Author: David Petts

My Story  Talk 17 Ministry in Basingstoke 1968-78  Part 2

Welcome to Talk 17 in our series where I’m reflecting on God’s goodness to me throughout my life. Last time I was talking about the evangelistic missions we organised in Basingstoke, but these tended largely to attract adults, and the children and young people needed to be reached too. So that’s our subject for today.

Children’s Work

At first, the only children we were reaching were those who came to our Sunday School, which was held at 10am before the 11am Communion Service. One of those children was Rosie Wilcox (née Wright), who later became Jonathan’s Sunday School teacher. Fifty years later, I still exchange Christmas cards every year with Rosie and her husband Paul.

However, we soon began to reach other children in what was then a more unusual way. To the best of my knowledge, we were the first AoG church in Britain to organise a pre-school playgroup. I had felt for some time that most church buildings were not being used to their full potential. I talked with Bill Mitchell, the church elder, who himself was a businessman, and he wholeheartedly agreed. The church building was standing empty in the daytime for six days a week. And we were on the edge of a new council estate where most of the houses were occupied by young families.

So, we checked out the legal requirements, and discovered that our facilities would accommodate up to 40 children, provided that we had one adult for every eight children present. We obviously needed to invest in the right equipment, and Eileen knew exactly what to get. In fact, with her administrative skills, she was the ideal person to take charge of the whole thing, and before Debbie and Sarah were old enough to go to school, they could be with her while she was at playgroup.

We started by opening for three mornings a week, but the demand for places was such that before long we were open for five. And we had adequate workers to take the full complement of forty, so for five mornings a week, as well as supervising and organising the children in their play, they were able to tell them about Jesus. That was, of course, the most important thing, but another welcome benefit was that, from the small charge we made for each child, we were receiving enough income to pay the mortgage on the building!

And an unexpected result of running that playgroup was the request I received to exorcise a ‘ghost’ from one of the nearby houses! It happened like this. It was 12 o’clock and the playgroup session was ending. I happened to be present having a chat with Bill Mitchell, when one of the mums came in and said,

Is one of you the vicar?

And although I don’t usually go by that title, I said, Yes, I am.

She then asked if I could help her because, she said, there was a ghost in her house. Could I get rid of it? To which, knowing that in Christ we have authority over the forces of darkness, I replied,

            Yes, of course.

            How much will it cost? she said.

            Nothing, I replied.

            Wow! That’s good, she said, the spiritualist wanted a fiver.

She gave me her address and, that evening, I went with another brother to visit her. We told her that her greatest security would be to let Jesus into her life and led her in a prayer for salvation.

Of course, the so-called ‘ghost’ was actually a demon, because there is no biblical evidence for the existence of what people call ghosts, but the woman did not know that. She said that it usually appeared at the top of the stairs. So I went up after it and, although I could see nothing unusual, I did feel a distinct drop in temperature. So I commanded the thing, whatever it was, to leave in the name of Jesus. At once the woman, who was standing in the hall with the other brother, suddenly shrieked.

There, didn’t you see it? It went right past you!

So, although I couldn’t see it, I chased it down the stairs, opened the front door, and told it to get out and never come back. The following Sunday she was in church to say thank you and told me that it had gone.

So running a playgroup certainly put us in contact with the people in ways we did not expect, but in Britain’s fastest growing town the playgroup and the Sunday School we ran in our church building were by no means sufficient to spread the good news among the children, and we soon decided to launch a second Sunday School in a school on the Oakridge estate. This was only possible thanks to the commitment of our teachers who, having taught in the morning in Cranbourne Lane, were willing to give up their Sunday afternoon to teach the same lessons to the children in Oakridge.

Another children’s work was started by Hilda Gibbons, an elderly widow who opened her home every week to some thirty children on the Winklebury estate. And we reached hundreds of children through the holiday clubs we organised. These lasted for a week or so towards the end of the long summer holidays. They were led mainly by Anthea and William Kay assisted by other church workers, SPF students and other Christian teachers all of whom we accommodated throughout their stay.

Notable examples were David Littlewood, later to become an AoG pastor, and Phyllis Parrish (née Sowter) who was baptised in the Spirit while she was with us and later became a student at Mattersey and a missionary to Bangaladesh.

Youth Work

Some of the older children who came to the holiday clubs were also attracted to our Friday night Youth Meeting. This was our main means of reaching young people on a regular basis and, for most of the time we were at Basingstoke, was led by me. Our church was situated right next to Cranbourne Lane Comprehensive School, where Debbie and Sarah became pupils and I became a parent governor. We also attracted young people from other parts of the town where some of our members were teachers.

The church minibus, faithfully driven by William Kay, was vitally important for this work, although it wasn’t worth much financially. At the time we had no suitable garage for it, so it was parked each night in the road at the back of our house. One night, in the early hours of the morning, we were woken up by the sound of our dog barking and then I realised that someone was banging heavily on our back door. As I went to the window I became quickly aware of another noise – the constant sound of a car horn. It was our minibus, and the neighbour banging on the back door had come to ask us to silence it.

I quickly threw on some clothes and hurried outside to see what I could do. To my surprise the driver’s door of the minibus was wide open. I wondered why, as I was sure I had locked it the night before. But my first task was to silence the horn, so I quickly disconnected the battery. Now the horn was silent I could go back to bed, hoping that not too many neighbours had been disturbed.

Next morning, as I was apologising for the noise in the night, another neighbour told us they had seen what had happened. Two men had broken into our minibus, but the moment they opened the door the horn had suddenly started sounding. This apparently had caused the men to panic, and our neighbour had seen them running away. Their attempt to steal our minibus had been thwarted!

Of course, it may be possible to think of a rational explanation for all this, but it’s important to mention that the horn on the minibus would not normally sound unless the ignition was switched on, and there was no form of burglar alarm fitted to the minibus. But whether there’s a rational explanation or not, as far as I was concerned God had protected our vehicle. He works in natural as well as in supernatural ways, and we will probably never know why that horn sounded just at the right moment – except that God knew that we needed that minibus!

In addition to the weekly youth meeting, we also organised at least two week-long missions, one where Warwick Shenton was the evangelist, and another led by Paul and Janice Finn who were the national youth evangelists for Assemblies of God. We were able to get them into several of the secondary schools in the town where they spoke in school assemblies. This way we knew that the vast majority of teenagers in Basingstoke had the opportunity to hear the gospel.

But it was at the regular weekly youth meeting and its associated activities that close personal relationships could be formed with the young people. We organised walks in the countryside, barbecues, and games evenings where we had great opportunities to get to know them better – and for them to get to know us better too. And nowhere was this truer than at our annual youth camp.

New Forest Pentecostal Youth Camp

While we were at Colchester I had organised a youth camp on the island of Mersea and, thanks to Eileen’s culinary skills and to the things I had learned as a teenager in the Boys’ Brigade, this proved highly successful. So towards the beginning of our time in Basingstoke I made enquiries as to what sites might be available for us to do something similar near us, and I discovered that the Hampshire Education Committee had one near Brockenhurst in the New Forest. It was set in beautiful countryside, was within a short driving distance from the coast, and had the advantage of flush toilets and showers!

All the equipment – tents, marquees, tables, benches, cooking utensils etc. – was provided on site, which was managed by a very helpful warden, a Welshman called Eddie Davies. So we decided to give it a go and, as an initial experiment, took a group of about 15 young people for a few days in the school summer holidays. It went so well that we decided to return the following year for a full week and to invite other AoG churches to participate. I put an advert in Redemption Tidings and over the years the numbers increased to some 150 young people each week.

Eileen and I planned the weekly menu which, although it was somewhat restricted by the cooking equipment provided at the site, nevertheless comprised three hot meals a day, prepared by teams of dedicated workers. The only exception to this was that when we all went out for the day – to the Isle of Wight, for example – everyone prepared their own sandwich lunch straight after breakfast with the food we provided for them.

Much of the food we bought came in large cans obtained from the cash and carry store in Basingstoke and transported down to Brockenhurst in the minibus in advance. The rest we bought on a daily basis from the International store in Brockenhurst who, incidentally, issued vast quantities of Green Shield stamps, which, when you had saved enough of them, you could trade in for a variety of items displayed in the Green Shield catalogue. I seem to remember that Eileen and I got our coffee percolator that way!

The daily programme involved breakfast, during which each of the tents was inspected for tidiness and hygiene, followed by a short devotional involving a song, a prayer, and a Bible reading. The daytime was taken up with recreational activities including at least one day trip to either Hengistbury Head or the Isle of Wight, afternoon trips to Milford-on-Sea, or a treasure hunt in the New Forest. As a family we all enjoyed going down to Brockenhurst a week or so in advance to prepare for this, when we would compose a poem giving clues to the route.

But the most important part of the camp programme was without question the meeting we held in the marquee each evening. These involved worship, prayer, testimonies, and preaching followed by an appeal. Every year we saw dozens of young people respond, either for salvation or for a renewed commitment to Christ. And many were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues. I still receive testimonies from people, now in their sixties, of how they met with God in those meetings.

After each meeting there was a break when we opened our tuck shop for half an hour. This was followed by a time of singing in the marquee, or, once a week, around a camp fire. The only exception to this was the long hot summer of 1976 when we were at camp for three weeks and when everywhere was so dry that it was illegal to light fires anywhere in the New Forest. Those weeks spent at camp during the seventies were wonderful times of blessing for all involved and form some of the happiest memories of my life.

But such blessings do not come by accident. They come as the result of prayer, commitment, and teamwork. None of it would have been possible without the dedicated help of Basingstoke church members like Hilda Gibbons, and visiting pastors and their wives who over several years brought their young people to camp and shared in the work and ministry. Of special note among these were Mike and Beryl Godward from Corringham, Brian and Audrey Quar from Crossacres, Manchester, and Colin Blackman from Tonbridge Wells, all of whom became good personal friends.

But these were not the only relationships that were formed or developed at camp. We really got to know our own young people much better too. Some of them came down early to help unload cans of food from the minibus and to assist in the erection of the tents, and I learned that forming relationships with young people, letting them know that you love them rather than just preaching at them, was the way to gain their loyalty and respect. This is essential if we want them to follow our example in following Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1).

One example of this was Linda. She, along with her twin sister, Sue, had become regular attenders at our Friday night youth meeting. On one occasion we were having a sausage-sizzle in the church grounds. Linda was standing next to me looking into the fire when she told me she was thinking of leaving us. So, putting my arm round her shoulder, I said to her, Oh don’t leave us Linda. We all love you. We’d really miss you. Linda didn’t leave us, and her relationship with Eileen and me deepened when she came to babysit for us from time to time. I recently discovered a letter she had written to Eileen in 1974 in which she said,

Entering your home is so different… there’s such a lovely atmosphere within it…  as soon as I entered the home I felt more confident in myself. Thanks for talking to me, so far since I’ve spoken to you I’ve felt up on top of the world… I want to say a big thank you, but I don’t think I could ever write or say it the way I feel to a friend like you… Thank you for praying for me.

Later, when her leaving college coincided with my becoming principal at Mattersey, Linda became my secretary, only leaving when she married a student from Switzerland, where she now lives.

But in 2012 she made a surprise visit to England when she came to our Golden Wedding anniversary. Of course, Linda was an exceptional case, but her story does illustrate the value of making time to develop relationships with children and young people wherever possible.

My Story   Talk 16   Ministry in Basingstoke (1968-78) Part 1

Welcome to Talk 16 in our series where I’m reflecting on God’s goodness throughout my life. Today I’m going to begin by telling you how in January 1968 we came to move from Colchester to Basingstoke.

During 1967, as part of my SPF travels, I was preaching in Oxford when an old friend from the Elim church asked to see me. He was hoping that an Assemblies of God church might be planted there and wanted to find out if I would be interested in coming to take over its leadership. I told him that I would pray about it but that my initial reaction was that I did not feel any sense of leading in that direction.

Some weeks later, I had an unexpected phone call from my friend Michael Collins who, as I have already mentioned, was a fellow student with me at Oxford and part of the original SPF group there. He told me that he had heard from Oxford that I might be thinking of leaving Colchester and that, if that were the case, he wanted to sound out whether I might be interested in coming to Basingstoke.

He explained that they were looking for a pastor and would like to invite me to come and preach one Sunday. The church had not had a pastor for three years and numbers had dwindled to only 12 people. Although they were not able to pay me much, the potential was great, as they had a new building on a large piece of land and Basingstoke had a rapidly expanding population.

This was an exciting challenge, but numbers at Colchester were now around 80 and I was relatively well paid. Did I really want to take on another small church and take a substantial drop in income? And did we really want to leave behind the many friends we had made at Colchester? So I told him that I did not think it likely that the Lord would move me from Colchester but that if they wanted me to preach for one Sunday I would be happy to do so.

As far as moving there permanently was concerned, I determined in my heart that I would only consider it if I received a unanimous invitation from the members of the church. We would also need them to provide housing for us, as the salary they were likely to offer would be far too low for us to be able to get a mortgage.

These matters were discussed when I went to preach there, and the financial position was clarified. The church’s income was £14 a week. £8 of this was taken up with mortgage repayments on the new church building and, if they needed to provide us with accommodation, the remaining £6 would be taken up with that. So anything they could offer me would be an act of faith on their part – and required not a little faith on my part too!

In the circumstances, I thought it highly unlikely that they would be able to meet the criteria I had set, but 100% of the members did vote to invite me, and after a couple of months I heard that they had been able to purchase a house for us. Taking this to be the will of the Lord, we informed the friends at Colchester of our decision, sold our bungalow, and moved to Basingstoke in January 1968.

The move to Basingstoke went smoothly and the house the church provided, a typical three-bedroomed semi-detached, had the advantage of central heating, a luxury we had not been used to. With the profit we made on the sale of our bungalow in Colchester, we were able to have new fitted carpets throughout, and to buy furniture for the lounge as well. We also bought a small second-hand car, having left the minibus in Colchester.

We were welcomed warmly by the church members, and the building was packed for my Induction Service with people from other churches who had come to show their support. The speaker was Billy Richards, the AoG pastor at Slough, in his capacity as Chairman of the West London District Council. His cousin, Bill Mitchell, who was an elder in the church, was at the piano, and we were inspired by his God-given talent and grateful for his commitment to play at every meeting. Other key people were the deacons, Janet Collins (Church Secretary), John Nicholson (Treasurer), David Moncaster (Sunday School Superintendent), and Michael Collins.

Another person who was present at the Induction Service and to become an asset to the church was William Kay, who had written to me asking advice as to how he could serve the Lord after he had graduated from Oxford. As he had come to Christ while he was at university and had had no real experience of life in a local church, I told him that this should be his first priority and made a few suggestions as to where he might go, adding as a PS that I was moving to Basingstoke and that he might like to come and help with the work there. Which he did, and within a few months a young schoolteacher, Anthea Bell, was to join our church and eventually become William’s wife and a great asset to the church.

At the beginning of our time there, Eileen’s primary role, of course, was looking after Debbie and Sarah, who were still under school age, and then Jonathan who was born in October 1970. However, she was soon to find an outlet for her ministry when we started our church pre-school playgroup, but more of that later.

Niggling doubts

So overall there was much to encourage us during our first few months at Basingstoke, but we were missing Colchester and both Eileen and I were having doubts as to whether we had done the right thing in moving. Part of the reason for this was that when I had given up my teaching job we’d had real confirmation about it through the gifts of the Spirit, but we’d had no such confirmation about moving to Basingstoke. Could we have really missed the will of God on such an important matter?

The answer came in a posthumously published article in Redemption Tidings written by Donald Gee. He was talking about how a church should choose a pastor (and, by implication, how a pastor should choose a church). He said that such matters should be determined by sound judgment and sanctified common sense, and not by the operation of spiritual gifts. And this came from the pen of a world-renowned Pentecostal leader and author of Concerning Spiritual Gifts.

This was just the reassurance I needed, and I later came to realise that God’s will is not difficult. By definition, God wants his will, and if we really want it, he will ensure that we get it! We will prove his good and perfect and acceptable will if our lives are truly consecrated to his service (Romans 12:1-2).

Church growth

And, of course, one major aspect of God’s will is that he is not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). In the years we were there, Basingstoke was the fastest growing town in England and there was a vast harvest field on our doorstep waiting to be reaped. We sought to do this in three main ways – personal evangelism, evangelistic missions, and children’s and youth work.

Personal evangelism

In those days the primary way of seeking to win others for Jesus was to invite people to church where they would hear the gospel. This was something we did every Sunday night in our Gospel Service, even if very often the only people there were already Christians. However, even if today it’s easy to criticise this style of evangelism, it did have the advantage of regularly reminding Christians of what the gospel is and the urgency of proclaiming it.

But clearly the Gospel Service approach to evangelism would not be enough. Neither would a leaflet inviting people to our meetings, unless of course it contained a clear gospel message. Jesus did not command his disciples to go into all the world and invite people to gospel meetings. He commanded them, and he commands us, to go into all the world and preach. God’s people needed to be trained how to do so.

While I was at Colchester I had completed a course on personal evangelism produced by Billy Richards and I had found this very helpful. So I decided that in our Wednesday night Bible Studies I would teach the people at Basingstoke the principles I had learned from this. We then embarked on a programme of door-to-door work, conducting a ‘religious opinion survey’, and found that most people were willing to share their views with us and for us to share the gospel with them. Admittedly, not many came to church as a result, but at least they had heard the gospel.  

Evangelistic Missions

But our biggest attempt at reaching people with the gospel was in 1970 when we organised a fortnight’s evangelistic and healing mission conducted by evangelist Melvin Banks. I invited Melvin for two reasons. First, he was clearly gifted as an evangelist, and I had come to understand that my own gift was predominantly that of a teacher. And secondly, because remarkable results were being reported of hundreds being saved and healed through Melvin’s ministry, and I strongly believe that healing is one of the signs that God gives us to confirm the message of the gospel.

In preparation for his coming, we spent months training the people for this big event, which was to be held in the Basingstoke Town Hall, not in our church, and got them ready for an intensive follow-up programme of personal visitation to the homes of those who made a decision for Christ. We printed thousands of leaflets which were designed by Melvin and which majored strongly on some of the many miracles he had seen in his ministry.

Not surprisingly, on the very first night the Town Hall was packed. Melvin did not preach about healing. He preached salvation. And to my amazement, when he made the gospel appeal, 57 people raised their hand. And then he prayed for the sick.  And miracles happened. It was the same every night throughout the fortnight, and by the end over 600 people had signed decision cards.

I thought we were experiencing a real revival! But sadly, when our team of trained follow-up workers visited their homes, it became apparent that the vast majority had not really understood what they were doing. They had come to the meetings because they wanted to be healed and that was why they had raised their hands, even though, to be fair to the evangelist, the message he preached was not about healing, but salvation.

Out of the 600 who had raised their hands, only 12 people were added to our church. Of course, we thanked God for the 12, and we had the satisfaction of knowing that the others had at least heard the gospel, but the sense of disappointment among our people was palpable. And I came to the conclusion that at least part of the problem was the advertising.

People with a longstanding physical ailment will understandably try anything to relieve their suffering, and that’s what they have in mind throughout the meeting, even while the evangelist is preaching. They are prepared to do anything he tells them to, so when he tells them to raise their hand, they do, but it’s a mistake to assume that that means they are saved. And as I thought more about it I realised that Jesus and the apostles did not advertise their healings. Their healings were the advertising.

So, somewhat disillusioned by this style of evangelism, it was six years before I decided to invite another evangelist for a series of meetings. I eventually asked my old pastor, Alfred Webb – who was really an evangelist rather than a pastor – if he would come and do a week’s teaching on personal evangelism followed by a week of meetings where he would preach the gospel. And this time I encouraged the people to pray for an outstanding miracle of healing that would take place before the evangelist came.

And those prayers were answered in a rather dramatic way the Sunday after Easter. It was the evening service, and I was preaching about Thomas. He was the disciple who had been absent when Jesus, three days after he was crucified, appeared to his disciples on Easter Sunday. When the other disciples told Thomas that Jesus was alive, he simply refused to believe it. It was impossible!

But a week later Jesus appeared to him too and showed him the wounds in his hands and feet. I remember saying something to the effect that the same Jesus whom Thomas had been able to see and touch was present with us right now even though we could not see him.

After the sermon, as we sang a closing song, a middle-aged woman walked – I should say hobbled – to the front of the church. This was a complete surprise to me as she had never been to our church before and I had not invited people to come forward for prayer, as we sometimes do. Neither had I mentioned healing.

So I went to her and asked:

Can I help you?

She responded by saying:

If Jesus is present as you say he is can he heal me now?

Immediately I knew that this was the miracle we had been praying for.

He can and he does! I said. Be healed in the name of Jesus!

And she RAN back down the aisle, instantaneously and completely healed. I found out later that her name was Ruby. She and her husband, John, both became Christians and members of our church.

And when we produced the leaflets that would inform people about the visit of Alfred Webb, we told Ruby’s story and used it to point out that we all have a greater need than the healing of our bodies. What really matters is the healing of our souls, the forgiveness of our sins, which is available to all who will come to Jesus.

While Alfred Webb was with us about 20 people made decisions for Christ and about 12 of them were added to the church – a far higher percentage than the 12 out of 600 people who had signed decisions cards in the Melvin Banks meetings.

My Story Talk 15 Ministry at Colchester 1962-68 Part 3

Welcome to Talk 15 in our series where I am reflecting on God’s goodness to me throughout my life. Today is the final talk about our ministry in Colchester between 1962 and 1968. These were the first few years of our married life and so far I have shared with you about the birth of our first two children, our housing, employment, holidays and transport.

We have talked about the growth of the church and the reasons for it, testified to an outstanding miracle, explained how I got to know more about Assemblies of God, and how God called me to give up my teaching job and go into full-time ministry.

Today I’ll be sharing first how this led me into a wider ministry, and concluding with two important lessons I felt God was beginning to teach me.

A wider ministry – the Students’ Pentecostal Fellowship

If I had thought initially that God’s purpose in leading me into full-time ministry was just so that I could give more time to the local church, I was soon to learn otherwise. It certainly did that, but I soon began to receive invitations to preach in churches at weekend conventions, and, more significantly, to speak in Coleford at a National Day School Teachers’ Conference on the relevance of the baptism in the Holy Spirit in day school teaching today.

It was there I met members of the AoG Home Missions Council and the National Youth Council who, if I remember correctly, had jointly organised the conference. The invitation came, no doubt, not only because I was a pastor who had until recently been a schoolteacher, but also because of my ministry in praying for people to receive the baptism and my role in the Students’ Pentecostal Fellowship.

I have already mentioned how, while I was at Oxford, I was asked to share my testimony at the AoG National Youth Rally held in the Birmingham Town Hall and to contribute an article in Redemption Tidings entitled Pentecost in Oxford University. So I was by no means unknown in the wider fellowship, and it was probably not surprising that, when Richard Bolt resigned as Travelling Secretary of the SPF, I should be asked to take over his role of visiting colleges and universities, preaching and praying for students to be filled with the Spirit, which of course would not have been possible if I had remained in school teaching.

Universities where I conducted meetings on those early SPF travels included Oxford, Cambridge, Leicester, Loughborough, Nottingham, Durham, and Newcastle. Later, after I had left Colchester, I also preached in the University of Louvain (Leuven) in Belgium, and in 1972 in the majority of universities in the state of Illinois.

The purpose of all these meetings was to tell people about the baptism in the Spirit, explain why it was biblical, and to pray for them to receive as I laid hands on them at the close of the gathering. Among the many who received were the chaplain of Queen’s College, Cambridge, and William Kay a student at Trinity College, Oxford, who had come to Christ at a Billy Graham meeting in London.

Valentine Cunningham, a student at Keble College, and the son of an AoG pastor, invited William to a meeting he had organised where I was to preach on the baptism in the Spirit. After he graduated he became a member of my church in Basingstoke, a close friend, a lecturer at Mattersey Hall Bible College, and a university professor who has contributed much to Pentecostal education around the world.

Val Cunningham went on to become Professor of English at Oxford and was a great help to me when I wrote Be Filled with the Spirit, a booklet published by the SPF, which proved to be the springboard for my ministry as an author.

Other former SPF members who became professors were John Miles and Michael Collins. John, after spending some years as a missionary in Congo became Professor of French at Wheaton, and Michael, after serving as SPF General Secretary, became Professor of Engineering at City University, London.

He was succeeded as SPF General Secretary by Andrew Parfitt, who after spending years in school teaching, became an AoG minister, as did Jeff Clarke who received the baptism under my ministry while he was a student at Oxford, and David Littlewood who received while was a student at Essex.

It is clear from all this that during the course of my lifetime Pentecostals have moved on from being suspicious of higher education to embracing it and playing an active role within it. This will become even clearer when we consider in a later talk the educational developments in our Bible Colleges.

Lessons I learnt at Colchester

Of course, I myself had never been to Bible College. And although I had received excellent teaching from my father and from Leslie Moxham, my pastor at Elm Park Baptist, I had received no formal training for ministry, and back then there was no provision in Assemblies of God for supervision from a more experienced minister. So I was very much learning on the job and was conscious of my need for the guidance, help, and the enabling of the Holy Spirit.

But my experience at Colchester taught me many lessons. The most significant of these was learning to trust God for our needs after I had relinquished my secular employment, which I have already mentioned. But there were two other areas the importance of which I began to understand more clearly. These were:

o   the nature of the ministry God had given me

o   the importance of a balanced theology of healing. 

The nature of the ministry God had given me

In my teens I had been greatly impressed by the ministry of Billy Graham. I had seen thousands of people walk forward in response to his appeals for salvation. Surely this kind of evangelism must be the answer and, when I felt the call to the ministry at the age of 16, I soon began to have dreams of becoming an evangelist.

Later, after I was baptised in the Spirit, I came to see the importance of healing in evangelism and, as I have mentioned previously, was greatly influenced by Richard Bolt who was seeing remarkable healings in his evangelistic crusades.  And at that time the American Pentecostal evangelist T. L. Osborn had made his books on healing available to students free of charge and I had read them avidly.

So I now wanted to be a healing evangelist, a desire which was evident in the two evangelistic and healing missions I conducted at Colchester. And that was why, although I shared with others the responsibility of preaching and teaching on Sunday mornings and midweek Bible Studies, I always did the preaching at the Sunday evening Gospel Service.

But when Harold Womersley, veteran missionary of the Congo Evangelisitc Mission visited us on itinerary, he asked me – purely out of interest, I think – about what I was teaching at our Bible Study meetings. And when I told him that, when it was my turn, I just gave whatever word the Lord had put on my heart, he graciously suggested that as the pastor it was my responsibility the feed the flock by regular and systematic teaching of the truths of God’s word.

This, I think, would have been at about the time that I had given up my school teaching job, and so, taking his words to heart, I set about planning various series of weekly Bible studies, and I discovered that I really enjoyed it and, to my surprise, so did those who came to hear me. It was gradually dawning on me that my primary ministry was not to be evangelism – though I have not been totally unsuccessful in that area – but teaching.

Of course, I had no idea then how that teaching gift would eventually be expressed not only in churches, but also as a Bible College principal and as a writer. But that brings me to another closely related lesson I began to learn at Colchester, the importance of a biblically balanced doctrine of healing.

The importance of a balanced theology of healing

As I mentioned at the beginning of this series, ever since my father told me of the healing of my aunt who had been deaf and dumb from birth, I have always believed that God still works miracles of healing today. I grew up with the belief that everyone could be healed if only they had enough faith and that the lack of miracles today was entirely due to lack of faith.

This understanding was confirmed by the teaching of Richard Bolt and the books of T.L.Osborn and was directly related to the doctrine that Jesus died not only for our sins, but for our sicknesses too. We can claim our healing in just the same way as we can claim forgiveness of sins, and all because Jesus died for us. I embraced this teaching wholeheartedly, and that is what I preached.

But my experience as a pastor in Colchester didn’t always seem to confirm this doctrine. It was great when we saw people healed, but what could I say to those who were not? Did I really have to tell them that the reason they were not healed was lack of faith, or that there must be some unconfessed sin in their life? And whereas this might apply in some cases, it surely was not true of all?

I simply could not believe, for example, that when Jack Joliffe was diagnosed with a cancer that first disfigured him and eventually destroyed him, it happened because of lack of faith or some secret sin. I knew him too well. He was a godly man, full of faith, and an elder of our church. It’s all too easy for evangelists to preach these doctrines and then move on, while pastors are left with the care of Christians who have not been healed and have been wounded by the teaching that if they are sick it is somehow their fault.

But it is not my intention in this talk to repeat what I have already said at length elsewhere. My rejection of this view is comprehensively explained in my Ph.D. thesis, Healing and the Atonement, where I argue that, although there is a sense in which healing may rightly be understood to be in the atonement, it is not true to say that Jesus died for our sicknesses in exactly they same way that he died for our sins. I have also explained this in my book Just a Taste of Heaven – a biblical and balanced approach to God’s healing power, which is available from my website www.davidpetts.org.

I simply mention it here because it was at Colchester that I began to question what I had previously believed about healing. Of course, we mustn’t build our doctrine on our experience, but if our experience doesn’t tally with our doctrine it’s always good to consider whether we’ve understood the scriptures correctly.

So I was learning important lessons at Colchester which were to stand me in good stead for the next ten years when we would be pastoring the assembly in Basingstoke. Life is a continuing process of learning and sometimes unlearning, and Basingstoke was no exception. Next time I’ll begin by telling you how we came to move there.

My Story  Talk 14 Ministry in Colchester 1962-68 Part 2

Welcome to Talk 14 in our series where I am reflecting on God’s goodness to me throughout my life. Last time we began to talk about the years we spent in Colchester and I shared with you how the church grew during our time there and some of the reasons why.

I finished by saying that I felt the Lord was showing us that the key to growth was to follow the supernatural leading of the Holy Spirit. Miracles happen as he determines and I was certainly not expecting what happened one Saturday evening.

I had gone down to the church at about nine in the evening to attend to a window that would not open. As it was still fairly light, I did not at first turn the lights on. After a few minutes, however, I realised that I needed more light, so I switched them on. I mention this apparently trivial fact because, as it happens, the timing was perfect. Within half a minute someone was knocking at the church door. He later told me that he would not have stopped if he had not seen the light come on just as he approached the church .

The man was in his thirties, well over six feet tall. He stood in the doorway, with tears in his eyes. I recognised him because, although he did not come to church , his grandmother had attended regularly until she died about six months earlier. I had met Billy  at the funeral and had remembered his name.

Come in Billy, I said. What’s the matter?

Then he told me his story. He had gone to work as usual on Friday morning and had worked later than usual doing some overtime. When he arrived home late that evening, he called out to his wife, but Ingrid did not reply. As he could not imagine where she might be, he searched the house looking for her. He found her in the bedroom, on the bed, unconscious, an empty bottle of sleeping tablets  beside her.

Ingrid was rushed into hospital, but they were by no means confident that they would be able to resuscitate her. On Saturday there was no improvement. She was in a coma . By this time Billy  was frantic. He was pacing up and down at home, when suddenly he noticed a photo of his grandmother on the piano. If only she had been still alive! She would have prayed ! So Billy tried to pray , but he just didn’t know what to say. So he jumped on his motorbike and headed for our church . As he approached it, he thought that no one was there and was about to drive past when suddenly the lights came on!

I said to him:

Billy, I’ll tell you why you can’t pray . The Bible says that God’s ear is not deaf so that he cannot hear, but it’s the things we’ve done wrong that have created a barrier between us and God.

I asked him if he had ever asked Jesus  to be his Saviour and to forgive him for the wrong things he’d done, and he said, No. When I asked him if he would like to, he said, Yes, and together we prayed  and asked Jesus to come into his life.

Then I prayed for Ingrid and, as I did so, my prayer turned into a command:

In the name of Jesus, I rebuke this coma and command her to come out of it!

This seemed a strange thing to say, as Ingrid was two miles away in the Essex County Hospital, and even if she had not been in a coma, she would not have been able to hear me at that distance! By then it was half past nine. I told Billy  that Ingrid would be all right, and that he could go home – but as soon as he had gone I found myself doubting.

What will I say to him if his wife dies?

When Billy got home, he thought he would not be able to sleep so he sat down in an armchair. He told us later that at that moment he saw a bright light  and felt a sensation of warmth flow through his body from the top of his head to the soles of his feet. The next thing he knew, it was 9 o’clock on Sunday morning. He rushed into hospital to see how his wife was and was told that she had come out of her coma .

Please, he said, can you tell me exactly when it was?

The nurse consulted the notes and replied:

Yes, it was at exactly half past nine last night.

Billy was able to take her home that afternoon. She too became a Christian and they both became members of our church .

This was by far the greatest miracle we saw while we were at Colchester, but the growth of our church during the time we were there was not primarily due to miracles or our evangelistic and healing missions. It was due, as I have said, to the Lord’s strategy in placing me in a school where I could freely teach the children about Jesus, to his giving me at the same time key people to help start a youth meeting, and to the commitment of people who were prepared to exchange their car for a minibus.

And as the congregation grew due to the influx of young people, adults were attracted to join us – some from other churches, others who had just moved into the area, and others who were baptised in the Spirit through my ministry in the early days of what came to be known as the Charismatic Renewal.

Getting to know Assemblies of God

For the first twenty years of my life I attended a Baptist church and had never even heard of Assemblies of God. Church attendance during the three years I was at Oxford involved going to the Elim church in term time and the AoG in Dagenham during vacations. So, when I accepted the pastorate of the AoG church in Colchester, I had had relatively little experience of AoG, and I am grateful that during our years at Colchester I was able to get to know more of its ministers and how the fellowship functioned at a national level.

I have already mentioned some of the ministers who came to preach at our annual conventions, but we were also blessed by visits from those who came to us on itinerary to tell us of the work they were doing for the Lord, to inspire our faith, and to encourage our support for their particular area of ministry.

These included missionaries like Roy Leeming pioneering a church in Belgium, Colin Blackman representing the Lilian Trasher orphanages in Egypt, Harold Womersley from the Congo Evangelistic Mission, and David Newington from Lifeline to Africa.

We also had visits from Michael Jarvis and Keith Monument. Michael was the AoG National Youth Secretary and Keith the Home Missions Secretary. I was impressed by the passion of these men to win people for Jesus and both were eventually to become good friends for many years. I recently had the privilege of paying a tribute at Keith’s funeral service. Keith was a few weeks short of his 99^th birthday when he died and had travelled over a million miles in Britain during his ministry for Home Missions.

But apart from the visits of such wonderful people, I also got to know AoG better by attending its Annual General Conference and the quarterly meetings of the Essex District Council. It was through the DC meetings that I learned that, if I wanted to become recognised as an AoG minister, I must first apply for Probationary Status. This would last for two years and then I could apply for Full Status. So in 1964, having already been the pastor at Colchester for two years, I applied for Probationary Status.

I’m so glad that the system has since been radically improved and that those who apply for status must now undergo a period as Ministers-in-Training, but back then my eligibility was assessed simply by two ministers coming to hear me preach, after which the only supervision I received was one of them saying, Go on giving them the good Word of God, brother.

After that, I was left to my own devices for two years until in 1966 I was granted Full Status on the basis that my ministry was bearing fruit and was ordained at General Conference held in Clacton in May of that year. And it was during that conference that God clearly spoke to me and told me to give up my teaching job and trust him to provide for our needs.

The call to full-time ministry

When I felt the Lord calling me to the ministry at the age of 16, I naturally assumed that it would be my full-time occupation. And that was certainly the desire of my heart. But when we had started at Colchester the church was so small that they could not possibly pay me an adequate salary and that was why I was school teaching. And even though, by 1966, the church had grown considerably, the weekly offerings amounted to only £11 a week and I needed at least £18 a week to cover all our expenses.

So when, at a Home Missions rally on the opening night of the Assemblies of God conference, pastor Eddie Durham began his sermon by throwing down a motorcycle gauntlet and challenging young men to give their lives full-time to the work of the ministry, I initially reacted by saying to God,

That’s all very well, Lord. But you know that I would love to be full-time, but that simply is not possible at the moment.

But I knew that with God all things are possible, and so I added,

But I’m willing to step out in faith if you will only make it clear that now is the time for me to do so. And if I am to hand in my notice to the school, I will need to know by the end of this conference.

I said this because my contract required that I hand in my notice by the end of May if I were not going to return to school in September. I went back to the conference meetings night after night – I could not be present during the daytime because I was teaching – and all I can say is that in one way or another the Lord spoke to me in every meeting confirming that I should give up my teaching job and trust him to meet our needs.

Of course, I shared all this with Eileen who had not been able to attend the meetings because she was at home looking after the girls, and she readily agreed that I should do whatever I felt the Lord was telling me. We told no one else about this, and when what I felt the Lord was saying was confirmed through spiritual gifts in church the following Sunday morning, I made up my mind that I would ask to see the head master the very next day.

But how do you tell a man who professes to be an atheist that God has spoken to you? Well, you just tell him! And actually he was quite understanding. He just asked if I could consider delaying it for another term so that he could find a replacement. I think I told him, out of courtesy, that I would think about it, but in my heart I felt sure that it would not be necessary. And, sure enough, a few days later he came to me and said that quite unexpectedly he had already found a replacement for September.

When they heard the news that I was leaving, colleagues at work made comments like, David, you must have great faith. To which I replied, Well, it’s not so much a matter of faith as of obedience. I just know it’s what I have to do. And that’s what I told the church the following Sunday morning. I made it clear that I was not looking to the church to meet our needs, but I was trusting the Lord. Some said that they thought I should have consulted them before making the decision, but I replied by explaining that I had not wanted to be influenced by man, but only by what God himself was saying.

Shortly after that, the church held a meeting and discussed what they should do in the circumstances. The outcome was that they decided that they wanted to trust the Lord with me and that from then on they would pay me 75% of whatever came in the offering and they would meet the ongoing needs of the church from the remaining 25%. Of course, Eileen and I were very encouraged by this even though, judging by the level of offerings at the time, what they would give us would fall far short of what we needed.

However, almost immediately, the regular offerings doubled as the people rose to the challenge, and by the time we left Colchester I was receiving a more than adequate salary. Admittedly, for the first year our faith was being tested, but God is faithful and throughout that time we never went without a meal, even though sometimes the best we could do was beans on toast!

Of course, we were careful with our money. We made sure that all the bills were paid and then spent whatever was left on food! Hadn’t Jesus said that we should not be anxious about what we were to eat or drink? Our Father in Heaven would supply our need. And he did, even if for a while we had to cut out luxuries like biscuits and if the girls had to drink water rather than orange squash! 

And thanks largely to Eileen’s positive attitude, they never complained. They grew up to understand that, however hard up we may feel, in this country we enjoy a higher standard of living than 99% of the rest of the world’s population. I am so grateful that financial prosperity has never been high on the agenda of any of our children, and God has blessed them for it. But learning from experience that God was able to meet our needs was by no means the only benefit of giving up my teaching job. It opened the door to a much wider ministry.

My Story  Talk 13 Ministry at Colchester (1962-68) Part 1

Our time at Colchester saw the arrival of our first two children, Deborah in 1964 and Sarah, fifteen months later in 1965. Apart from the birth of the girls, the most significant aspects of our time in Colchester were the growth of the church, my ministry beyond the local church, and the lessons the experience taught me.  In this talk I’ll be dealing mainly with the growth of the church, but first a word about practical things like employment, housing, holidays, and transport.

Employment, housing, holidays, and transport

Before we were married, Eileen had been working in the Dagenham education office, and on moving to Colchester she found an excellent job in the education office there, which was within walking distance of our new home. She was soon promoted to a highly responsible administrative position which she held until shortly before Debbie was born.

As for me, although the church was contributing £5 a week towards the rent of our bungalow, it was essential that, for the time being at least, I find full-time secular employment. For the first year, the nearest RE (Religious Education) teaching post available was in Braintree which necessitated a thirty-mile round trip every day.

However, a year later a post became available in Colchester at the Alderman Blaxill Secondary School, a little over a mile from our church and a similar distance from our home. In those days the RE syllabus was based almost entirely on the Bible, so lesson preparation was not difficult, and I became very much aware that teaching 300 children every week was an important part of my ministry. I will say more later about how the Lord remarkably blessed that work, but how in 1966 the Lord called me to give up the teaching job and give myself full-time to the work of the church.

The rent for the bungalow we were living in was about £28 a month, which sounds ridiculously low by today’s prices, but it didn’t seem so then bearing in mind that my monthly salary as a teacher was only £60!  However, we soon discovered that some new houses were being built nearer to our church and that as a schoolteacher I could get a 100% mortgage to buy one. The monthly repayments would be just £18, £10 less than we were already paying in rent.

The only problem was that the builders required a £20 deposit to secure the plot. Eileen had £20 saved up to buy a hoover, which we desperately needed, and we were wondering what to do, when my mother, not knowing anything about our plans to buy a new property, phoned to say that she was buying a new hoover and asked if we would we like her old one, which was in perfectly good condition. We saw this as a clear sign that the Lord was prompting us to make the move, and we paid the £20 deposit and moved into our new home in August, 1963.

My parents also moved in 1963. They had been living in Hornchurch since before I was born, and now I was married they decided to move to a new bungalow in Eastwood, not far from Southend-on-Sea.

So when the children came along we were grateful for our holidays to be visits to our parents who were equally pleased to have an opportunity to spend time with their grandchildren. Eileen’s parents were still living in Hornchurch, and it was always good to see them, but my parents’ home in Eastwood, with its proximity to the sea and the beautiful view of open countryside to the rear of the property was especially inviting. We usually travelled there on a Monday and returned on the Saturday so as not to leave the church unattended on Sundays.

But that brings me to the subject of transport. During the course of my ministry, I have owned or had the use of some fifty different vehicles, ranging from my first car, a Ford Prefect, which I bought during my final term at Oxford, to my recently acquired nine-year-old Mercedes E-Class saloon. The Ford Prefect broke down in the cold winter of 1963 when the snow lay on the ground throughout January, February and most of March.

I was on my way to school in Braintree when it happened, and I quickly decided that I needed something more reliable. That was when we bought our fourth Lambretta scooter, reliable because it was new, but extremely uncomfortable and at times difficult to control in that freezing weather. So it wasn’t long before I was back in a car again.

In the summer I borrowed an old Bradbury van from the father of some of the children coming to our meetings. He said we could have it for the day to take them to the seaside. Unfortunately, it broke down on the way home and I was left with about a dozen kids on the roadside. As I was wondering and praying what to do, a man came by in a Humber Hawk and asked if he could help. It was a large car and somehow he bundled all the kids on to the back seat and, with me beside him in the front, kindly drove us all back home.

But that gave me an idea. Maybe I should get a Humber and use it for children’s work! I looked in the local paper and saw an ad for a Humber Super Snipe, even larger than the Hawk. It was over ten years old, but I had read somewhere that if you’re buying a second-hand car it might be wise to get a big one. It might cost a bit more in fuel, but the engine was more likely to be reliable! Which has been my excuse for buying big cars ever since!

So I bought it for £80 and discovered that it did 11 to the gallon in town and, if you were lucky, 19 on a run! But it did the job, and I remember on one occasion squeezing eighteen kids into it to get them to Sunday School! It was only a short distance, and I realise now how potentially dangerous that was. But in those days ‘risk assessment’ had not been invented and there was no requirement to wear a seatbelt. In fact, there were no seatbelts. Piling people into the back of a van or lorry was quite common, but of course there was far less traffic on the roads back then. And if it did enter our head that something might be risky, we just trusted the Lord to take care of us!

But it soon became obvious that we needed something more suited to the task, and I traded in my Humber for a 12-seater minibus. And before long we were running four minibuses to bring people to the meetings as one person after another, following my example, exchanged their car for one.

Everything we have belongs to the Lord, and if changing our car for a minibus will lead to more people coming to Christ, we should surely be prepared to do so. The commitment of such people was undoubtedly one of the reasons for the growth of the church while we were there, and that’s where we turn to next.

The growth of the church

The Full Gospel Mission, Straight Road, Lexden, was nothing more than a tin hut with the potential to seat at most eighty people. When Eileen and I arrived, there were only twelve regular attenders, and that included a family of four who emigrated to Australia not long after our arrival, leaving us with a congregation of eight. By the time we left, the church was packed every Sunday with eighty regular attenders, which, in the 1960s was considered rapid growth, and my main purpose in this section is to explore the reasons why. But first, a word about the church programme.

Church programme

When we arrived in Colchester we inherited what was a typical programme for AoG churches in those days. On Sunday mornings there was the Breaking of Bread service, otherwise known as Communion. There was a Sunday School for the children in the afternoon, and on Sunday evenings there was the Gospel Service where all the hymns and the sermon were designed to bring people to Christ, and after which there would be laying on of hands and prayer for the sick.

Midweek on Tuesday evenings there was a Children’s Meeting from six to seven followed by a Prayer Meeting at nine, and on Thursday evenings there was Bible Study. There was no meeting for young people until we started one on a Friday, but more of that later.

The attendance at these meetings was far from encouraging. In fact, during our first year at Colchester, the Sunday School and Children’s Meeting were attended by only a handful of children, and the midweek meetings for adults were hardly better. On Sundays, if we had visitors, numbers might rise to fifteen. I faithfully preached the gospel every Sunday evening, but in that year we saw not one single decision for Christ, largely because most Sundays everyone present was already a Christian.

Apart from the weekly programme, there was the church’s Annual Convention when a guest speaker would be invited for the weekend and friends from surrounding Pentecostal churches would come for the two meetings held on the Saturday. It was good to see the building full and to hear some of the pioneers of the Pentecostal Movement like Howard and John Carter. But while these occasions were a real encouragement, they hardly made up for the weeks throughout the year when so few were attending. So what made the difference in the remaining years where we saw our numbers multiply significantly?

Reasons for growth

It is the Lord who builds his church, and in my view, the major reason for the growth of the church was, without a doubt, the fact that he strategically placed me as an RE teacher in a local school where I was free to teach the young people about Jesus. That, combined with the fact that he sent me key people to help me start a Youth Meeting on a Friday night, resulted in dozens of decisions for Christ, many of whom started to come on Sundays.

It all started when I received an invitation to preach at the Youth Meeting in the Colchester Elim Church. After the meeting a couple of people in their early twenties asked me if we had a Youth Meeting at our church, and I said that I’d like to start one but that I had no musician. To which they responded by offering to help me. David Fletcher was an able guitarist and John Ward an excellent accordion player. Together with their fiancées, Jean and Sandra, who were good singers, they made a great group for leading worship and were, quite literally, a Godsend.

All this, in the providence of God, coincided with my starting teaching in the local school and with a girl called Corinne, one of the children from a family in our church, starting there too. She provided the link between my RE lessons and the local church. I told the children about Jesus, and she told her friends where they could find out more.

So we launched our new Youth Meeting by hiring a couple of coaches to provide transport to the church from just outside the school gates. My new friends from Elim provided the music and I preached. In school I had been able to tell them about Jesus, but I couldn’t make a gospel appeal in RE lessons! Now, in church, I had complete freedom, and on the very first night, when I made the appeal forty-one children made a decision for Christ.

And when a number of them started coming on Sundays, on one occasion eleven of them being baptised in the Holy Spirit, there was a new sense of expectancy among the older members. They were thrilled to see young people in their meetings, and that began to attract people from other churches too, including David and Jean, John and Sandra, who decided to join us because of their work with the youth.

Of course, our attempts to reach people with the gospel were not limited to the young people. I produced a quarterly newsletter which we called The Full Gospel Mission VOICE. We distributed thousands of these to the homes in the area, using my minibus on a Saturday morning to transport ten or so young people to deliver them street by street throughout the area. I can think of only one person who came to Christ through that ministry, but at least we knew that people had had an opportunity to read the gospel even if they never came to church.

After I had given up my teaching job, I also conducted two evangelistic missions in our church. Each mission lasted from a Saturday through to the following Sunday. We leafleted far and wide, each leaflet containing a message about healing as well as salvation, and, of course, details of the meetings. The meetings were well attended, but mainly by Christians who wanted prayer for healing, and although there were a few decisions for Christ and some healings, I have no memory of anyone being added to our church as a result.

And an SPF mission we conducted in Wivenhoe, a village near Colchester next to which the new University of Essex was about to be built, fared little better. It was a great experience for the students who participated, but there were very few local people who attended.

Apart, that is, from Ian and Janet Balfour, a couple from a Strict Baptist background, who came to support us, got to know us, were baptised in the Spirit as a result, and decided to move to a house less than five minutes’ walk from our church. They had four children all under the age of five, one of whom was Glenn, later to come as a student to Mattersey Hall, and, for a time after my principalship, its principal. The Lord clearly had a purpose in our going to Wivenhoe, even if, at the time, we felt rather disappointed with the results.

And Ian and Janet were not the only people added to our church as a result of receiving the baptism in the Spirit. Alan Coe, who was a work colleague of John Ward and had recently become a Christian, came along to our meetings, received the baptism, and joined our church. He proved a very faithful member, and when I was in contact with him recently was still attending regularly. David Littlewood, a former Methodist, later to become an AoG minister and a member of Mattersey’s Board of Governors, was also baptised in the Spirit in our church while he was a student at the University of Essex.

But the ministry the Lord had given me of praying for people to be filled with the Spirit was not limited to those who would become members of our church. I had the privilege of laying hands on Reginald East, the vicar of West Mersea, and on Mike Eavery, the minister of the local Congregational Church and seeing them both baptised in the Spirit in their homes.

So the Lord was blessing us in ways that perhaps we had not expected, and if the results of the evangelistic missions we conducted were rather disappointing, he was showing us that the key to growth was to follow the supernatural leading of the Holy Spirit. Miracles happen as he determines, and I was certainly not expecting what happened one Saturday evening.

But I’ll tell you about that next time.

My Story  Talk 12 Brasenose College Oxford 1959-62 (Part 3)

Welcome to Talk 12 in our series where I am reflecting on God’s goodness to me throughout my life. This is now the third talk about the years I spent at Oxford. So far we have talked about life at Oxford, its academic programme, and my spiritual experience while I was there. Today I’m going to share with you my developing relationship with Eileen, our decision to get married shortly after I graduated, and how the Lord led us straight into pastoral ministry rather than going to Bible college first.

Keeping in touch

Throughout the two years after Eileen and I met, we had seen each other almost every day. Clearly, this could not continue while I was at Oxford, but we kept in touch as much as was then humanly possible. Of course, in those days there were no mobile phones. In fact, access to landlines was not easy, and anyway, it was extremely expensive. So Eileen and I kept in touch with each other by writing letters four or five times a week.

We also managed to see each other every two weeks. As I have mentioned already, the terms at Oxford were only 8 weeks long, so by going home for the weekend after four weeks, and by Eileen travelling up to see me for the weekend after weeks two and six, we were able to see each other on a fortnightly basis. This was very clear evidence of Eileen’s commitment to me as the journey on our Lambretta scooter through the busy traffic of central London was by no means easy.

Obviously, we made the most of those precious weekends. On Saturdays we would often explore the surrounding countryside on our scooter or even travel further afield visiting pretty Cotswold villages like Bibury and Bourton on the Water. Or in the summer we loved getting into one of the punts moored by Magaden Bridge and heading up the Cherwell where we picnicked on the home-made sausage rolls and egg and bacon pie that Eileen had brought with her from home. On Sundays, of course, we went to church together before Eileen made the 60-mile journey back home to be ready for work on Monday.

Of course, during the college vacations (which totalled half the year), the situation was completely different. I was able to see Eileen every day again. During the week, this was in the evenings as Eileen was at work during the daytime. And I was too, at least during the weeks that the schools had their holidays. As the Oxford terms were far shorter than the school terms I was able to earn some extra money by teaching in a local secondary school, which was to prove valuable for my future ministry as I was gaining experience in teaching children of a different age group from those I had taught in the years before I went to Oxford.

But apart from working hours, Eileen and I saw each other every evening and every weekend. Sundays were taken up with church twice in the day, and midweek we regularly attended the Tuesday night prayer meeting, the Thursday night Bible study, and the Friday night youth meeting. We were desperate to learn more about our Pentecostal experience and the way the Pentecostal churches did things.

In fact, whatever we were doing, our relationship with each other was from the start intimately connected with our relationship with the Lord and his will for our lives, even when we went on holiday.

As I have already mentioned, our first holiday together was at a Christian Endeavour Holiday Home in Devon in 1959 just before I went up to Oxford. The following year we decided to explore the Lake District together. We travelled the three-hundred-mile journey on our scooter, stopping overnight in Aintree with one of Eileen’s aunts, before finally arriving at a CE Home in Kents Bank near Grange-over-Sands. We had each visited the area before, but never together, and that fortnight was a wonderful opportunity to enjoy fellowship with other Christians as well as marvelling at the beauty of God’s creation as we made daily trips into different parts of the Lakes.

In 1961 we decided to go further afield and to spend four weeks touring France and northern Spain. So we exchanged our 125cc Lambretta for a new 175 which we trusted would cope well with the distances we would be travelling laden with two tents and all the paraphernalia required for camping. However, the moment we set off we both had some misgivings as the weight of luggage at the rear of the scooter made it harder to handle the machine safely, but undaunted we proceeded with caution and arrived safely at Southend airport where we had booked a flight on a cargo plane to northern France.

Our first night in France was spent in a cow field with the kind permission of the farmer. We were both experienced campers, Eileen with the Girl Guides and I with the Boys’ Brigade, but we had never before been woken by the sound of cows champing round our tent pegs and we quickly agreed to depart as soon as possible, particularly as there were no ‘facilities’ available! We determined that after that we would make sure to check into proper camping sites.

We travelled down the western side of France, stopping first at Paris for the weekend, camping in the Bois de Boulogne and visiting the thousand-strong Assemblies of God Church in the Rue du Sentier led by pastor André Nicole. Little did I know it then, but that was to be the first of many visits to French assemblies later in my ministry and sparked my interest in what the Holy Spirit was doing in European countries.

In Angouleme we discovered that our GB plate had fallen off and, knowing that we were legally required to display one, we visited a garage there and asked if they knew where we could get a replacement. It was then that I realised how inadequate my A Level French course had been. Although we had studied numerous French authors, it was of little practical use to us now as no one had told us how to say the alphabet in French! Finally, by writing the letters down I managed to let them know what I wanted and learnt that in French GB is pronounced Jay-Bay. They told us that they could make us one, but it would take a couple of days.

As a result, we had to travel further each day than originally planned which meant that we were both rather saddle-sore at the end of each day. We crossed the Spanish border between Biarritz and San Sebastian and immediately discovered that what we were doing was culturally unacceptable. Eileen was getting hoots and wolf-whistles from passing motorists because she was wearing trousers and not riding side-saddle! Of course, this would have been extremely dangerous bearing in mind the distances we were travelling each day and, at the risk of causing offense, we decided that we had no option but to carry on as we were.

Extremely tired when we reached Burgos we decided to spend the night in a hotel and enjoy the luxury of proper beds. We did the same in Madrid for two or three nights before heading for Barcelona by way of Zaragoza. But before we reached Barcelona our scooter broke down on a mountain road and reluctantly I had to leave Eileen by the roadside with the scooter while I hitched a lift in a Citroen deux-chevaux into a village called Jorba to get help.

It took two days to get the scooter fixed and by the time we eventually reached our campsite at Rosas, on the Mediterranean just north of Barcelona, it was already dark. A day or so later we arrived in Perpignan in southern France, intending to travel on up the eastern side of France on our way back home. But the scooter broke down again, and after two days camping at the back of an Esso station, we were compelled to return to England by train, leaving our scooter to be brought home courtesy of the RAC. Fortunately, it was still under warranty and was repaired by Lambretta after it finally arrived back in England some six weeks later.

That holiday was the last we were to have together before we were married the following year and, in some ways, was a preparation for it. Like the holiday, married life is wonderful, but not without its unexpected events, delays, and difficulties. We were learning to face problems together, to be patient with each other, and to trust in the Lord to bring us through. Perhaps that’s why I tend to advise young couples, wherever possible, to go on holiday together before deciding to get married. But that brings me to how I decided to propose to Eileen.

Engagement and Marriage

It was during my first term at Oxford. We had been ‘going out’ together for two years, seeing each other almost every day. But we had never talked about marriage. I think that must have been because I was very conscious of how serious marriage is. Divorce in those days was far less common than it is today and for me, as a Christian, it would not have entered my head. I knew that marriage would be for life. What’s more, I knew God had called me to serve him, and choosing the right partner was vitally important. So I was reluctant to commit myself.

But just before I went to Oxford my father had a word with me.

You’d better make your mind up about that girl, David. It would not be fair to keep her waiting for three years while you’re at Oxford, if your intentions are not serious.

Of course, I knew he was right. I had to make up my mind. The problem was, I didn’t want to give her up, but I didn’t want to marry her if she wasn’t the right one for me. Finally I did what I should have done much sooner. I decided to pray about it. I got down on my knees in my bedroom at Oxford and told the Lord my dilemma. I told him that I would gladly marry Eileen if she was God’s choice for me, but if not, I would give her up.

And as soon as I said that prayer I received an overwhelming peace and an assurance that Eileen was the girl I was to marry. So, the next time I was home from Oxford, after a long and passionate kiss, I said to her, You will marry me, won’t you, darling? Yes, those were my exact words! To which she replied, Oh yes! Of course I will.

So we decided to get engaged the following summer after my first year at Oxford, knowing that the earliest we could expect to marry would be after I had graduated. After gaining her father’s consent, we organised a wonderful garden party to celebrate our engagement on 2^nd July, 1960, and eventually were married by Pastor Alfred Webb at Bethel Full Gospel Church, Vicarage Road, Dagenham, on 28^th July, 1962. And the specially invited organist for the occasion was none other than Laurie N. Dixon, LRAM, the friend through whom I had first heard about the baptism in the Holy Spirit.   

Our move to Colchester

After our honeymoon in Cornwall, we moved directly into our first home, a bungalow in Colchester, where I had accepted the invitation to take over the pastorate of the small AoG church there. Colchester will be the subject of our next talk, but first I need to explain why we did not consider ministry in a Baptist church and why I did not go to Bible College as originally planned.

With regard to the Baptists, the explanation is simple. Once we had been baptised in the Spirit, neither of us had attended our Baptist churches apart from perhaps an occasional visit. This was largely because the minister of Hornchurch Baptist was not sympathetic to a Pentecostal understanding of scripture, and the new minister of Elm Park Baptist had stated that the Pentecostals’ exegesis of Acts was entirely unwarranted.

Against this, my parents had told me that Leslie Moxham, our former Baptist minister at Elm Park, had noticed such a difference in me since I was baptised in the Spirit that he had said, If the baptism in the Spirit can make that much difference to David, I want it too. Leslie was later baptised in the Spirit and eventually became an AoG minister working with my friend Colin Blackman in the Tunbridge Wells assembly. And although, as we were to discover later some Baptists were beginning to get involved in the Charismatic Renewal, it was evident to us that our future lay with the Pentecostals rather than with the Baptists.

But why didn’t I go the Bible College before taking on a church? The answer is that I tried to. Early in 1962 I applied to London Bible College. There was a section on the application form where you were required to give an account of your experience of Christ. So I mentioned not only how I had become a Christian, but also how Jesus had baptised me in the Holy Spirit. My interview lasted about an hour, most of which was taken up with what I believed about speaking in tongues. Was it for today? And if it was, was it for everyone? As a result, I received a letter a few days later saying that they felt I would do better to apply to a Pentecostal bible college! Interestingly, their rejection of my application is mentioned in Ian Randall’s history of LBC, Educating Evangelicals.

The AoG Bible College was then at Kenley in Surrey. Its principal was Donald Gee. I had had a brief conversation with him after a meeting at the East Ham Easter Convention, and he had promised to send me the application form. But this never arrived. I also heard it rumoured that the lady teaching English at Kenley, on hearing that an Oxford graduate might be coming, had, presumably jokingly, commented that he’ll be probably teaching me!

This, together with the fact that some of my Pentecostal friends were telling me that I didn’t need to go to Bible college, because I had got it – whatever that meant! – caused me to wonder if that was the direction I should be heading. So I said to the Lord,

If you really don’t want me to go to Bible College, let someone offer me the pastorate of a Pentecostal church.

And within a week, I had my answer. I received a letter from the Colchester assembly asking if I would be their pastor. There was a bungalow available for rent for six and a half guineas a week (£6.51) towards which they were prepared to contribute £5.00. Apart from that, they could offer nothing, and it was understood that I would need to seek full time secular employment. But that’s something for next time.

My Story   Talk 11 Brasenose College, Oxford (1959-1962) Part 2

Welcome to Talk 11 in our series where I am reflecting on God’s goodness to me throughout my life. Last time I finished by sharing with you how God powerfully spoke to me after a Philosophy tutorial through a verse in Psalm 119. Today I’ll be talking in more detail about my spiritual experience at Oxford, which, looking back on it, was to be far more significant for my future life and ministry than the academic programme I was following.

The most important thing a young Christian can do when going up to university is to make sure right from the start that they find, and have regular fellowship with, other Christians. There are two main ways of doing this, either by joining the Christian Union or by attending a local church – or preferably both, which is what I did.

Christian Union and Local Church

The CU at Brasenose was part of the OICCU – Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union. Each college CU would have its own weekly meeting for prayer and Bible study, but there was also a regular Saturday night Bible Study held at the Northgate Hall, situated close to the Oxford Union building. This was well attended by Christians from across the whole university, and I became a regular attender at both these gatherings. I appreciated the opportunity to meet Christians from different denominational backgrounds, and, bearing in mind my experience of the Anglican chaplain at Brentwood School, was particularly pleased to discover that some Anglicans actually did profess the believe the Bible!

However, much as I enjoyed fellowship with these good people, having been only recently baptised in the Spirit, and having begun to appreciate Pentecostal worship, I was very aware that something very important was lacking in their meetings – the supernatural power of the Holy Spirit. Of course, things are very different today, but in those days the Charismatic Renewal had not yet begun and most Anglicans, who in my experience tended to view other denominations as somewhat inferior, were highly suspicious of, if not totally unaware of, the rapidly growing worldwide Pentecostal Movement.

And, of course, I was eager to enlighten them! But first a word about the local Pentecostal church. At the time, the only Pentecostal church in Oxford was the Elim Church situated on the Botley Road just beyond Oxford Railway Station. I was keen to attend there because, however valuable membership of a Christian union may be, there really is no substitute for the life and fellowship of a local church.

So throughout my time at Oxford I regularly attended on Sundays both the morning and evening services, which meant incidentally that I missed both lunch and dinner in college because the mealtimes clashed with the times of the services. More importantly, on my very first Sunday in Oxford, it was there that I met three other students who were from Pentecostal churches, which led to our meeting regularly for prayer and to the formation of the Students’ Pentecostal Fellowship.

Students’ Pentecostal Fellowship

The students I met after church that first Sunday morning in Oxford were, Michael Collins who came from Dorchester AoG and was in his second year at St. Peter’s Hall reading Engineering, and Gladys Bland and John Miles who, like me, were in their first year. Gladys was from East Ham AoG and was doing postgraduate work in English Literature at Somerville College, and John was from Gloucester AoG and was reading English at Regents Park College.

We were all delighted to meet each other because up to then there had been relatively few Pentecostals attending university. We soon became firm friends and agreed to meet regularly together for fellowship and prayer, particularly for spiritual gifts and for Christian students from a different denominational background to be baptised in the Spirit. Michael had a friend called Philip who was already Spirit filled, and he joined our prayer group too.

I will never forget the day, early in our first year, when there was a prophecy in one of those meetings that people of all denominations, including professors and university lecturers, would be baptised in the Spirit. As I’ve already mentioned, the Charismatic Renewal had not yet begun or, if it had, we had not heard of it, and to be honest, I really wondered if that could possibly happen. But it did, and in our own small way we were to be a part of it.

What we didn’t know then was that similar groups were forming in other universities. There were students from a Pentecostal background at Cambridge and London Universities too, and once we heard about this we naturally wanted to get in touch with them. And a key person to help us do that was Richard Bolt. Richard had been an Anglican ordinand but after he was baptised in the Spirit in an AoG church in Durham his course at Clifton Theological College was terminated because he was laying hands on other students and praying for them to speak in tongues.

Shortly after this he was welcomed by AoG and became an Assemblies of God minister based in a small assembly in Colchester. However, as the Lord was using him in healing and in leading others into the baptism in the Spirit, Richard’s ministry extended well beyond Colchester as he took time to travel to universities and colleges to encourage Pentecostal students and to pray for others who wanted to be filled with the Spirit. He was certainly a great encouragement to me and my family. My mother was baptised in the Spirit under his ministry.

But before I knew anything about how the Lord was using Richard, the thought had already crossed my mind that we ought to form, at least in Oxford, a university society for Pentecostal students. The Baptists had what was known as The John Bunyan Society which met every Sunday afternoon in Regents Park College where John Miles was a student. He and I attended this quite often and I mentioned to him that I thought it might be good to have something similar for Pentecostals. As a result of this, John wrote to Aaron Linford, the editor of Redemption Tidings, the AoG weekly magazine, and asked for advice.

And it was at this point that Richard Bolt told us about the Pentecostal students at Cambridge and London. All this led to a gathering in London early in 1961 when the Students’ Pentecostal Fellowship (SPF) was formed. Richard Bolt was recognised as its Travelling Secretary and Donald Underwood, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, as General Secretary.

We organised annual weekend house-parties where students were exposed to the ministry of Pentecostal leaders, and evangelistic missions where students would sing, testify, and preach during the summer vacations. We also published a magazine known as The Pentecostal and developed a postal library service where students could borrow books by Pentecostal authors.

At Oxford our group grew in numbers during our second year, partly due to an influx of students from Culham College led by Andrew Parfitt, the son of the AoG pastor at Maidstone, but also because our prayers were being answered and students from other denominations were getting baptised in the Spirit. But that leads me to how I personally started to be used in leading others into the baptism.

Leading others into the baptism

It all began a few weeks after I had started at Oxford when, after one of those Saturday night Bible Studies in the Northgate Hall, I was looking at a book on the bookstall which was about a revival that had broken out somewhere in Africa. Chris, one of my Anglican friends from Brasenose, saw what I was looking at and asked me if I had any personal experience of revival. So I began to tell him about the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

As a result, Chris started to seek the baptism and came along to the Elim church where the pastor laid hands on him and prayed for him. But nothing happened and after a few weeks Chris came to me and said,

I want you to pray for me. I’m coming to your room tomorrow and I want you to lay hands on me and pray for me.

I was frankly unsure how to respond to this. I was very new to all this myself and I did not know if I had the authority to lay hands on him. I didn’t know if such things were the responsibility of pastors, and I wasn’t a pastor. But Chris was very insistent and so I agreed. The next day was Saturday and there were no lectures or tutorials for me to attend, so I decided to spend the night in prayer. This was something I had never done before, and have not done very often since, but I realised the seriousness of what Chris had asked me to do and I wanted to get it right.

When Chris came the next day, we chatted for a bit, and then he said,

Well, are you going to pray for me or not?

I think he may have sensed that I was putting it off because, despite my night of prayer, I was nervous about it. He knelt down in front of me, and I plucked up courage and, quietly speaking in tongues, gently placed my hands on his shoulders. But nothing seemed to happen, and I didn’t know what to do, when I remembered that in the Authorised Version (which most of us were still using in those days) Acts 19:6 says that it was when Paul had laid his hands upon the Ephesians that the Holy Spirit came on them and they spoke in tongues and prophesied. In other words, the Spirit came on them after Paul laid his hands on them.  And I found myself prophesying over Chris that he would receive, and that he would receive that very day. At which, Chris got up, said thank you, and left me. And I was left wondering if I had done the right thing.

I had my answer at eight the following morning. I was still asleep, having had no sleep the previous night, when I was woken by something digging me in my ribs. It was Chris with his umbrella. What was he doing here?

            Oh, it’s you Chris. What on earth are you doing here?

And then it occurred to me that he might have come to tell me what had happened, so I added,

            You haven’t received the baptism, have you?

To which he responded as he continued to dig me in the ribs,

            O ye of little faith!

He had, of course, received, and he told me how it had happened. After he had left me he had returned to his room and had been reading a book by, or about, the famous missionary to China, Hudson Taylor. The book emphasised that in addition to faith we need courage in our Christian lives, and Chris realised that that was just what he needed. He looked up from the book intending to say, Yes, Lord. Give me courage. But instead of doing so, he found himself speaking in tongues!

Little did I know it then, but Chris was to be the first among hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have begun to speak in tongues through the ministry the Lord has given me. But that’s closely related to the subject of spiritual gifts and how I began to exercise them.

Beginning to exercise spiritual gifts

Shortly after I was baptised in the Spirit I visited the bookshop at the AoG National Offices at 51 Newington Causeway, London. I bought every book they had on the Holy Spirit and spiritual gifts. As a young Baptist I had received little teaching about the Spirit and none whatsoever on spiritual gifts. And I was eager to learn. I devoured books like Harold Horton’s The Gifts of the Spirit and Donald Gee’s Concerning Spiritual Gifts, and I learnt that the baptism in the Spirit is not an end in itself, but a gateway to supernatural gifts like tongues,  interpretation, prophecy, and healing. And I was longing to receive and be used in whatever gifts the Lord might have for me.

As it happened, I didn’t have long to wait. I was still in my first year at Oxford when I was confronted with a situation at the church I was attending. The Elim church in Oxford was a well-attended lively church where the gifts of the Spirit were regularly in operation. On a Sunday morning there were often prophecies, tongues and interpretation. Some of my Christian friends from Brasenose came along to experience Pentecostal worship and so far I had not been embarrassed in any way by what went on in the meetings.

However, one Sunday morning, when fortunately none of my friends was present, somebody spoke in tongues but there was no interpretation. No explanation was given for this and, although I was still new to these things, I knew that the Bible was very clear that speaking in tongues in church should be interpreted. I probably should have asked the pastor about this, but he was a busy man and I did not know him very well. Consequently I kept quiet about the matter, but was still concerned that everything was not quite as it should be.

Shortly after that, when Richard Bolt was visiting, I told him about this and asked him what I should do. He said,

The answer is very simple David. You interpret.

To which I replied,

But I don’t have the gift.

He then said,

Then ask for it.

But, bearing in mind that 1 Corinthians 12:11 tells us that these gifts are given as the Holy Spirit determines, I asked,

But I know God wants me to have it?

His answer to this was along the following lines. The very fact that I was concerned about it might well indicate that God wanted me to have it. And, anyway, we know from God’s word that it is his will that tongues in church should be interpreted. So I would be in God’s will if I went ahead and interpreted it. I should pray about it and next time it happened I should ask God for the interpretation and then speak out in faith. Our heavenly Father gives good gifts to his children when they ask him.

Although I still had questions, I decided to do what he said and over the next few weeks kept asking the Lord about the matter. Then, one Sunday morning it happened. Someone spoke in tongues and I waited, hoping that someone else would interpret it. But when no one did, I asked the Lord to give me the right words to say and immediately a few words came into my mind which I began to speak out in faith. I say in faith, but I have to confess that my faith was mingled with doubt. I was half expecting the pastor to intervene and say that this was not the right interpretation! But to my intense relief he said nothing, and after the meeting people came and thanked me for my interpretation.

So from time to time, I continued to interpret tongues, but still with the occasional doubt if what I said could really be the interpretation. And later in the series I will tell you how God wonderfully confirmed the genuineness of my gift when I interpreted a tongue that was identified as a language spoken in Africa.

God certainly did some wonderful things while I was at Oxford, and I realise now that I was already exercising a ministry while I was there. I was leading our SPF prayer group, teaching others about spiritual gifts, as well as preaching in churches from time to time. It seems that others were recognising this before I did, and I was soon asked to share my testimony at the AoG National Youth Rally held in the Birmingham Town Hall and to contribute an article in Redemption Tidings entitled Pentecost in Oxford University. The Lord was clearly preparing the way for my future ministry.

Next time, I’ll tell you about my developing relationship with Eileen which led to our marriage immediately after I graduated and how I ultimately decided not to go to Bible College as originally planned, but to accept the pastorate of the Assemblies of God Church in Colchester.

My Story   Talk 10   Brasenose College, Oxford, 1959-1962

Welcome to Talk 10 in our series where I’m reflecting on God’s goodness to me throughout my life. Today we begin on the years that I spent at Oxford between 1959 and 1962.

For me, life at Brasenose College began on Thursday, 8^th October 1959, exactly one month after I had been baptised in the Holy Spirit. I travelled there by car with Eileen and my parents, who, after helping me unpack and settle into my room at the top of staircase 11, prayed with me before returning home. This was the beginning of an entirely new phase in my life. It was the first time that I was living away from home. I would be making new friends and be challenged by new ideas.

But there are some things which remain constant in our lives no matter what else may change. I knew that my parents loved me. I knew that Eileen loved me, and that I loved her. And I knew that God had a purpose for my life and that I was now at Brasenose as part of that overall plan. So I had confidence that all would be well.

The fact that I would now be reading PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) did not faze me, even though I had never studied any of those subjects before. My original purpose in accepting the place I had been offered had been to widen my sphere of knowledge before eventually concentrating on theology in order to prepare for the ministry.

And PPE would certainly do that. But there was far more to being at Oxford than the course I would be studying. There was the social and recreational life which I greatly enjoyed. And it was a great opportunity to interact with people of all faiths and none and to share my faith with them. Opportunity, too, to tell other Christians about the baptism in the Holy Spirit, and to meet other Pentecostal students and spend time in prayer with them for the supernatural gifts of the Spirit. And it was also a time when my relationship with Eileen would be strengthened even though we would be apart for weeks on end.

As I can’t cover that in just one talk, today will be aboutlife at Brasenose, its domestic arrangements, its social life and sporting activities, and the academic programme and its challenge to my faith.

Next time I’ll share in more detail about my spiritual experience including how the Lord led me into leading others into the Baptism in the Spirit, how I began to exercise spiritual gifts, and how we began the Students’ Pentecostal Fellowship.

And later I’ll tell you about my developing relationship with Eileen which led to our marriage immediately after I had graduated and how I ultimately decided not to go to Bible College as originally planned, but to accept the pastorate of the Assemblies of God Church in Colchester.

Life at Brasenose

When I arrived at Brasenose in October 1959 it was almost three years since I had been there previously in November 1956 when I had taken the scholarship examination. Back then I had never seen any of the students’ rooms, as we were staying in a boarding house in the Woodstock Road. So I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. But as soon as I entered my new room, I was pleasantly surprised. It was larger than my bedroom at home, was well furnished and overlooked one of the quads with a view of the Radcliffe Camera and the University Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in the background.

Students were usually allocated a room in college for the first year of their studies, and sometimes for the second year too, when you had opportunity to choose what room you would prefer. During my first year I discovered that the room beneath me was even larger than the room I was in and had the benefit of a bedroom separate from the main room which was used as a sitting room as well as a study.

So when I was offered the chance to live in college for a second year I opted for this room which proved to be extremely useful when we were holding prayer meetings for those interested in seeking spiritual gifts. But more of that next time. For my third year I lived ‘in digs’ in a boarding house on the Botley Road, just 50 yards away from the Elim Pentecostal Church which I attended throughout my time in Oxford.

Meals at Brasenose were, in my opinion at least, of a high quality and I was introduced to dishes which I had never tasted at home. These included jugged hare and braised haunch of venison, the only meals I took a positive dislike to, probably because the meat was hung for several days before it was cooked which resulted in a rather unpleasant smell. Fortunately, we were allowed to sign out in advance for any evening meal, provided we dined in college at least five times a week.

Dinner was a rather formal occasion at which we were required to wear our gowns, and which was preceded by a Latin grace which began with the words:

Oculi omnium spectant in te Deus. Tu das illis escas tempore opportuno…

which means

The eyes of all wait upon you O God. You give them their food in due season,

and is taken from Psalm 145:15.

Sadly, however, I’m not sure that many people took it seriously, even if they should have known what it meant, bearing in mind that at the time Latin at O level was still an entrance requirement for Oxford University.

Breakfast and lunch were far less formal occasions. Grace was not said and there were no requirements about a dress code or attendance. There were, in fact, very few requirements about life in college. Apart from academic regulations, what rules there were related to the time of day you had to be back in college and the time at which any female guests had to be out!

The gate in the porters’ lodge was the only means of access to the College. It was locked at midnight and anyone seeking access after that would be reported to the Dean and a fine would be automatically payable. However, this could be avoided if you were agile enough to scale an eight-foot wall without being caught, something of course I never had to try!

As far as the ladies were concerned, they had to be out by 10pm. This, I imagine, is no longer relevant, as, like most Oxford colleges, Brasenose rightly accepts female students as well as men. But by the time I left Oxford the ‘swinging sixties’ had hardly begun, and there was still at least a nominal acknowledgement of Christian moral values.

For residential students there was also a rule about the minimum number of nights you had to be in college over the course of a term. Any absence without permission from your ‘moral tutor’ would be reported by your ‘scout’. Scouts, who were usually much older than the students, originally were little more than their servants and before my time would clean your shoes if you left them outside the door of your room.

Even in my time they were referred to by their surname only, whereas they had to refer to me as Mr Petts and address me as Sir. This was something I deplored, a tradition which harked back to the old upstairs/downstairs attitude of the aristocracy still very prevalent in the early decades of the last century. If you’ve ever watched Downton Abbey you’ll know exactly what I mean.

Social and sport

Probably the most frequent social activity at Oxford was drinking coffee and staying up until the early hours of the morning discussing religion or politics or whatever else was currently in the news. Of course, whenever I could I took the opportunity to share my faith with anyone who would listen. Most of these discussions took place either in my room or that of fellow students whose accommodation was close to mine.

And at least one of those students came to faith in Christ during his first term at Brasenose, largely through the ministry of Keith de Berry, the rector of St. Aldate’s Church, but I like to think that my testimony also played a part in his decision to give his life to Christ. He went on to gain a first class degree in Chemistry and continued at Oxford to do a D.Phil., (the Oxford version of a PhD). Now, after more than sixty years he is still a committed Christian and once told me that his scientific research had only confirmed his faith in Christ.

Of course, late night discussions were by no means the only occasions when there was opportunity to witness to the truth of the gospel. So whether it was punting on the Cherwell on a lazy summer afternoon, or in the changing room after a football match, or playing tennis or table tennis (for which, in my final year, I was captain of the College team), I was always eager to share my faith.

But that doesn’t mean that I was constantly ‘Bible bashing’. Far from it. I remember how on one occasion, when our team was playing tennis against another college, my doubles match had been delayed for some reason. Consequently, it looked as though I would be late for our Students’ Pentecostal Fellowship prayer meeting.

But it was a three-set match, and we had lost the first set six-love and were losing the second set four-love. We had only to lose two more games, and the match would be over, and I could get off to the prayer meeting which by then had already started. But throwing away the match would hardly be fair to my partner and would not have glorified God.

Then I realised that my friends would wonder where I was and would be praying for me, wherever I was or whatever I was doing. Which inspired me to say to my partner,

            Come on, John. We’re going to win this match.

And we did. The level of our tennis suddenly improved, and, having lost ten games in a row, we went on to win all the next twelve, taking the match by two sets to one (4-6, 6-4, 6-0). I’m not sure that John believed my explanation that this was probably the result of answered prayer, but because of that experience I am personally convinced, not only that God is interested in every tiny detail of our lives, but that such experiences bear testimony to others of the reality of our faith.

Academic programme

The academic year at Oxford began in early October and finished towards the end of June. Each term lasted just 8 weeks which meant that the long summer vacation provided the opportunity for students to get a summer job or travel abroad or, where necessary, to catch up on their reading.

Reading was, in fact, a major part of learning, and the world-renowned Bodleian Library situated virtually on the doorstep of Brasenose, provided access to millions of books and other printed items. Guidance as to which books to read was given in tutorials when your tutor would set you an essay to write in time for the following week, when you would read your essay to him and he would make appropriate comments.

At the beginning of term, he would also recommend what lectures might be helpful. Attendance at lectures was entirely optional, whereas attendance at tutorials was a compulsory part of one’s course. The standard of lecturing varied immensely, some academics having very poor communication skills. As a result, attendance would steadily diminish week by week and in one case I remember the series was terminated early ‘due to an indisposition’ on the part of the lecturer!

In my day, the system of assessment at Oxford, for PPE at least, was by written examination. After ‘prelims’ (preliminary examinations) which were taken in March in your first year, there was no further examination until ‘finals’ which were taken in the June of your third year.

I was required to take at least two papers in each subject, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, plus two further papers of my choice. I opted to take these in Philosophy as this was my favourite, despite the fact that it had been the most challenging to my Christian faith.

For example, during my second year I had been asked by my tutor to write an essay on the ontological argument for the existence of God. This was one of the arguments used by the philosopher René Descartes in an attempt to prove God’s existence. During the course of my essay I said something to the effect that although philosophy cannot prove the existence of God it cannot disprove it either.

It was at this point, as I was reading my essay to my tutor, that he interrupted me by saying:

Oh, I don’t know. I think if you mean by ‘prove’ what we normally mean by ‘prove’, and if you mean by ‘God’ what we normally mean by ‘God’, then we can probably disprove God’s existence. But perhaps we can talk about it another time.

This was the first time in my life that I had been confronted with such an outright denial of God’s existence, and my tutor’s statement shocked me deeply. It challenged everything I had based my life upon. I felt numb. As soon as he had left the room I instinctively wanted to call out to God for help. But what if my tutor was right and there was no God to call out to? But I called out anyway:

            God, if there is a God, HELP!

And He did! I walked into my bedroom and picked up my Bible and opened it. It fell open at Psalm 119, verse 99. My teacher had told me that he could prove that there is no God. Who was I to challenge the statement of an Oxford tutor? But in that verse the Psalmist said:

I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes.

I came later to realise that by reading the Bible the most simple believer can gain more understanding of the things that really matter than all the intellectual rationalising of the philosopher. That verse brought immediate reassurance to my heart. It was not just the content of the verse that reassured me – though it certainly did – but the fact that, of all the verses there are in the Bible, I should turn at random to that very one. This was surely no coincidence. God had spoken to me in a remarkable and powerful way.

And as the years have gone by I have learned how to counteract the arguments of the atheists. I’m so glad now that I did not abandon my faith back then. People will always be bringing up challenges to our faith, but just because I don’t know the answer doesn’t mean that there is no answer! And until I know what it is, I just need to keep on trusting the One who said, I AM the truth.

My Story  Talk 9 Between Brentwood and Brasenose (1956-1959) Part 2

In our last talk I mentioned that three significant things happened between my leaving school in 1956 and going up to Brasenose in 1959. I gained experience in teaching. I met Eileen, my future wife. And I received the Baptism in the Holy Spirit. And it’s the baptism in the Spirit that’s the subject for today. We’ll be talking about the events that led up to it, how I heard about it and how both Eileen and I received it.

In August 1957 at a Baptist Union Summer School in the Lake District I met a man called Michael, who mentioned that the following year he was planning to go touring Europe with some Christian friends who owned a car. He asked if I would be interested in going with them and I said yes. I paid to have driving lessons so that I could share in the driving. It was a wonderful holiday, not just because of the breathtaking scenery, but because it was there in Switzerland that I first heard about the baptism in the Holy Spirit.

In my book Signs from Heaven I have already recorded the miraculous escape I had from a falling boulder while climbing a mountain and how impressed I was with the simple faith of one of my new friends who prayed for me as he saw it coming straight for me. His name was Laurie and he was clearly moving in a dimension of Christianity that I knew little or nothing about. So I asked him what he had got that I hadn’t got.

So he started to talk about an experience he had received after his conversion – being baptised with the Holy Spirit he called it – when the Holy Spirit had come and filled him to overflowing. He said he had spoken in tongues and told me I could read about it in the book of Acts. But although I wanted to experience more of God in my life, I wasn’t interested in speaking in tongues, and I dismissed the subject from my mind. And I might have ignored it forever had it not been for the remarkable series of events which took place the following summer when both Eileen and I were baptised in the Spirit.

In the summer of 1959 we were both sitting in the youth meeting at Eileen’s church singing from a well-known chorus book, when I happened to notice a list of books advertised on the back cover, one of which was entitled, The Full Blessing of Pentecost, by Dr. Andrew Murray. The title arrested my attention. Could this be what Laurie had been talking about the previous year in Switzerland? So I decided that it might be good to get it.

I mentioned this to Eileen and, without my knowing about it, she wrote to the publishers hoping to buy a copy for me, but a few days later, she received a reply saying the book was no longer available. The following Saturday morning, I went round to see Eileen and she told me that she had tried to get the book for me but that unfortunately it was out of print. A bit disappointed, I thanked her for trying anyway and, after spending the morning with her, returned home from Eileen’s to my parents’ house for lunch.

As the meal was not quite ready, I went into the sitting room to wait. On entering, I happened to notice a book lying on the piano and casually picked it up – The Full Blessing of Pentecost by Dr. Andrew Murray! But how did it get there?

No one, except Eileen, knew anything of my interest in the subject. My parents did not know where the book had come from. It is true that my father had always had a large collection of books, but if it was his, he certainly had never read it, and didn’t even know that he possessed it. Anyway, why wasn’t it in the bookcase and how did it get on the piano?

No one had any idea how that book came to be there on the very day that I had been told it was unobtainable. The answer must surely lie in the realm of the supernatural. This was no coincidence. God was confirming to me that I needed to be baptised in the Spirit, and that afternoon, after I had read the book, I got down on my knees and asked God to fill me with the Holy Spirit. But nothing happened!

That evening, I went round to Eileen’s and told her about the book. And after she had read the book she too started to seek for the baptism in the Holy Spirit. As Baptists, we knew next to nothing about it – only what we had read in Andrew Murray’s book, and that, as I look back on it now, did not give an entirely complete picture.  As I remember it, it made a strong case for believing that there was an experience of the Holy Spirit beyond what we receive at conversion, but there was no mention of speaking in tongues as the evidence.

As a result we weren’t exactly sure what we were asking for, but I had the distinct impression that if I was going to receive the Holy Spirit I needed to prepare myself by becoming more holy. I remember thinking that if I could only live a sinless life for a month, or maybe even a week, or even just today, perhaps God would fill me with the Holy Spirit. I remember driving my father’s car taking care not to exceed the speed limit when, as I was going down a hill in a 30 zone, I noticed that the speedometer had gone up to 32 m.p.h. Oh no, I thought, I’ve missed receiving the baptism for another day!

Of course, I now understand, and frequently teach, that the Holy Spirit is a gift and can’t be earned! But back then I was getting frustrated by trying the achieve an experience of the Spirit by my own efforts and inevitably failing. So I thought I would write to Laurie who had told me about the baptism in the Spirit in the first place. What should I do? To which he replied, David, all I can say is that if you are really thirsty, you will drink. But this was even more frustrating. The problem was, I had no idea how to drink! Laurie lived quite a distance from me and I didn’t feel like writing back and saying,

Thanks Laurie. That’s very helpful, but please, how do I drink?

So Eileen and I decided on a different approach. Perhaps we should find a Pentecostal Church and see if they could help us. It turned out that the nearest one was Bethel Full Gospel Church which was about five miles away in Dagenham, and easily reached on our recently acquired Lambretta scooter. So we drove over to take a look at it and discovered from the noticeboard that there was a prayer meeting every Tuesday evening. I was quite nervous about it as I had never been in a Pentecostal meeting before, but we were pleasantly surprised and were impressed with the number of people praying, even though prayers were interspersed with lots of Amens. We, of course, as good Baptists were only used to saying Amen at the end of a prayer!

But what really impacted us was the use of the gift of tongues and interpretation. In the middle of the prayer time there were three ‘messages’ in tongues each of which was promptly interpreted. And we knew that God was speaking to US. These people did not know who we were. We had arrived just in time for the meeting and had had no time for conversation before the meeting began. So when we heard the opening words of the first interpretation we were completely amazed:

You have come into this church seeking to be filled with the Spirit!

All three interpretations were equally directly relevant to us, and as a result we spoke with the pastor after the meeting and explained who we were and why we had come. His name was Alfred Webb, and he encouraged us to come the following Tuesday and sit on the front row where anyone ‘seeking the baptism’ would be prayed for with the laying on of hands. So that’s what we did, but we were rather disappointed when nothing seemed to happen when he laid hands on us. This happened week after week until we finally received after we had come back from our summer holiday in Torquay, Devon.

That holiday was significant for several reasons. It was the first time that Eileen and I had been on holiday together and we had borrowed my father’s car so that we could take another young couple with us. My father had bought the car before he had passed the driving test so that I could give him lessons. (You may remember that I had learned to drive before we went on that holiday in Switzerland). Dad had not yet passed the test, so was happy to let me borrow it.

But, as far as the baptism in the Spirit was concerned, two things were particularly relevant. First, on the two Sundays we were in Torquay we decided to attend Upton Vale Baptist Church which was not far from the Christian Endeavour Holiday Home where we were staying. I was very impressed with the minister’s sermon on Hebrews 11:6 and his emphasis on the fact that God rewards those who earnestly seek him. So I had a word with him after the service and told him I was seeking the baptism in the Spirit.

Sadly, but not unsurprisingly for a Baptist minister back in 1959, he tried to discourage me from doing so, something which, when I started my course at Oxford a month or so later, influenced my decision to attend a Pentecostal church while I was there rather than a Baptist church. However, that sermon on Hebrews 11:6 on God rewarding those who earnestly seek him did reemphasise a word of prophecy we had received at Bethel a few weeks earlier encouraging us to get up early to pray. Now I am not saying that getting up early to pray is a condition of receiving the baptism, but it could be an indication that we were earnestly seeking, that we were really thirsty (John 7:7-39). So for the rest of that holiday we got up early and prayed.

And when we went to the Tuesday prayer meeting after we got back from our holiday, it happened! This time there was another man sitting alongside the pastor on the platform. I had no idea who he was but as soon as the prayer time began he came down to pray for those who were seeking the baptism.

Eileen and I were kneeling in the front row and he came to me first. I was kneeling with my head in my hands on the seat of the chair I had been sitting on. The man, who I later learned was a pastor called Harold Young, said,

Kneel up, brother.

So I moved into an upright kneeling position and he then said,

Breathe it in, brother.

I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, and I thought it rather strange. But I was thirsty and unquestioningly did what he said. I took a breath. Then he said,

Speak it out brother.

Again, I did what he said and I found myself speaking fluently in tongues. And I did not stop until the pastor closed the meeting 45 minutes later!

Then someone came up to me and said, You had a mighty baptism, didn’t you, brother? To which I replied, Oh, did I? To be honest, it was not at all what I had been expecting. Although I’m not really sure what I was expecting! By this time I had heard or read of so many different testimonies of people receiving the baptism and had realised that in some ways everyone is different, so I was not really sure what I should expect. What I wanted was to be filled with the Holy Spirit. I was not particularly interested in speaking in tongues.

What’s more, I found myself questioning whether the words I was speaking really were a language. I had studied four different foreign languages at school and it certainly sounded like none of them. So was my experience real? These questions were going through my mind as we were travelling home on our scooter. But then I remembered something that Jesus had said in Luke 11. Our heavenly Father does not give stones or scorpions or snakes to his children when they ask for the Holy Spirit. And on that basis I chose to believe that what I had experienced was real. I’m so glad that I did. Its reality has been confirmed again and again in my life and ministry. But more of that in later talks.

But what about Eileen? She had had similar doubts when she heard what Harold Young had said to me and when he laid hands on her she did not receive. However, straight after the meeting he spoke to her and said, You do want to receive don’t you? and Eileen said yes. So he took us both into the church vestry and placed his right hand on my head and told me to start speaking in tongues again. Then he placed his other hand on Eileen’s head and said,

Now you begin to speak too.

And she did! And later she told me that it had been in that very vestry that she had received Jesus as her saviour in Bethel Church Sunday school when she was only seven years old. So we were both baptised in the Spirit on the same day, September 8, 1959, just four weeks before I began my course at Brasenose College, Oxford, where I spent a lot of time telling other Christians about the baptism in the Holy Spirit. But we’ll be talking about that next time.

Talk 8 Between Brentwood and Brasenose (1956-59) Part 1

Welcome to Talk 8 in our series where I’m reflecting on the goodness of God throughout my life.

I left school in December 1956 and started my course at Oxford in October 1959, a period of almost three years. In many ways it seemed a long time to wait, but in the plan and purpose of God they turned out to be highly significant years. I gained experience in teaching. I met Eileen, the girl who was to be lifelong partner. And I received the life-changing experience of the baptism in the Holy Spirit. But first, I need to explain how I got my place at Oxford and why I had to wait three years before taking it up.

Gaining my place at Oxford

In 1956, at the age of seventeen, I had already passed my A Levels and had decided to stay on at school a further year to take S Levels the following summer. S Levels – the S stands for Scholarship – were the highest level of GCE exams that you could take and were designed to support your application to university, especially if you were hoping to go to Oxbridge.

However, as things turned out, I did not need to complete my S Level course because in the first term of that school year I was awarded a scholarship to read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Brasenose College, Oxford. Our form master, Mr. Rennie, had suggested that some of us might like to spend a few days in Oxford and take some examinations at Brasenose College with a view to obtaining a place there.

As there was only one place available I was not expecting to get it. But I decided to go even though my friend, John Bramble, was going too and I thought he was far more likely to be successful. He had always come higher than me in class and had gained better A Level results than I had.

There were about eight of us altogether, each of us taking different exam papers, generally depending on what subjects we had taken at A level. There was just one paper that was the same for all of us, an English essay, the title of which was unknown to us until we sat down in the examination room. And that title was WORDS.

The length of that exam was three hours and, although some boys started writing almost immediately, I spent the first 45 minutes planning my essay. I can’t remember in great detail the contents of that essay but I know that I concluded it by talking about Christ, the word made flesh, the divine logos, the ultimate revelation of God Himself.

I have sometimes wondered if the reason I was awarded the scholarship rather than any of my colleagues was that the Lord was honouring me because I had honoured him. Of course, I can’t be sure about that, but he had helped me through my A levels when I had honoured him before the whole class when my History master had told me that I was likely to fail, and I have always sought to give God the glory for any academic success I may have achieved.

And I discovered later that, of all the papers I sat during that visit to Brasenose, that essay on WORDS was awarded the highest grade – an alpha. But when I received a letter from Brasenose offering me a scholarship a few weeks later, I was totally amazed and, after discussing it with my father, I came to the conclusion that this had to be God.

But there was just one problem. The place they were offering me was for three years later in October 1959, after I had completed my two years National Service. However, the Government had already agreed to abolish National Service and were in the process of phasing it out gradually.

They did this by delaying the ‘call-up’ which meant, in my case, that by the time they would have called me up, there would be less than two years before my course at Oxford was starting. In short, I would not have time to do National Service and, by the time I had finished my course at Oxford, National Service had been abolished completely.

So, having obtained my place at Oxford, I decided to leave school at the end of term in December and start to earn some money. And at the time there was a great shortage of schoolteachers, as a result of which young people who had passed their A levels could do ‘uncertificated teaching’ before going to university, and so I ended up doing almost three years’ teaching before I went to Oxford.

Gaining experience in teaching

And, surprisingly enough, it started at the very school I had just left. Or, to be more precise, it was at the Preparatory School attached to Brentwood and standing just on the other side of the main playing field. One of the teachers was on sickness leave for a few weeks and I was asked if I would take their place as they taught French and Latin which were of course my two main A Level subjects.

As it was a boarding school, I was required to live in and be the housemaster for some of the boys, which mainly involved making sure that they were in bed on time and not talking after a certain time. I was only there for a few weeks (January 15 to February 16), but I enjoyed the experience very much and learnt a great deal, not least of which was that, if you prepared your lessons thoroughly, you had relatively few problems with discipline.

After Brentwood Prep I was told by the Essex Education Committee that another job was available in Brentwood, at the Church of England Primary School in Coptfold Road, only a few hundred yards from my old school. A teacher was on maternity leave and a replacement was needed until July to look after her class of 8 to 9 year-olds. The pay wasn’t great as I was not a qualified teacher. It worked out at about half what I would have been paid if I had been qualified. And, of course, this was not a residential post, so I needed to travel on two buses each day to get there from Hornchurch. But I accepted the job anyway.

As in most primary schools, a teacher was responsible for teaching their class throughout the day all the subjects on the timetable. That was not a problem, but learning to keep discipline was another matter. My expectations were based on the level of discipline I had experienced as a pupil at Brentwood and the few weeks I had spent teaching at Brentwood Prep.

Coptfold Road was quite another matter. Many of the children came from a less fortunate background and some of them were of rather limited intelligence. As a result, and due to my own lack of training and experience, and lack of any supervision, I found the two terms I was in charge of that class extremely difficult, and was quite relieved when I heard towards the end of the summer term that Mrs. Istead, the teacher who had been on maternity leave, was returning the following Monday.

So on the Friday before she was due to return I was clearing my desk after school when the headmaster, Dr. Ward, asked me what I was doing, adding, You’re not leaving, are you? And he offered to give me a different class to teach and keep me on indefinitely until I went up to Oxford. So I decided to stay and, as things turned out, I was there until the end of September 1959, my ability to keep discipline improving greatly with experience and the help of a Day School Teachers’ Conference organised by the Baptist Union and held at St. Augustine’s College, Canterbury in August 1957.

As I look back on those years of teaching before I went to Oxford, I think I can see why God allowed it to happen that way. While I was waiting I was rather frustrated, thinking, Why am I teaching when God has called me to the ministry? But little did I know then that his plan for me was that most of my ministry would be teaching.

And although the major part of my teaching ministry has been to a different age group, even when teaching at degree level in Bible Colleges around the world, I have found that God has given me the ability to teach at a level that everyone can understand, something I repeatedly hear from grateful listeners. And perhaps at least part of that ability is a result of those years I spent teaching less able children while waiting to go to university.

God knows what he is doing, and he always has a purpose in what appear to us to be pointless pauses in our lives. But that brings me to an even more significant purpose in those years of waiting, for it was in those years that I met Eileen, the girl I was to marry and who was to be the ideal person to support me in my ministry.

Meeting Eileen

It was an incredibly hot day that Saturday afternoon. So hot in fact that the railway line buckled in the heat of the sun. It was Saturday 29th June, 1957 and we had arranged a youth rally where the young people from Elm Park Baptist would meet up with Hornchurch Baptist young people for fun and games in the park followed by an open air service.

Although the churches were only two miles apart, before then we had had little contact with them, so I actually knew none of the young people there. People have often asked me how I met Eileen and I have usually replied, In the park!

After a game of rounders, we sat down in groups and had a picnic tea. I noticed a group of four rather attractive girls sitting a few yards away and thought I would like to take a closer look!

So I got up and walked towards them and happened to notice that one of them had taken her shoes off. On impulse, I picked up one of the shoes and ran off with it, with nothing in particular in mind other than just having a bit of fun. Needless to say, the owner of the shoe ran after me but was at something of a disadvantage as she had bare feet. I soon disappeared from view and hid the shoe under the bridge that spanned the park lake.

Of course, when she caught up with me, I felt a bit of an idiot and showed her where the shoe was. We got into conversation and I asked her if she would like to come to our Saturday evening youth club which took place after the open air service. She agreed and, after sharing a song sheet at the open air, I found out that her name was Eileen and that she was just six days older than me. After youth club I walked her home and kissed her goodnight. And that was the beginning of a relationship that lasted, with a short break, for 67 years and which ended only when the Lord called her home at the age of 85.

We agreed to meet again some time the following week, but the next day, after attending church in the morning, I decided to go to Hornchurch Baptist for their evening service in the hope of seeing Eileen again. She and her friend were sitting in the choir and her friend noticed me in the congregation and said to Eileen, He’s here!

After the service we went for a long walk in the park and from then on were to see each other just about every day. I discovered that Eileen had attended Romford County High School and had left after taking her O levels. At the time she was working at Barts (St. Bartholemew’s Hospital) in London, but a year later she accepted a post in the Dagenham Education Office which was closer to home.

But before that, I have to confess that there was a short break in our relationship during the last few months of 1957. I mentioned earlier that I attended a conference in Canterbury during the last week in August of that year. Everyone there was a qualified schoolteacher with the exception of me and one other person, a girl called Irene who was the same age as me and had been accepted to train as a teacher at the Chelsea College for Physical Education in Eastbourne.

Irene was extremely attractive, highly intelligent, and very good at sport – she was nearly good enough to beat me at table tennis! But she was having doubts about her faith, and I spent some time with her trying to encourage her. As a result we were both very attracted to each other and, to cut the story short, because I have never been proud of myself about this, we started to see each other after the conference was over.

When I next saw Eileen I told her, without mentioning Irene, that I felt we had been seeing too much of each other, that our relationship had been getting too intense – which it probably was – and that I thought we should cool it and not see each other for a while.

She later told me that she had not been too concerned because she was convinced that if I was the right one for her, the Lord would bring me back to her. Which he did. The relationship with Irene lasted only a few weeks – until the middle of October, when I went to Eastbourne for a weekend to see her at her college. In short, she jilted me!

But not long before Christmas the young people from Hornchurch Baptist came to Elm Park to take our Friday evening YPF meeting. And who should be singing in the choir but Eileen. I think we spoke briefly after the meeting, just polite conversation, but it was enough to arouse my interest in her again. So I sent her a Christmas card, and she replied by sending me one and enclosing this short poem:

I do believe that God above created you for me to love.

He picked you out from all the rest because he knew I’d love you best.

I had a heart so warm and true, but now it’s gone from me to you.

Take care of it as I have done, for you have two and I have none.

Not the best poetry in the world, but it touched my heart and I wrote to Eileen – I still have a copy of that letter – asking if she would like to resume our relationship. And from January 2^nd 1958 hardly a day passed without our seeing each other.