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Bardsey, this peaceful island called Ynys Enlli
in the native Welsh tongue, is an ancient holy island that nestles
in the swell of the Irish Sea, a few miles off the northwest tip
of Wales. Her associations with religion must surely pre-date
the coming of Christianity, the name Bardsey (the "Bards'
Island") being given to her by ‘visiting’ Viking
raiders.
When the Christians arrived and took over the island, the venerable
St Cadfan and his companions built a monastery there in AD 546,
fallen into ruins a long time ago. Over the centuries since then
Bardsey became a kind of Iona in Wales, a holy burial place for
holy men and Royalty alike.
The island has been a magnet to me; I have no focused idea why
that should be, it just is. She has drawn me, every year I was
able to get there, to rest in her arms, to sit on her rocky edges
while the sea rolls in and washes the beaches around my feet,
to let the salt laden and gentle breeze bite deep into my skin
and to listen to the call of the pregnant and new-mother seals
and to talk with God in the privacy of one of his places.
One of his places? Of course the whole of creation is one of his
places but this one, the blessed island in the Irish Sea, is somewhere
where modern saints can sit and listen and hear remarkably well.
It was one of those ‘thin’ atmospheric mornings on
the island when I stumbled across one of the basic keys to the
world of miraculous kingdom Christianity. At that moment it was
going to be something very exciting and very new to me.
Of course I had by then crossed paths with hundreds of faithful
Christians who confessed a miraculous faith experience but, on
closer examination, so much of what they had witnessed was simply
not fulfilling the apparent New Testament promise of a dynamic
kingdom that changed lives in droves whenever it came near.
Things happen here and there, in ones and twos, but rarely in
New Testament proportions.
Sure enough there were many fellow disciples along the way who
had episodes to relate of people receiving miraculous healing,
or other life-changing experiences, but they only had one or two
stories at best. Many of the episodes being related were from
other people’s prayer experiences rather than their own.
The uncomfortable truth I had taken to Bardsey that year, deep
in the secret recesses of my private mind, was that we ordinary
people in the church are simply not experiencing miracles any
more in New Testament proportions and have probably not done so
for many centuries.
Much of the God designed system for partnering with Christians
in redeeming creation after the fall and for giving glory to the
Father through the manifestations of Jesus’ continuing work
seems to have dropped right down into first gear. Our healing
and our evangelism seemed to me to be very short of breath! There
was an enormous amount of hard work going on in and around church
life in these areas but that was my problem. I was having difficulty
with the words ‘hard work’. My reading of the new
Testament was suggesting that these things were, in those days,
a lot easier and far more common.
I confess that God is not in the habit of turning up in my brain
and depositing mind-bending Churchillian answers to the world’s
problems, but he does, from time to time, give me hints and nudges
that are paths of speculation and investigation. And, one morning
on Bardsey, a big one was on the way.
I was leaning on my elbows on the old dry stone wall outside the
front door of one of the island’s old farmhouses, hot coffee
mug in hand, when it arrived. My feet were planted firmly on a
gravel path which ran across the front of the house and away to
my right towards the old farm buildings with its high walled farmyard
full of glorious bird song that had served for many years as a
hermitage. Away to my left the path led to the swinging cottage
garden gate and through to the garden with its high flowering
and bee infested hedges and its well trodden path across the lawn
to the Ty-back, the ‘little house’ at the bottom of
the garden.
The sea breeze had calmed itself as the sun came up and the fresh
morning air was filled with the comforting sound of buzzing bees
and bird calls, punctuated by the intermittent bleating of sheep.
Beyond the chest high cottage wall on which I was leaning, topped
with flat stones that were warming in the morning sunshine,
the ground sloped gently upwards away from me, across the field
to the old gate and beyond the rough and rutted tractor track
that serves as the island’s main road, The ground rose sharply
to form the gorse and bracken covered mountain that forms most
of the eastern shoreline and reaches up to scrape the scurrying
clouds in the sky above its shoulders.
Slightly over to the right, as I raised my eyes and ears to the
mountain, the morning sun warmed my face and gladdend my heart
with the knowledge that God was in his heaven and that all was
well.
Most of the island sounds may be unfamiliar to the suburban ear
and, on this particular day, two skylarks were talking to each
other across the field in front of me. At least I supposed that
was what they were up to and I was privileged to be sandwiched
between them and listening to their conversation.
I leaned forward in the morning sunshine, forearms resting on
the flat stones that levelled the top of the wall, sipped my coffee
and listened a while to them.
It took ten minutes or so for me to quite realise it but I slowly
became aware that one was calling and the other repeating his
call. The originator was somewhere ahead of me, up across the
rugged path and in the bracken and bushes of the lower slopes
of the mountain. The copier was very close, sitting in the hedge
along the Ty-back path that ran away through the garden gate to
my left.
Each birds’ stock of notes amounted to only five or six
individual distinct sounds, these were being sung in various order
with varying gaps in between. Like ringing the changes of church
bells, the connotations seemed endless in the timeless morning
sunshine and on the gently salt laden sea breeze that cooled my
face in the warmth of the sun. After every slightly differing
call instigated by my new-found friend ahead of me at the foot
of the mountain, there followed a pause for what I guessed was
the collecting of bird thoughts. Then the Sky-lark in the hedge
along the path to my left would repeat the call, note for note,
exactly as it had been sung a quarter of a mile away to my front.
Then the call would change again, same notes in a different order,
and be faultlessly copied.
Twenty minutes passed and they were still calling to each other,
the same mountain edge bird originating each different call and
the same garden bird repeating it note for note in the clear still
air and eventually, slowly at first as I was so engrossed in the
musical conversation of the occasion, I thought I was beginning
to see what God could be saying.
His intention, being expressed through those birds a-calling,
was hinting that we should become an echo. As the bird beside
me echoed exactly the bird in front of me across the rising slope
of the hay field, so we should return to being echoes of Christ’s
actual words and works. Might the miraculous life be restored
in the church if we all set out to copy Christ’s kingdom
ministry?
At first I shrugged off the thought of being a Jesus echo. It
sounded almost as if it was going to be the same old tired simplistic
Sunday school message we had been laying on mainland church people
for as long as the island had been subject to Christian use. It
seemed an insignificant saying to me as many more learned people
had said it more often to more people in more pews and from higher
pulpits than I could ever do.
But the more I listened to the larks the more sense it made. In
fact, this message had a simple substance to it that felt very
different and needed understanding at a more profound level altogether.
It was not the same old message that we should be Christ like
in the community by being nice to people, by helping them across
busy roads and offering money to drunks and down—and—outs
in the street. This was a different and deeper thought entirely.
No, this did not seem like some vague encouragement to be nice
to other people, valuable though that is. This was a calling to
copy, not to copy what the modern church is, or is not, teaching
us about healing ministry in all its variety and different possibilities
but to copy Jesus himself in his ministry.
But wasn’t I doing that anyway? Surely I had been taught
properly over the years and had built up quite a body of experience.
I could see only one thing wrong with the way we do healing ministry;
it doesn’t actually work very well. In fact it’s pretty
hard work! We may have a lot of different techniques and varied
theological understandings but we do not see, compared to the
disciples’ New Testament experiences, enough miracles. And
if the church truly was pastorally concerned about the state of
society today then we were not seeing anything approaching enough
miracles! I, like everyone else around me, could recognise this
position easily enough but, if we were not in complete denial
about it, we were taking it as a spur to continue the search for
yet more complexities, to drive on in our gaining of the knowledge
of kingdom dynamics from where we were.
The healing ministry has come a long way since Jesus; was the
church now teaching itself by listening to itself and not to the
Scriptures? Was it developing by drawing in advances in secular
skills and practices rather than through a deeper reverence for
the truth of the original New Testament ways?
But the Sky larks went on calling and their message to me that
morning was insistent, unsteadying, if not troubling. ‘Go
back! Start again and be an echo of Christ’s ministry. Imitate
Jesus!’
Well, that would be quite an adventure! It felt like a call to
disrobe, to fling off all that self-help books and helpful friends
had taught, to strip away the outer garments that innumerable
lecturers and healing theologians had taught, and start again.
I was gaining a real sense that I would have to discard the old
and comparatively ineffective clothes of modern healing ministry
and return to Christ’s teaching before we could see miraculous
Christianity at work again in New Testament proportions.
Such thoughts can be heavy hammer blows on one’s humility
and it takes a great deal of courage to change one’s shoes
and step out into the world anew.
May the Lord bless you to pick this up
Mike Endicott
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