3.3
Christianity and
the Church
The church at Coleford seemed very strange to me; the interior was black-painted[61], with a gallery on three sides, and an egg-cup pulpit in the centre. The organ (to which I was introduced fairly quickly, as a holiday-time “reserve”) was at the back centre of the gallery. And the schoolroom was two or three doors away up the road. Mum and Dad had of course been welcomed and settled in – I seemed (to me) to be a visitor. But the folk there still managed to welcome me, and two (Mr Horwood and Mr Harris[62]) helped me find holiday work.
The
first term at Portsmouth was one of church-seeking; I visited one or two,
including one where a distant cousin of Mum’s was a minister, but with no joy.
Then one day (I think early in the second term) I went a little off my regular
route to college, and arrived for the morning service at Devonshire Avenue
Baptist Church (pictured in 1961-2). In the porch was a man with grey hair, who
asked me if I was a student; as I had the college scarf, some 6-foot long,
draped round my shoulders at the time, I thought that was fairly obvious, but
said “yes”, whereupon I was invited to his home for tea. I more-or-less
immediately decided that this was probably the church for me – and so it
proved. I shortly discovered that the minister there, John Scott Thorburn, had
been at Spurgeon’s College with Dad, but was slightly younger – it was he who
told me that my father was called “Dad Harris” by the other students, being a
little older and willing to help anyone. I found him very easy to listen to.
The other advantage was a significant number of young people in the church,
within a few years of me, and I soon latched onto them and joined their
get-togethers.
This was the first church where I was an “independent person”, no-one there (other than Scott Thorburn) knowing my parents. That was good for me. At college, my mind was being stretched in many ways, and at this church I think my spiritual life was also being tested; Scott Thorburn’s sermons had a distinct evangelistic twist, but enough there too to stimulate the mind. So it was in the first year that I started thinking through where I stood with regard to the Christian faith; up to leaving home, church and Christianity was just a part of life, perhaps taken for granted – was that all it was, or did I really believe? I suppose I approached it with a mixture of logic/reason and faith – analysing anything about God from a human starting-point I rejected intuitively as futile, but I started to try to reason from God’s viewpoint. Eventually, I got to the part of my maths course where we started thinking about the nature of light, ending up with the dual or quantum theory – this says (heavily paraphrased!) that “light is neither physical (particles) nor abstract (waves); it is both at the same time, and which aspect you see depends on how you’re looking at it”. This we were able to reason about and accept, but it proved the logical key to a question I was grappling with in terms of faith; was Jesus human or divine? I decided that if science accepted that light had a simultaneous dual nature, it was quite permissible to believe that Jesus, the Light of the World, could too; sometimes we look at him and see Him as a human being, sometimes as God Himself, but He is both at the same time.
The next step was “if I have accepted that”, is there any point searching for other intellectual problems to grapple with; the answer was “no” – the dual nature of Jesus had been taught for some 1900 years before science found a parallel, so I was quite content to trust other “slightly strange” parts of Christian theology; also, I found that there was reason and logic in the basic tenets of the faith – if God exists, he is “better” than anything we can imagine, therefore he must be pure and holy, therefore must hate sin and injustice – and from the divine logic, the need for salvation and redemption follows. It all made sense to me (without having the answers to all questions, I had answered enough), and I realised that my mind and my heart both agreed that I did trust Jesus Christ as my Saviour. So the next step was baptism, and on broaching the subject at home, discovered that Rosalie had also asked, so she, Tony Court and I were all baptised by Dad at Coleford, on September 29th 1963. I have never regretted that decision.
The rest of my time at Southsea (and Coleford in the holidays) went very happily; I was very well accepted at Devonshire Avenue – elsewhere I mention my involvement with music and (briefly) scouts – and had frequent invitations for meals, which were welcome to a student in digs! Mr and Mrs Brown in particular were most kind to me; their son Howard, who while I was there completed A-levels and went on to study as an Accountant, came twice to Coleford for a visit (and I think wrote once or twice to Rosalie), and their daughter Maureen became a special friend. I celebrated my 21st at their home – on Mums advice, I bought a chicken, and Mrs Brown turned it into a celebration meal for us all. And through it all, my faith grew.
I became a member of Coleford Baptist Church (accepted Sept 25th 1963, welcomed 3rd November), but then transferred to Devonshire Avenue B C Southsea (accepted Jan 1965, welcomed 7th Feb 1965).
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