Category Archives: Experiences

Posts relating to personal experiences, my own and those of others

10-20-30

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Doug has tagged me with a new meme 10-20-30. I have been asked remember what you were doing 10, 20 and 30 years ago. So here goes:

1997: For most of the year I was home on furlough from my Bible translation work. By the end of October I was back in the capital city where I was based and getting on with checking the Old Testament translation.

1987: I started my second year of studies at London Bible College, now London School of Theology, and was enjoying getting to grips with biblical languages and with theological issues – but also, in retrospect, becoming less personally in tune with God.

1977: I graduated in physics from the University of Cambridge, and stayed on for a one year course in theoretical physics (in other places it would probably count as an MA course). At the time I intended to work on a PhD in this area, but by the next summer I had changed my mind, and so took the job which brought me to my current home in Chelmsford.

In response I will tag Lingamish, Eddie Arthur and Tim Chesterton.

My ancestral home

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This week I spent a few days visiting friends in Sheffield, and included a day out in the beautiful Peak District, in perfect autumn weather. See my photos in this Facebook album. During this day I paid a brief visit this week to my ancestral home. No, not the one in this first picture, which is Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, although I greatly enjoyed walking around its grounds. But the house I have in mind dates from the same period. The first house at Chatsworth was built in 1552, but the current house dates from around 1700.

The house I really want to talk about here belonged to and was probably built by my ancestor Arnold Kyrke, and an inscription “AK 1559” gives its approximate date. Continue reading →

Prof Charlie Moule

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I just received news of the death of Prof C.F.D. Moule, “Known to all as ‘Charlie'”. He passed away yesterday, aged 98. I knew him when I was an undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge, and he was a famous professor near to retiring age. Nevertheless, he was an outstanding example of Christian humility and gentle wisdom, so much so that it was impossible for me to get him to walk through a narrow doorway ahead of me. He regularly served breakfast to us students in his rooms after services in the college chapel.

There is already a short obituary on the college website. I have pointed out to the college a couple of minor errors (which may be corrected later): he was still supporting the Dean in the time (also my time at the college) when Arthur Peacocke was his successor; and when he retired from his university post he moved initially to nearby Ridley Hall, Cambridge, where I remember visiting him, and presumably only later to Pevensey. The obituary notes his scholarship and particularly his important role in translating the New English Bible. It does not mention his 1959 book “An Idiom Book of New Testament Greek”, which remains influential – I still see it referred to from time to time, and it is still in print from Cambridge University Press.

Although I had had no personal contact with Prof Moule for nearly 30 years, I was sad to hear of the loss of a man who was in many little ways a role model to me of the Christian life.

Does the Gospel change our lives?

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This is the basic question to which Joe Dongell is trying to answer in a pair of lectures posted at Ben Witherington’s blog.

Too often the Christian message is presented along the lines that if we believe and/or do the right things now, everything will turn out all right for us after we die, but that we should not expect anything to happen to us before that. We should of course attempt to stop sinning and do good Christian things like going to church. But the only changes in our lives will be what we bring about ourselves; God does nothing for us, at least nothing which we can perceive, until the day of our death.

Dongell argues for a very different version of the Christian gospel, in which believers can expect God to act in their lives to make a real change in them. Continue reading →

My personality type

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Things have been quiet here. I have been remarkably busy considering that I am effectively without a job at the moment. I have been posting daily thoughts on my readings on Isaiah at qaya thoughts, but as noted in the tagline there these are unpolished thoughts, and in fact not very profound especially if read outside the context of my thinking about such matters.

Part of the reason I have been busy is that there has been so much to read on other blogs. Among those has been Wayne Leman’s post on Bible translation and personality types, which has prompted lots of comments and several posts on other blogs (such as here and here, but none of them are showing up as links). I am still waiting to see how Wayne can link the two halves of his post title. I commented giving my own personality type, but well down in the comments so probably most of you won’t have spotted it. Anyway, I couldn’t put in a comment the following graphic which summarises the results.

Click to view my Personality Profile page

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The Caleb Generation

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The title of this post is in some ways an odd one because there was no Caleb generation, apart from Joshua and Caleb himself.

Of course Caleb did have a whole lot of contemporaries among the Israelites. But, apart from the probably much younger Joshua, they were very different people from Caleb. They grumbled and rebelled against Moses, and they were afraid to go into the Promised Land when God told them to, but presumed to try to go when God told them not to. Only Caleb and Joshua had the faith to go when God said “Go”, and to wait when he did not. As a result, God punished the entire generation, apart from those two, with early death.

And so, when the time came for the conquest of the land, Caleb, aged nearly 80 (see Joshua 14:7,10), was twenty years older than any of the other surviving Israelites, apart from Joshua. Yet Caleb was by no means ready to retire; five years into the conquest, at age 85, he could still say

I am still as strong today as the day Moses sent me out; I’m just as vigorous to go out to battle now as I was then.

Joshua 14:11 (TNIV)

It seems that the God who had caused all the other Israelites to die by age 60 had miraculously preserved Caleb’s health and strength for 45 years.

So it was perhaps a little strange that at Soul Survivor, which I came home from just over a week ago, Mike Pilavachi preached about the Caleb generation, about how we should have faith like Caleb did. Continue reading →

One for all and all for one

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My post at Better Bibles Blog One for all and all for one? discusses how to come up with one Bible version acceptable to everyone in a language group, in answer to some questions from Doug Chaplin and ElShaddai Edwards. In the group I was working with, in which there are only a few churches and a few thousand Christians, the translation team was able to produce a Bible more or less acceptable to all. I don’t hold out much hope for it working for English language speakers. But those of you my readers who are interested in my personal experiences might like to read this post.

ElShaddai and me

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ElShaddai Edwards writes Yes, that’s really my name…, with some interesting reflections on what it is like to live with a name of God as one’s first name. He seems daunted by the special responsibility this gives him.

I can understand a little of what ElShaddai means. I was given the name of the leader of the apostles (although perhaps more because it was a traditional name in my father’s family), which is well known to mean “rock”. And my surname effectively means “the Lord’s”; “kirk” is northern English dialect for “church”, from Greek kuriakos “belonging to the lord”. So I feel the responsibility to be the Lord’s rock in all that I say or do, especially in Christian ministry, and on this blog which I consider to be part of that ministry.

ElShaddai is right to quote

The warning that “not many should become teachers, my brothers, knowing that we will receive a stricter judgment” (James 3:1, HCSB) …

But this applies to all of us in Christian ministry, not just to him, not even especially to him. None of us can be confident in ourselves that what we do will not “be tragically misused for [our] personal gain and selfish heart”; we have to continue to walk with Christ and trust him to keep our hearts on the right path. And we all know times when we have failed, and need to repent and be restored. But the awareness ElShaddai has of his own weakness is perhaps the best safeguard he can have that he can succeed in Christian ministry. I too am aware of many times when I have failed and of my continuing weakness. I hope and pray that I may continue to have this awareness, but I won’t let it stop me moving on into whatever ministry God is calling me to.

Meeting Tim Chesterton and Paul Trathen

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It has been good to meet my fellow bloggers Tim Chesterton and (rather briefly) Paul Trathen. I don’t think I have mentioned Paul here before; his blog is called the journey home. I have mentioned Tim’s blog An Anabaptist Anglican, but perhaps not his other blog Tale Spin which is more about his music and his story-telling. Tim is an Anglican pastor in Edmonton, Canada, but originally from here in Essex. Paul is also an Anglican priest, but still is here in Essex.

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