Monthly Archives: May 2008

Pentecost news – I hope not!

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Sally gives her answers to a “Pentecost Friday 5” of personal questions from her fellow Revgals. I don’t propose to join in this female pastors’ little game. But, in the light of current discussions, here is my answer to the bonus question

What would a modern day news coverage of the first Pentecost have sounded like?

There will be more Baal worshippers than Christians in Jerusalem by the year 50!

According to a new publication Religious Trends, the number of Christians shows a decline from 12 just two months ago to 11 last week. At this rate of decline there will be just two Christians left in 20 years time.

Philip, a spokesperson for the Christians, suggested that these statistics are misleading because they do not take into account new believers such as the reported 3000 converts yesterday.

This evidence seems to prove that this new religion is dead even before it starts. Caiaphas, the Jewish High Priest, told this newspaper that the situation entirely justified the action that the Sanhedrin were planning to stop the Christian leaders preaching.

Let’s hope and pray for better news coverage of this year’s Pentecost, tomorrow.

Moses, Charles Wesley and Todd Bentley

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Maybe some of you, my readers, have been offended by my recent posts about charismatic phenomena and the Todd Bentley revival in Florida. Or maybe you know others who have.

I was a little surprised to read a post by Jim West which, I hope, puts any doubts about these matters into proper perspective. Jim presents a poem by Charles Wesley based on the rather obscure Bible story of Eldad and Medad, Numbers 11:26-30. Here is one stanza:

Moses, the minister of God,
Rebukes our partial love,
Who envy at the gifts bestow’d
On those we disapprove.
We do not our own spirit know,
Who wish to see suppress’d
The men that Jesu’s spirit show,
The men whom God hath bless’d.

Let us indeed have the attitude that Moses had when he said

I wish that all the LORD’s people were prophets and that the LORD would put his Spirit on them!

Numbers 11:29 (TNIV)

Todd Bentley revives Florida, and prays for revival in the UK

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I linked here in passing to the ongoing revival led by Todd Bentley in Lakeland, Florida. You can find out what is going on at Todd’s Fresh Fire Ministries site, which includes a page with live video streaming during the meetings, and recordings of previous ones, although the latest recording currently listed (which I have watched part of) is from 5th May.

The site also includes a blog. The latest post includes a report on Thursday evening’s meeting. Here are two extracts, taken from among many testimonies of healing and deliverance:

What can be said that hasn’t already? What God is doing here in Lakeland, FL is simply indescribable and amazing. As we continue to gather each night the presence comes stronger and like never before. …

=======================================
TODD CALLS EVERYONE UP FROM ENGLAND
=======================================

The line stretches from one side of the arena to the other…
BAM BAM BAM…

The entire line of over 60 people SLAM TO THE FLOOR!!!

THEN, IRELAND AND SCOTLAND… BAM BAM BAM

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PRAY FOR REVIVAL TO BREAK OUT
IN THE UNITED KINGDOM!!!
===============================

Now I can understand why some people are sceptical about this kind of thing. There are times when I have been. I have only seen a small extract from a recording of this, so I don’t know enough about what is happening to give it an unqualified endorsement. But if it is indeed as I have heard reported by people I know and trust, then this is indeed an exciting new movement, and something we need here in the UK and worldwide.

In a comment on this blog Alastair made this good point:

I get wary when I see talk of “revival” and “outpouring” and “annointing” and “angels” but I hear no talk of repentance of sins and no emphasis on Jesus and his work.

Indeed, so do I. But is this a fair description of what is happening in Florida? I asked a trusted friend who has been watching with a somewhat critical eye. When I heard from him I commented:

I had a reply from my friend who has been following what is happening at Lakeland. He tells me that in the morning meetings, attended by thousands, there is “teaching on sin, repentance, love of the Father, Jesus’ death, resurrection and atonement”. The evening meetings, just as large, are more for testimony and ministry, but “there is always talk of salvation and accepting Jesus as Saviour”. This from someone who is not taking this all in uncritically but watching carefully to see if it is OK. So if you “hear no talk of repentance of sins and no emphasis on Jesus and his work”, it may be because you, like me, have not actually had the full Lakeland revival experience.

Christian research confusion

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I feel for Benita Hewitt, the Director of Christian Research, and indeed currently their only full time person. She seems to have found herself in the middle of a media storm about apparently conflicting statistics on her organisation’s newly published Religious Trends 7.

Ruth Gledhill reproduces some tables from this publication giving a clearly shown estimate of church attendance in England in 2050 of 718,100. But this page on Christian Research’s own website, reproducing a March 2008 magazine article supposed to be summarising the figures in Religious Trends 7, gives a figure for church membership in England in 2050 of 1,898,000. That is a discrepancy of over a million! Are these supposed to be members who don’t attend? Even on the higher figure the predicted decline from 3,554,200 attenders or 3,764,000 members in 2000 is worrying, but by no means as catastrophic as the figure quoted by Ruth in The Times, and disputed by me and many others, yesterday.

So, what is going on? Even in the magazine article the final table suggests a total for “churchgoers” in Great Britain (not just England) in 2050 of 0.9 million, which agrees with Ruth’s figures. It also suggests that a mere 3% of those churchgoers will be under 30 – but on what basis are they predicting the habits of people not yet even born?

It seems to me that Christian Research has got its figures mixed up, or else there are some explanations of them in the full report which have not been picked up by newspapers or bloggers. This also illustrates the dangers of extrapolating current trends for long periods in the future

But, as David Keen writes in his take on the situation:

no complacency, the picture is still one of decline, and there’s no reason for folk to pat themselves on the back and reassure themselves with the knowledge that the Titanic isn’t sinking as fast as we thought.

Archbishop not replacing press officer

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Ruth Gledhill writes that

The Archbishop of Canterbury’s director of communications returns to parish work next week and is not being replaced.

Good news or not? During the fiasco over Archbishop Rowan’s sharia law speech his director of communications was clearly not doing a good job. But, if rumours are correct, this was because he was not allowed to do it, but was bypassed by the Archbishop. If so, no surprise that he has resigned, but a disaster that he is not being replaced.

Now I’m not going to go all the way with Ruth’s journalistic complaints about lack of access to bishops at the Lambeth Conference. Anyway she should realise that the way she reported the church attendance figures yesterday is not going to win her or any journalists favour in the eyes of the Anglican authorities. And she can hardly complain about the swimming pool with a view she will enjoy – and can perhaps invite some bishops to share.

But the Archbishop and everyone in the higher echelons of the Church of England need to realise that they have a serious image problem. And the way to do something about that is not to shun the media and do without a press officer.

Lies, damned lies and church attendance statistics

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Both Eddie Arthur and John Richardson have picked up on Ruth Gledhill’s report in The Times Churchgoing on its knees as Christianity falls out of favour. And this is not surprising given the shocking way that the report starts:

Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests.

Ruth goes on to report how these statistics are being seized on by those opposed to the church. In her commentary she, a good Anglican, comments:

The decline forecast for the Church of England is so severe that its position as the established church of the nation with the Queen as Supreme Governor can surely no longer be tenable.

The problem with all of this is that the predictions are in fact quite baseless.

Apparently this research has been published by Christian Research in their statistical analysis Religious Trends. But there is no mention on their website of any publication since the 6th edition apparently in 2006. It is not clear to me whether the press has got hold of pre-publication copies of a new edition, or has simply found and decided to be shocked now by something published years ago.

But it seems clear that this research is deeply flawed – at least in its predictions for the Church of England. The report predicts that C of E attendance will fall to 87,800 in 2050 (the over-precise figure betraying a misunderstanding of statistics). But in fact the attendance figure has been stable for the last decade or so at twenty times that figure, 1.7 million. That stability is because the decline of some churches as older people die off is being balanced well by good growth, often among younger people, in a relatively small number of thriving churches. So there is no reason to foresee any significant decline in the future.

The same point has been all the more clearly by an official Church of England spokesperson. Lynda Barley writes:

These statistics are incomplete and represent only a partial picture of religious trends in the UK today. In recent years, church life has significantly diversified so these traditional statistics are less and less meaningful in isolation … These figures take no account of the rapid growth in ‘Back to Church Sunday’ initiatives that are drawing thousands back to church. Nor, being based purely on numbers in church buildings on Sundays, do they take account of the thousands joining the Church through ‘fresh expressions’ initiatives meeting in other places, on other days.

The figures used for the Church of England are not the actual numbers of Anglican churchgoers, which are carefully counted and published annually, but the smaller, and perhaps still declining, number of people formally signing up to church electoral rolls. Many younger churchgoers are uninterested in church politics and see no point in signing up as formal members. This is likely to include a good proportion of the hundreds of thousands of mostly younger people who are attending churches as the result of initiatives like the Alpha Course, as well as those involved in “fresh expressions”. These are the people who will still be attending churches in 2050, and there are far more than 87,800 of them. The failure to recognise this point is a fundamental flaw in this research.

The comparison with Muslims is also rejected because “the research does not compare like with like”. Instead, it compares those calling themselves Muslims with practising Christians who are formally signed up as church members. Making comparisons of this kind is simply irresponsible. While the Christian organisation which published this misinformation may have intended it as a wake-up call to the church, in fact they have simply played into the hands of those who want to reduce the influence of the Christian faith in our country.

Meanwhile Christian Research are advertising on their home page for a Research Manager. They certainly need one.

UPDATE: While I was writing this, Dave Walker was posting at the Church Times blog his own take on this issue, in the form of a cartoon. Do have a look, and a laugh! Dave also links to two posts on this subject by David Keen, one in which he suggests (in a comment) that the best hope for the church is Bishop Hope, and another in which he explains, in similar terms to me, Why Christian Research is Wrong. In the latter he comments:

As Rowan Williams has pointed out, the media has two main narratives for the church, decline or split, and Christian Research is, sadly, playing straight into these.

FURTHER UPDATE: Dave Walker has posted again with a link to a post at EvangelismUK reporting that the director of Christian Research is distancing herself from the article in The Times, She

describes the article as very misleading. Church attendance once a week is compared to mosque attendance once a year, and no allowance has been made for once a month, once a year, midweek and FX church attendance.

So perhaps the fault here is not with Christian Research but with The Times for sensationally misreporting the statistics. If so, I am surprised at Ruth Gledhill, but maybe she has been badly served by her junior researchers. I hope we will hear more in due course.

Two Anglican priests' thoughts on charismatic experience

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My post on speaking in tongues seems to have stirred up quite some interest. In addition to several comments and the link from Darrell Pursiful which I mentioned in my first follow-up post, it has attracted links from two Anglican priests on the edge of the charismatic movement, Tim Chesterton and Sam Norton.

Tim, once of Essex but now of Canada, dispels any suggestion that for him charismatic experience was something he enjoyed as a teenager in the 1970s but has now grown out of. In his new post he writes about “words of knowledge”. I didn’t mention in my previous posts that these “words of knowledge” are a major part of the prayer ministry at my church (which, sadly, is not well described at its website). Every Sunday morning before the service a group of us pray together and also wait for God to reveal to us specific prayer needs, such as sicknesses which God wants to heal. These are read out in the service before the final time of worship in song and prayer ministry, to encourage people to come forward for prayer for healing etc.

I don’t personally have such words on a regular basis. But a couple of weeks ago I had a sort of vision of someone with a particular health problem sitting in a particular part of the church. I wasn’t at all sure that this was from God and not just my imagination, but I shared it with the group in a very tentative way. Despite my uncertainty this was read out, there was indeed someone with that problem in that part of the church, and they came out for healing prayer.

Now it took a long time for my church to get to the point where that was acceptable; other churches may need to move gradually in that direction.

Sam, still here in Essex, linked to a recent post of his which I had not read before, about his visit to the New Wine Leadership Conference. It is good to see how he is edging towards a greater acceptance of the charismatic movement. To me, as an evangelical Anglican, the kind of “worship” experience which he criticises is quite normal, but I can see why he as a high churchman found it difficult to accept. And if he can’t take Bill Johnson, I certainly wouldn’t recommend to him Todd Bentley!

But I wonder if there is really “an underlying disparagement of the intellect” and “a division between ‘head and heart'” at New Wine. What I have seen is the opposite, a rejection of the division between ‘head and heart’ which underlies the idolatry of the intellect and disparagement of experience so common in many church circles, together with messages intended to appeal holistically to the whole person, including head and heart. I quoted here before Smith Wigglesworth’s 1947 prophecy that

When the Word and the Spirit come together, there will be the biggest movement of the Holy Spirit that the nation, and indeed, the world, has ever seen.

Surely it is this coming together of the Word and the Spirit which New Wine is aiming to achieve. And there are signs that it is beginning to happen.

I’m sure Sam will be happier as a “Charismatic Catholic” than he is in New Wine circles. And I hope on Pentecost Sunday, this Sunday, he will indeed have the courage to carry out his intention to preach about a “release of the spirit”, and that this release becomes not just words or doctrine but a real experience of many in his congregation.

Sam also links to an older autobiographical post of his own, Guarding the Holy Fire, which is long but fascinating. May there be in his parish of Mersea a real visitation of the Holy Spirit, not as an explosive fire which blows itself out (read the post to understand this allusion) but as a long-lasting holy fire which burns up all the rubbish and provides lasting heat and light. Todd Bentley is praying that the revival fire in Florida will light fires all over the world. May this happen even in Mersea, as well as here in Chelmsford. And while I don’t want to wish anything uncomfortable on Sam, he just may find that this revival doesn’t fit his expectations about a proper liturgical setting!

I was interested to see also in this post of Sam’s these words from Marianne Williamson:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. …

Sam gives the whole quote. These words, as seen in a clip from the film Coach Carter (which in fact cuts the quote to leave out the parts about God), formed the basis of a recent sermon at my church’s youth service. It was certainly a powerful sermon. With the Holy Spirit working in us we are indeed “powerful beyond measure”. But for many of us our deepest fear is of allowing that power to work in us (to continue the Williamson quote)

to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. …
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

It is the Holy Spirit who can liberate us from our own fear. May we have the courage to let him do so.

Filled with the Spirit, not with emotionalism

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Dr Platypus, Darrell Pursiful, linked to my last post on speaking in tongues and also gave a link to an older post of his, Filled with the Spirit. That post gives, it seems to me, some very sensible teaching on what baptism and filling with the Holy Spirit really means. But I am not entirely convinced by the distinction he tries to make between pleroo and pimplemi.

Darrell brings up the old chestnut that encouraging the gifts and manifestations of the Holy Spirit, especially speaking in tongues, is in fact encouraging emotionalism. But those of us who have experienced these gifts in our own lives know very well that they are not just matters of emotionalism. Yes, human emotions are affected by the touch of the Holy Spirit, often leading to releases of tears or laughter, and to joyful praise and worship. For some people the Holy Spirit brings release from years of oppression and suppression of emotions, and healing from depression. When the pressure is released the emotions bubble over, like the froth from a newly opened champagne bottle. But in the bottle there is not just froth, there is the beautiful new wine of God’s presence, which is clearly felt and known by those whom the Holy Spirit touches.

Anyway, what Darrell says is true of most churches in western countries, except for some extreme Pentecostal and charismatic ones:

Some will wonder about the danger of emotionalism if such experiences are encouraged. To that I would say that there are no doubt many spiritual dangers facing the churches of which I have been a part for the past forty-some years, but unrestrained emotionalism has rarely been one of them! Rather, the danger for most of us in our relationship with God is not emotionalism but the lack of emotion. Every loving relationship involves emotions. There must be more than emotion—things like friendship, communication, honesty, trust, and so forth—but if I never showed emotion toward the people I love, something would be missing.

Meanwhile there is an amazing revival going on in Lakeland, Florida, led by Todd Bentley. Apparently there have been meetings there every night for more than a month, with wonderful miracles happening. This has been showing on God TV (late every evening here in the UK), and also as live streaming from this site, with (rather poor quality) recordings of previous meetings available at all times. Christian leaders from all over the world are flying to Florida to catch the fire from this revival. I have just been watching some of this – the evening meeting from 5th May, starting after the “worship” about 90 minutes into the four hour broadcast and listening for about 40 minutes.

Now Todd Bentley, a tattooed former drug dealer from Canada, is not everyone’s style. He is certainly very different from the other preachers from British Columbia I have mentioned here recently. His preaching is not classic expository preaching, and I’m sure he makes no claim that it is. He is quite deliberately appealing to his congregation’s emotions rather than to their intellects. Not everyone likes this, I know. I have seen some really rather ridiculous criticism of what is going on in Lakeland. But it should be clear from watching it that people are being touched by the power of the Holy Spirit and their lives are being changed. I believe this is God’s work. If others are not convinced, they should at least follow Gamaliel’s principle in Acts 5:38,39, and remember what happened to those who opposed Moses.

Google found for me an excellent post on the subject by John Allister, who quotes Greg Haslam quoting Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Here is part of John’s post:

But just because we have the Holy Spirit, that does not mean that we have the fullness of experience of the Holy Spirit.

And if someone asks “Surely we got it all automatically when we believed?” Dr Lloyd-Jones replied “If you have got it all, why are you so unlike the New Testament Christians? Got it all? Got it all at your conversion? Well, where is it, I ask?”

Filled with the Holy Spirit by Greg Haslam in Preach the Word

Should all Christians speak in tongues?

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Brian Fulthorp, a Pentecostal pastor, has opened up discussion of speaking in tongues, with two reports on books, a review of the 40th anniversary edition of John Sherrill’s book They Speak with Other Tongues, and a brief notice of a new book Initial Evidence. Tim Chesterton also mentioned speaking in tongues in a great post which is in effect his testimony of how he became a Christian.

Like Tim, I first prayed in tongues here in Essex in the 1970s. In fact I can tell you the date, 11th April 1979, and the precise spot, 51°42’54.32″N 0°31’9.58″E (according to Google Earth). The evening before I had had a long talk with some older Christians about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, at the end of which I let them pray for me. Nothing happened at that moment, and I was left confused, but the next evening as I went for a walk to think and pray about what had happened, I suddenly started to speak in tongues. In fact the words came out in a flood. as if a dam had broken, and at the same time I felt a great release of previously dammed up joy and peace. I have been praying in tongues on and off since that day, so for nearly 30 years, and in general consider it helpful as part of my prayer life.

My initial reluctance to accept this gift was largely because of the teaching on the Baptism of the Holy Spirit which seemed to go with it. According to the kind of teaching I heard (although maybe they didn’t intend to put it quite like this), since before that day I didn’t speak in tongues, I must have been some kind of second class Christian, and what I needed to become first class was to experience something called the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. The way to know that I had received this would be if I spoke in tongues. This is more or less the classic Pentecostal doctrine of Initial Evidence which Brian refers to. And it was this teaching which was a stumbling block to me as a young Christian, a recent graduate, well schooled in UCCF‘s brand of evangelicalism. Nevertheless, I was hungry then as now for all the good things God had for me, and so I let these people pray for me to receive this Baptism of the Holy Spirit.

At that time, the late 1970s and the early 1980s, a lot of well known Christian authors were writing their books giving their different perspectives on this Baptism of the Holy Spirit. Some embraced the Pentecostal doctrine. Some rejected speaking in tongues as demonic, or at least as unhelpful emotionalism. But the most convincing, to me at least, were the ones which concluded that speaking in tongues is a genuine and good gift from God, one which Christians should seek, but not evidence of or a prerequisite for a full Christian life.

And that is basically the position I have come to over the years. I continue to speak in tongues, and to encourage and pray for others to do so if they want to. But I don’t condemn those who don’t speak in tongues or don’t want to as unspiritual or second class Christians. I am happy to work alongside Pentecostals as long as they don’t make too big a thing of this gift, and alongside those who don’t speak in tongues as long as they don’t reject me because of my experience and the way I pray.

So, what of the Baptism of the Holy Spirit? I know that this is the name often given to the very clear experience, accompanied by speaking in tongues, which I had. And I don’t reject the name as long as it is not associated too dogmatically with what John the Baptist prophesied about the ministry of Jesus:

I baptise you with [footnote: Or in] water, but he will baptise you with [footnote: Or in] the Holy Spirit.

Mark 1:8 (TNIV)

I believe that all Christians receive the Holy Spirit at conversion, and perhaps this is what John was referring to in this verse. Nevertheless, many who profess to be Christians have never had any experience of the Holy Spirit working in them. That is the position I was in as a student in a UCCF group. I knew my doctrine backwards, but only in my head, but I knew I was missing out on something, especially when I met Christians who had experienced the reality of the Holy Spirit at work in their lives.

In my church these days we don’t make a big thing about speaking in tongues. And I think this is wise. But in line with practice at for example Soul Survivor and Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship, we pray for people, whether already Christian or not, and expect them to have an experience of the reality of the Holy Spirit. For those not already Christians, this will be accompanied by repentance and faith; for those already Christians, this will be some kind of second experience. The evidence or manifestation of this experience is very varied – it may be shaking, or tears, or laughter, or even the infamous Toronto Blessing animal noises, or it may just be an inner sense of peace or joy. Such experiences can be repeated. But somehow having had one once is enough to change a person’s life, because they suddenly realise, not just in their heads but deep in their hearts, that God is real, alive, and working inside them.

When you have experienced all that, it somehow seems petty to try to insist that this experience is only fully valid if the evidence is speaking in tongues.

Michael Reid and his bulldog

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This may well come out as post number 500 on this blog. But it is not really my 500th post – in fact only the 448th published post. I don’t know why there is such a discrepancy. So I won’t mark this in any special way as I have in the past with such milestones.

My rather quickly written post on The fall of Bishop Michael Reid has unexpectedly proved to be one of my most popular, attracting 1365 hits so far and so putting it in third place behind Pope Benedict, Bible scholars, and the Antichrist (6420, almost all in three days) and Why is Easter so early this year? (2798). Many of the Michael Reid hits have come from Google searches. There is obviously a lot of interest, especially here in Essex, in what has happened to this long controversial and now disgraced pastor. But there is not much information available.

The Michael Reid Ministries website is still working under that name but is now just a synonym for the site of Reid’s former church, Peniel in Brentwood. There is now no mention, except in the page header, of Reid or his resignation. Even the Peniel College URL now links to this same page, but the Peniel Academy, Peniel TV and Michael Reid Publishing sites are unavailable. (The last four links were found in a Google cache.)

The Michael Reid Miseries site has not been updated recently. Among the few bloggers to report this story are Chris Lazenby of Midlands Bible College and Divinity School, Richard Bartholomew, and Simon Jones whose post which I mentioned before sparked a long and sometimes vitriolic comment thread. The most recent posts are those of Johli Baptist (John Race), part 1 and part 2.

The most informative site about the situation is the Reachout Trust forum. Most of the discussion is in one long thread, 29 pages, at Reachout Trust. This thread was closed on 1st May, because it was going off topic and allegations were being made about Reid which are, it is said, being investigated by the police. Of course it is right to avoid passing on potentially libellous allegations, but in some ways it is even worse to hint that some are being investigated without giving any details. It is reported that Reid is back in the UK, but also that there is a court order preventing him from returning to church property including his former home. There is some more recent news on this thread at the same site; see also this thread.

The boredom of the long Reachout Trust thread was broken by this charming story from former Peniel member Jacob:

Back when I was a humble student and first visiting Peniel, I remember on one of my first visits when I was just getting to know ‘his nibs’ :lol: (so I got to see his ‘nice’ side…. the bit the security guards need to be wary of). On one of my earliest visits he was in bed sick (at least I assume that’s what he was doing in bed… after recent revelations, who knows!!) :lol:

As I said, my only encounters with Reid at that point had been friendly, I was a visitor – and he didnt know much about me either at that stage. So I suggested to some of the other young people that I had been getting to know that we get him a get-well card, we happened to be in town, and while I was in the card shop in Brentwood high street, I spotted a soft toy – in fact, I think it was spotting the soft toy that inspired me to get it for him as a ‘get well’ present, with a card.

It was a bull dog, wearing a T shirt with the slogan ‘be reasonable, do it my way’. It was interesting the response of the other young people…. they obviously knew the ‘other side’ of Reid, and were a bit nervous about getting something so very cheeky – but I was quite a confident, witty chap back then (nothing’s changed as you can tell from my posts… I’m back to my old self…. Peniel tried to knock it out of me but it survived 19 years!).

So I bought it, and the present was delivered…. and we heard nothing back.

However years later, when I was at Testimony House for some reason, I got to peep into the hallowed bedroom – and was very gratified to see the toy there, complete with T shirt, occupying pride of place beside the bed! Obviously the great man like it…. who doesnt like a bit of a cheeky joke… especially when it’s true!

So for all his faults the man has a human humour-loving side.