Spurgeon's College - Reflections 

20th September
A couple of days after the Spurgeon’s thanksgiving service, I’m left with some abiding impressions.  The experience of hearing several hundred church leaders, who happened to be singing towards me, (people whose whole lives are oriented towards serving the Kingdom of God, singing from the heart, many of whom share in the scars of the cross through that service) has changed me, softened some of the hard edges with which we protect ourselves, the sound worm of the hymns and songs carries that Spirit infused foretaste of worship in heaven with me.

The preaching by David Coffey caused me to think quite deeply about the free will - providence tension and come to my own resolution which unsurprisingly leans heavily towards Arminianism whilst reflecting through the lens of the cross,  that God subverts evil and even transforms it into the means of healing by carrying it on the cross and burying it in the grave, (I think that is a form of providence on the macro scale) and that such a loving self sacrificing God can only be related to ideas like the rather dubious concept of predestination through the notion of divine foreknowledge of the decisions made through free will. (Calvin, doesn’t get my vote! And further reading of a Greek Orthodox Theologian will follow.)

The kindness reflected in all the arrangements spoke so well of the ethos of the college.

The fact that a diverse group of people with very different stances in the theological spectrum could come together in this way was also, I’m sure, a foretaste of heaven.

There was also opportunity to chat over food with people I’ve worked very closely with in the past.

I’m left reflecting that the reality of Baptist Ministry in some churches can be a bear-pit and that I am, by Gods grace, one of less than half of the people I trained with who have survived as a Minister. So I mourn not only the passing of the college but also the loss of a number of perfectly good Ministers, and I’m grateful that my present and previous pastorates have been in predominantly kind churches. Albeit with a couple of bear-pit experiences earlier on.

I’m also relieved to discover that my blend of traditional hymns and contemporary worship songs with a liturgical structure appears to be more mainstream than I thought. Thank you, Nigel Wright for such a wisely constructed and beautiful service. (Maybe I’m not as weird as I feared.) 😂

So I will continue to pray for all those people most affected by the closure of the college, to be thankful to have been there at what was probably its peak, and in the face of its loss, to trust that in the upside down economy of his coming kingdom, God uses life’s trials, tribulations and even apparent disasters to subvert the intentions of evil and bring about good from difficult things.