andy cottingham

Just a quick suggestion for people who might be looking for Christmas present ideas. We’ve put together a recommended book list of titles we can really endorse. Follow this link to ‘Shelfari’ or enter this URL in your browser address bar http://www.shelfari.com/tcchoniton you can click on books you like and find them in Amazon.

Books are for life not just for Christmas

Summer holidays presents many challenges; The break of routine, children who need to be usefully occupied, brains that require focusing etc I find that my thinking needs to be kept in order when I have a significant break in routine. This is a short document I have used for the last few years, seeking to help people survive the summer holidays without loosing their focus on Jesus. It can be tucked into your bible and provides a framework for the holidays. I hope you find it helpful.

Download ‘Survive the Summer’

The badge holders have been handed in, the glossy magazines lie discarded and the 5000 delegates have scattered, once again, to the ‘ends of the earth’. So what is the lasting effect of another Together on a Mission conference?

I have enough history to remember Downs Bible week with, to my mind, impressive clarity. It was where I first served at a Christian event and I guess is therefore partly the reason I’m sitting here now. We began by offering to help out on the doughnut stand and ended 10 years later at Stoneleigh Bible week leading the 11-12’s ministry.

I terms of lasting effect from the content of ‘conferences’ I recall such prophetic preaching that we would leave with confidence that we ‘knew what to work on for the next year’. I was speaking to a young lad a couple of days ago who volunteered exactly the same confidence having been to Newday for the last few years.

The privilege of sitting under such prophetic preaching is impossible to quantify – I suggest you try and explain it next time you sit down with the local ‘churches together’ group.

I personally know people who now are moving house & continent to pursue God’s call, people who are embarking on training and radically re-thinking the plan for their lives. Others, mine included, whose thinking about mission has probably been changed forever and that dear friends changes everything.

This year’s TOAM was so much more than a ‘Christian jolly on the coast’  it was a life changing encounter with God the affect of which will probably only be fully appreciated in eternity. Thank you to everyone who has worked so hard to make them happen.

Last year I was able to track through the Newfrontiers ‘Together on a Mission’ conference and give daily updates. This year I thought I’d do an ‘after conference summary’. I often find that in the personal, incidental, conversations in cafes and corridors and minutes caught between sessions God is powerfully moving.

For me the over-riding sense of what God was saying was to be overwhelmingly mission orientated. We all wear coloured glasses when we approach the Bible. I’ve done it all my life. I looked back a few years ago at an old bible I had as a young christian. The underlinings followed a consistent theme, namely what I needed to do to please God. The glasses I was wearing were, try to please God by doing the right thing glasses.

You’ll be pleased to hear I’ve got some new ones, grace glasses, they make for a more balanced viewing. I also have faith glasses, I find myself looking for stories of trust and faith. I guess I have lots of other glasses too.

But I feel like I’ve just been given a huge pair of missions glasses. I think my preaching has been insipid and weak, I feel a passionate urgency to preach the gospel and see lives changed in the power of Jesus Christ.

More from TOAM 08 soon…

or catch up on adrianwarnock.com

Continuing our short, impromptu series focused around the Zimbabwean elections I thought it might be timely to consider our own financial blessings, as a nation. While this clearly flies in the face of an economic downturn the blessings  we experience  are no less  dramatic.

We are fickle creatures relying on a pretty finely tuned environment before we are satisfied. A few pounds more and we’d be content, a few less and misery closes in. I don’t want to belittle the genuine economic challenges many are facing but I do want to give some perspective to the overwhelming doom and gloom being peddled my the media.

In view of more thankful perspective

UK inflation – 2.5% (an item costing £1 today will cost approximately £1.3p in a year)

Zimbabwean inflation – 150,000% (Z$1 today Z$150,000 in a year)

Practically this means a number of things, when you are paid in Zimbabwe (if you are amongst the 1 in 5 that have a job) you need to spend your wages on that day or it becomes worthless. Items could cost 400 times more from one day to the next.

In order to buy anything Zimbabweans have to carry bags of cash – it’s not uncommon for people to have bundles of hundreds of millions of dollars packed into rucksacks when trying to buy the most simple commodities.

Friends of ours are eating rice, brought over the border from South Africa added to any vegetables they have managed to grow in their garden. They also, in what may be considered an irony, have to drinking the water from their swimming pool. The telephones have stopped working and there hasn’t been electricity for months. Occasionally a mobile phone will function, occasionally!!

For many life is comprised of rushing after the rumor of food, toilet paper or the vain hope of some other previously plentiful commodity.

Our taps work, we can buy bread for a few pence in a grotesquely overstocked supermarket and my mobile phone never stops ringing.

Even those in our society with ‘nothing’ have access to a world-class social services system that would render them multi-billionaires in Zimbabwe.

So while we batten down the hatches and seek to weather the economic storm please pray for our brothers and sisters who are having poverty redefined for them on a daily basis.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” (Edmund Burke)

This is a reflection of a biblical truth

Anyone, then, who knows the good he ought to do and doesn’t do it, sins.

James 4 : 7 

It is beyond credibility that any thinking person, let alone politician, genuinely believes that Robert Mugabe has not lost any democratic mandate to ‘govern’ Zimbabwe. He and his ruling Zanu-PF party have manipulated this election in a thousand ways and have still lost!!

Is the world really going to watch as he saunters away with another term as, self-styled dictator?

The popular image of Christ is as ‘gentle Jesus, meek and mild’ – the Bible has a bit of a shock for you if this is your sole reference point for Jesus.

 11I saw heaven standing open and there before me was a white horse, whose rider is called Faithful and True. With justice he judges and makes war. 12His eyes are like blazing fire, and on his head are many crowns. He has a name written on him that no one knows but he himself. 13He is dressed in a robe dipped in blood, and his name is the Word of God. 14The armies of heaven were following him, riding on white horses and dressed in fine linen, white and clean. 15Out of his mouth comes a sharp sword with which to strike down the nations. “He will rule them with an iron scepter.”[a] He treads the winepress of the fury of the wrath of God Almighty. 16On his robe and on his thigh he has this name written:
KING OF KINGS AND LORD OF LORDS.

Revelation 19 : 11-16 

This image of a tattooed warrior is a stark contrast to the bearded hippie we are often sold by the media. This is the Jesus we will face and give an account of how we lived and what we did.

Justice will be done, and seen to be done – the wait is sometimes frustrating but the one who underwrites the promise is faithful.

My plea to good men, faced with a difficult decision regarding the current situation in Zimbabwe is – DO SOMETHING! the one fighting with you loves justice and is exceedingly powerful.

5 Is this the kind of fast I have chosen,
only a day for a man to humble himself?
Is it only for bowing one’s head like a reed
and for lying on sackcloth and ashes?
Is that what you call a fast,
a day acceptable to the LORD ?

7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?

Isaiah 58 : 5-7 

The Bible was written, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, by people often familiar with oppression. God is by no means indifferent to injustice and the plight of the oppressed.

He is angry about injustice and oppression and so should we be.

The current joke of an election in Zimbabwe should make your blood boil!!

I am privileged to count a number of Zimbabweans among my friends and knowing them to be such wonderful, generous people makes the crimes of the current Zimbabwean government all the more infuriating.

I guess the question for Christians is how to respond to this kind of obvious oppression?

1) We need to pray, with psalmist  -

Arise, O LORD!
Deliver me, O my God!
Strike all my enemies on the jaw;
break the teeth of the wicked. 

Psalm 3 : 7 

Break the teeth in the mouths of the wicked – remove their power. We know a day is coming when, justice will flow like a river. Until that day we wait.

2) As well as praying and to inform our prayers and action we must take the lead form those living under the oppressive regime. We have an unfortunate tendency to become very cerebral in our response people actually experiencing these things are often far more pragmatic. What are the Christians in Zimbabwe saying and more importantly what is God saying to them?

The answer is both surprising and humbling – their reaction over the past few years has been that God has allowed all this that we see now and have seen for years now for his glory. The church has grown in faith and swelled numerically, lives are being changed, transformed in the midst of this serious oppression.

So we pray, believe and stand with all Zimbabweans asking that God will bring a peaceful resolution to this farce – and yes we get angry!! which should fuel our prayers.