Fallen—but HOW?

29th August 2014

By Norman Walford

Last week on the golf course, we encountered a troop of monkeys whose members had picked out one of their number and seemed to be trying to drown him/her in one of the large ponds that are scattered along the course. We scared them away. The victim was left standing alone by the water, staring around him disconsolately. 

Are We Getting Better … Or Worse?

by Norman Walford

This month I've been struggling through one of the so-called all-time greats of Christian literature—that is, “The City of God” by St Augustine of Hippo. Listening to it as an audiobook, I can just about keep going. If I had to read it in print, I wouldn't have a chance. It's very long and very pedantic. It starts out as total tedium, brightens up for a few chapters in the middle, and then the relapses back into total boredom. 

Your Wife Divorced You WHY??

by Norman Walford

“My wife divorced me because she said I wasn’t spiritual enough.”

Wintering in an Alpine ski resort has given me opportunity of meeting all kinds of interesting people who have made their homes here temporarily or permanently. Some of these I meet in our little Anglican Church congregation and some out in the wider community. In the old days ski bum was the preserve of the teens and twenties; now you get them in their 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. They all have a story to tell, and perhaps even a skeleton or two in the cupboard.

The above-quoted remark came out casually from a church member.

Oh Juno! … What Have You Done?

By Norman Walford

This is the week that I found out that the publisher of my book How to Survive in the Pharisee Church has collapsed after being taken over by a fundamentalist Pharisee cult. Everyone else seems to have seen this thing coming for about the last two years. For me, who’s supposed to know about Pharisee things, I’ve just found out. Wake up Norman! Show a bit of interest in what’s going on around you …

St Gregory ... Wonder-worker or Try-Harder?

by Norman Walford  

The history books have not been kind to St Gregory the Try-harder.

He has no Wikipedia entry. Until recently if you Googled him you wouldn’t have got a single hit, though happily that’s starting to change now. In the annals of church history he has become, strangely, something of a nonentity.

Why he has been neglected for so long is a bit of mystery. It may simply be that our Gregory never achieved anything in his life worthy of being recorded for posterity. That is after all the common fate of those who try to live the Christian life according to the try-harder philosophy (I wouldn’t want to dignify it by calling it a theology.) As I mentioned last week, there is a basic spiritual principle that the harder we try the less we achieve. Some people sadly go their whole lives and never figure this one out. Others—and I include myself in these—understand the principle pretty clearly but nonetheless find themselves falling in and out of the try-harder mentality on a regular basis. Perhaps Gregory was just one of these.

St Gregory-the-Try-Harder ... A Convoluted Tale of Two Churches

by Norman Walford

“You do know he wears make-up, don’t you?”

This was one of the milder comments I got when I announced to a few select friends that after 14 years of struggling to find my place in the Pharisee Church of St Gregory-the-Try-Harder, I was throwing in the towel. From now on I would be transferring my allegiance to Nearly Creative, the rapidly growing megachurch down the road, and its secretive, multicoloured, multicultural, senior pastor—his real name is a closely guarded secret so I’ll just call him “JP” for now. (Not JC, that’s already taken.) He of the make-up. I’m not sure what colour lipstick he wears—I’ve never got close enough to find out, and I probably never will. Such is the massive popularity of the church I’m just happy if I can get in through the door on a Sunday morning, forget any thoughts of getting close enough to the front** to check his mascara isn’t running under the lights.

Universalism - Did Paul Really Believe in Hell?

by Norman Walford    16th January 2014

Talking about Jesus and Hell last week, I mentioned briefly that St Paul never uses any of the standard Hell-words such as Gehenna, Hades, or the lake of fire, such as we find elsewhere in the New Testament . I was surprised at this, and surprised at myself also that I’ve taken so many years to discover such a basic fact. Sometimes we just see what we expect to see and filter out the rest.

I got curious about that, so this week I’m asking the question for my own benefit as much as for anyone else’s, if Paul doesn’t use these words, then what words does he use, what does he mean by them, and what did he actually think about ‘Hell and all that’.

Universalism – Did Jesus Believe in Hell?

by Norman Walford   10th January 2014

I had a serious shock a couple of months ago when a Christian friend of many years’ standing whom I have always held in high regard started dropping hints that he was moving in the direction of Christian Universalism—the doctrine that says that all men without exception with eventually be reconciled to God, that the penalty for sin is not everlasting.

I confronted him with the question So do you think that Jesus Christ himself believed in Universalism? and after some prevarication he replied that there

A New Beginning – Is it REALLY That Simple?

by Norman Walford
4th January 2014

28 years ago last month, I resigned my job in a respectable London hospital and headed for the ski slopes of Switzerland. I remember dire warnings from my boss that I would never get another job again, but I wasn't too worried. When you've got God on your side, you can take risks that others can't. I knew He would look after me, and so it proved. It broke a bondage in my life, and looking back it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

Now 28 years later I'm doing something similar, again back on the ski slopes of Switzerland but this time mainly to write not to ski.  Life is very short, and the older you get the shorter it looks. Like the saying goes, "No one ever lay on their deathbed and said I wish I'd spent more time working." I get a bit of correspondence back from what I write, and some of it shocks me. Yesterday I replied to someone who told me the way to get close to God is to read the bible for a minimum of four hours a day, and believe me they get much worse than that! One thing I've finally learned is that we don't get to God by trying harder, and in fact trying harder is often the surest road to becoming the ultimate Pharisee.