a five-week course I’m teaching on Romans at Trinity College. And so, I drove to Bristol and taught for two hours. It was great to catch up with a couple of Baptist College students who are taking the module.
When I got home, I put the golf clubs in the car and went to the driving range. The professional who has given me a few lessons has said that he’ll take me out for 9 holes on Thursday and I’d like the experience to be as unembarrasing as possible. I hit a few shots and it could have been worse. Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry, so I visited the range again on Wednesday.
Again, I managed to hit the ball properly a few times, so it should be alright. How wrong can you be? I should have known better. I was keen to show my teacher that I’d learned something from him, but golf is a cruel mistress and had saved my worst performance in years for just this occasion. My shots found lots of bunkers but none of them would open up and swallow me.
14th – 15th November
I’m grateful for the occasional pastoral visit and on Thursday morning, one of the regional ministers popped in for a chat to see how I was doing and on the Friday morning, I met a former student who works at the church up the road for a cup of coffee. It’s lovely to have the opportunity to keep up with some of the people I used to work with.
16th November
Becca and I set off to Bath where we had tickets to see Felicity Kendall in a play called Filumena. When we were younger, people used to say that Becca looked a bit like that actor and so we were looking forward to seeing her on stage.
We misjudged the traffic and the availability of parking and missed the start of the play. I’m not sure we ever recovered. Still, it was nice to be out together.
17th November
An early start for my trip to the Baptist church in Rugby. More adventures in parking, this time because they were setting up lots of fairground rides and stalls in the centre of the town. As I said to the congregation, a church you can step out of straight into a funfair – that’s the dream.
The pastor is someone I’ve known for many years. He and his family moved into the college flat that we vacated when I finished ministerial formation in Oxford. He suggested that I speak about my presidential themes and so I wrote a sermon based on 2 Timothy because the letter suggests that the Apostle Paul, as he faced the end of his life and knew what his priorities had to be, was concerned for Timothy who represented the next generation of church leaders, and for the Scriptures. He even, in a personal moment, asks for ‘the books and the parchments’.
19th November
Today was a lovely day filled with good things. First of all, I taught the second class of the course on Romans. I tried to keep the students’ attention, but I couldn’t compete with the snow that was falling and settling outside. Then I went to the Baptist college to collect some post and had a conversation with my successor who told me a little about everything that’s happening. It was very encouraging.
After that, I drove to the Easton area of the city and visited my elder daughter and our granddaughter. Becca met us there and we had a lovely lunch together. Then it was back to the north of the city to have a coffee with a former colleague from the college and to catch up with her news.
After that, I drove to the sports centre and played a few sets of badminton before going for a drink before the drive home.
20th November
I had planned to play golf in Taunton today with a couple of former students, but we got a message to say that they had closed the course because of the snow.
I’ve agreed to do a little marking for the International Baptist Seminary in Amsterdam and I needed to have a conversation with another marker. His college is in Oakland in California and so we spoke on Zoom. It’s strange to think that in September, when I visited my aunt, I was just up the road from him and now we’re an ocean and a continent apart.
21st November
I spent the day talking with a group of friends about all things Baptist.
22nd November
Becca and I drove down to the Chard area. The snow was still on the ground there. We had a lovely, if slow, walk and enjoyed a delicious lunch before heading home.
24th November
It seems like ages since I attended church in Burnham. I’ve missed it and it was good to be there today. We’ve reached the end of our series on Daniel. We’ve taken one chapter a week for six weeks and, apparently, we’re covering the last six chapters this week. That’s quite an agenda.
Our pastor had asked one of the other ministers in the congregation to preach. She had my sympathy. It reminded me of the time I was in a planning meeting for a series on Mark. We were handing out chapters and when we got to Chapter 13 it was as though everyone else in the room took a step backwards and I’d been volunteered. Anyway, on Sunday, as it turned out, our preacher did a terrific job and gave us a great end to the series.
26th November
Back to Trinity College in Bristol for the next instalment of the Romans course, this time looking at chapters 5 – 8 and pondering the characters in the story; Adam, the Messiah, Sin, Death, the Law, the Spirit and Life.
This evening, I was involved in a Zoom conversation. One of the leaders of the younger people in our church is taking a one-year course organised through our local association. I have agreed to act as his mentor for the next 12 months and tonight I was being briefed about my role. It’ll be interesting to have a one-to-one role with a student again. The programme starts in January and I’m looking forward to it.
29th November
We’re fortunate enough to have a small but lovely cinema in Burnham. The ticket prices are about half what they were in Bristol, so it’s an inexpensive treat. We saw a late afternoon showing of Paddington in Peru. We enjoyed it, if not quite as much as the first two films in the series. I thought the best jokes came at the end with the – spoiler alert – brief Hugh Grant cameo and the visit to London of members of Paddington’s tribe.
We were especially interested in seeing the film because we spent a few years in the Peruvian mountains when we were working with Tearfund. When people found out we were from Britain, the first things they said – we arrived there in 1986 – were Bobby Charlton, Margaret Thatcher, and Benny Hill (nearly always in that order).
I’d kind of anticipated the first two but hadn’t expected Latin Americans to find the third to be endlessly hilarious. After we’d got those three things out of the way, they wanted to talk about the sovereignty of Las Malvinas, so, of the conversational options, I felt safest sticking with Bobby Charlton.
People then often asked us what people in the UK knew about Peru. I would speak about the Incas, the mountains, the jungle, Machu Picchu, and, of course, Paddington Bear. They’d never heard of him and often told me there were no bears in Peru.
Having loved the books as a child (and a grown-up) I, of course, knew different. I imagine the films were released in South America and so it’s possible the Peruvians are now aware of their best-known export.
30th November
Today is my mother’s birthday and the Finamore clan descended on her home in a block of small, semi-sheltered flats in Oxford. My brother, our wives, four granddaughters, three out of four partners, and three great grandchildren made the trip.
We borrowed the garden room in the complex and had pizza and birthday cake and wished mum a very happy birthday. It was nice to catch up with the wider family and meet a couple of recent additions for the first time. Mum enjoyed herself though she had some trouble remembering, when it came to wives, husbands, fiancés, and great grandchildren, who belonged to who.
It didn’t matter. At least for the day all that mattered was that there were four generations of us in one room, and that we were all there for her.
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