Slightly Reverend
It was a bedraggled, sad, place. The shell - the walls, the roof and
floor were intact, but little else. Every single fitting and every pane
of glass was distributed around the floor in a carpet of chaos. The big
wooden cross from the wall lay on top of the pyramid of scrap items
heaped in the centre of the chapel - chairs, the wood from the altar,
the old organ, bits of masonry...
I stood in this carnage, surveying the Blitzkreig scene. Every brain
cell was screaming to get out of the door and yet oddly, another part of
me was at peace. I lingered while the arguments raged inside me until,
in my spirit, I caught the strangest of signals: It was a whisper as
soft as the wind swaying the trees: 'They haven't chased ME out of
here!'
The church had been seriously vandalised by local thugs. I had only gone
there because well, the building was close to where I lived and it just
so happened I had a slender connection with the owners - the Church of
the Nazarene - through a friend of a friend.
With the 'okay' from the owners, I called the local TV and they came
down to run a story on it. Kids were trying to break into the place
again when the camera team arrived and they actually filmed a dialogue
with one of them:
'What are you doing?' said the presenter, interrupting a ten-year old as
he industriously wielded a jemmy to the back door.
'What does it look like?' the kid answered back, and then continued his
exertions with the jemmy while the camera whirred… The episode was
replayed on the local TV News that evening, 18 November 1998, with the
face of the kids mosaiced out. I think the police had a copy of the
video, but I don't know what, if anything, happened to them.
A few weeks later, the Nazarene Church invited us to a meeting.
'If we get the church repaired,' they asked, 'would you keep it open as
a place of worship?'
'Yes' I said trepidously, while Mandy blinked. She had some experience
of church work, having been an assistant to Pastor Dave Woodfield years
ago. She knew what I was letting myself in for.
I have to say it was not my plan
or my idea to run a church, to be called a 'pastor.' No, definitely not.
It could never have happened without a succession of things dropping
into place like the bricks of some galactic jigsaw puzzle. It rose up on
a long string of happenstance that slowly painted a backdrop against
which, when I was asked, I could say 'Yes.' Just two years before, the
proposition would have been completely out of the question.
You see, I could never speak from a platform, never say anything of
value - not until I became David Scott-Morgan. Not that changing my name
made any difference you understand, but the fact is, that is the way it
happened. I became David Scott-Morgan first.
Storyteller
Yes I changed my name in 1996 and Mandy and I were married in April
1997. We had not been married many months when the phone rang: It was
the pastor of the little church in Tile Cross, the one just down the
road from where I had lived back in the Early Days, the same
church, albeit under another name and another pastor, where years ago my
mother had married Alf.
Could I come to his church and do a concert in May '98? he asked.
'Tell him yes,' said Mandy, as if we were hoofing before the footlights
every night of the week. I dutifully said 'yes' with all the conviction
of a man who means 'No,' and then after hanging up, asked Mandy: 'How on
earth are we going to do a concert?'
'We can play some music and in between the songs you can tell them your
story' she said.
My eyebrows went up, my mouth hung open and cogs whirred… My 'story'
was not exactly a video I could pluck off the shelf and mime to at that
point, but necessity is known to be the faithful mother of invention.
Everyone has hidden treasure buried somewhere in their lives, some
latent ability or talent, maybe something discarded and put in the box
marked 'that doesn't work for me!' And it's a fact that God is able to
show you where your treasure is buried, to draw you a map and put an 'X'
on it. He is able to get you digging for your booty when you don't even
know what it looks like. For it's surely true that if you knew what it
was, then you would have dug it up yourself long ago.
The treasure chest I needed to unearth contained the secret of how to
stand up in front of people and speak to them. I had to convince myself
I had a story to tell and then become some kind of storyteller.
It didn't sit well with me: Years ago, I had never wanted to stand up
and sing my God songs in front of people - Dave Woodfield got me through
that ordeal. Then, when I had grudgingly accepted it, people would
suggest I push the boat out a little further: 'Maybe you could give your
testimony?' they would say. 'Aaaargh' I would think while nodding
vacantly and espying the position of the exits. Constantly prodded by
encouragements from well-wishers, I would occasionally give 'speaking' a
try only to disappear inside an immobilising cloud of stuttering
gobbledigook until the thought of it used to terrify me.
Mandy encouraged me that my story was worth telling and, egged on by the
ever-shortening concert date, I worked at developing ways I might speak
about the more publishable of my life's exploits. I was helped in my
quest by all sorts of people - Orson Welles, Jesse duPlantis, T.D.Jakes
- these became my unpaid coaches like John Lennon had been thirty years
before.
The worst thing that can happen to you when you are speaking publicly is
to dry up. Anyone who has ever stood up at a wedding, a funeral, or the
Christmas do in the works canteen, will tell you this.
As I studied other speakers - 'the professionals' - and practised to
myself, it percolated down to me that I needed to make contact with just
one simple thing - passion!
The problem wasn't that I couldn't speak at all, but just that I
couldn't speak unless I was emotionally engaged. Passion was the carrot
to drive my donkey along and without that, it didn't want to move.
If I had thought about it, I could have twigged the similarity with
singing:- If you can lose yourself in a song and 'live' it while you're
singing it, then you can get beyond your fears and start to connect with
your spiritual assets instead of only the intellectual ones.
The discovery melted away an impenetrable barrier before me. There was a
way out of my cocoon of shyness and inhibition after all. Of course, it
helped to make notes and to try and organise what I planned to say but
for me, the thing I needed most was to find a point of passion and hang
on to it.
It's a fact that everybody has a story to tell. The problem is that the
really explosive and interesting things are often hidden inside a
thicket of the mundane, trivial and outright embarrassing. It's one
thing to talk about riding high on a hit record but quite another to
talk about some seedy subterranean swill-house where you first met the
song while in a state of mortified lust with some nubile companion whose
name you cannot remember. (No, that was not part of my story, I just
made it up as an illustration!)
At that time, I was choc-a-bloc with the amazing things God had done for
me and I knew that speaking about it was a way that I could encourage
others positively and also give thanks to the Lord for what He had done
for me. I realised something else: The wonderful thing about telling
your story is that nobody can argue with it! - People might think you've
got it wrong, that you are crazy, they might think a lot of things, but
when you declare 'God has done this for me' - they can't put hand on
heart and say: 'No he hasn't!' That is what makes testimony so important
and why it is so uniquely powerful.
Then, in short order, a divine chronology seemed to catapult me out of
rehearsal mode:
Local Northfield Pastor Harry Hewat invited me along to a 'Prayer
Breakfast' at Birmingham's Council House at the end of January 1998. I
got up and sang 'This is my Prayer' (easily the most anointed 'God' song
I had written) in front of an august assembly of businessmen and local
dignitaries. The fallout from that resulted in me being asked to appear
at the National Exhibition Centre in March - at a conference called
'Prayer for Revival.' There were about 4,000 at the NEC that day and my
short contribution prompted a write-up in the Birmingham Evening News.
The article leaned heavily on the fact that the last time I was on the
stage in the NEC Arena was with the famous pop group ELO twelve years
before. This exposure raised a level of press interest so that in June,
Mandy and I were guests on BBC Television's Sunday morning Christian
show called 'First Light.'
Tile Cross
But before that, in May 1998, we had done the 'concert' at the church in
Tile Cross, right around the corner from where I used to live. Yes there
was something quite spooky about the placement…
The old estate looked to me like a youth who had lost the fresh-faced
glow of innocence: It didn't seem to care any more about its appearance.
There was that feeling of isolation in the air as people shuffled past
without ever making eye contact. Tile Cross, the once proud model of
socialist re-housing and a place where kids would always be playing in
the streets, had turned into a ghost town. The streets that once rang
with the sound of children playing now exuded the silent ambience of a
drug ghetto.
But inside the little church, insulated from all that, it was brim full
for our first concert. There were three of us on 'stage' - Mandy and
myself and Mark Jago, playing guitar and helping with the singing.
We played Buddy Holly and Beatles and ELO and many of my songs
intersperced with Mandy and I telling our story and of course, telling
the gospel story too.
After the concert, Mark Jago had secretly ordered a stretched limmo to
take us back home in style. We didn't know anything about it until
murmurings at the door made us look out of the window: Outside in the
roadway was an enormous white Cadillac, elongated into a bizarre
cinemascope like it was entering a black hole, with its driver in peaked
cap waiting ceremoniously for his fare… 'It's for you' someone said.
'Nah, can' t be!' But it was. Yes we departed like pop stars after our
first ever gig.
The upshot of all this activity is that when, in November 1998, the
Church of the Nazarene asked Mandy and I would we keep their church
open, we had by then travelled around singing and telling our story
all over England. We had even done gigs in Northern Ireland and Canada.
I had overcome my reticence to public speaking and that helped me
enormously to say 'Yes' but I have to add, the main reason was that I
was not on my own. I could never have contemplated leading a church
without Mandy's help. If we had not been married I would not be here.
That's why I had to become David Scott-Morgan first.
I think in all honesty the Nazarene Church were about ready to throw the
towel in on their Northfield outpost and their overtures to us were a
last-ditch effort to keep it open as a church. A long shot indeed. We
had never done anything remotely like it. Mandy and I were without
credentials or experience; Ministers without portfolio, called up to the
battlements with a knife, fork and spoon, and daft enough to go.
Church on the Hill
It looked more like a place in the process of demolition than one
being restored as a place of worship: The windows, or rather their
apertures, were boarded over (and stayed that way until the repairs were
complete), giving it an abandoned, dead but-not-buried appearance -
about as inviting as Dracula's castle. I remember having the 'loud
thought' that it was going to need a powerful injection of friendliness
in its public countenance. The idea that immediately followed was the
name: 'Church on the Hill.' After all, it was on a hill. Where all
beacons should be: 'Egghill' was a sub-peak of the local vantage point
'Frankley Beeches' just half a mile away, where the elevation rose to
1000 feet if your electricity is in rubber wiring, or 330 metres if its
in plastic.
The repairs were finally completed in May and the church was re-opened
for business on June 4 1999. We painted a sign and hung it above the
front door announcing the name to the world in friendly shades of blue
and white: 'Church on the Hill.'
Nehemiah
I had never thought of myself as a Nehemiah - he was the administrator
who got involved rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem back in 450 BC. No,
definitely not: Handyman about the house, fixer of things, builder,
plumber, decorator or gardener, these things I am not. Anything
practical I am not. Yet that is what it seems I was called to be over
the first two years of running Church on the Hill.
At some point in the past a lorry had reversed into the brick wall that
marked the border between council pavement and church forecourt. About a
third of the wall had been knocked over and big sections were lying
dejectedly around the frontage. We pieced them back together and heaved
them into place, and then bricked in the remaining gaps. I was cementing
the last line of bricks into place one evening when two teenage girls
came slinking past, arm in arm. As they walked by, one of them inclined
her head and called back bitingly: 'We'll have that down again by
tomorrow!'
The next day, one brick had indeed been assiduously chiselled out, but
that was all. It was repaired and the wall resisted all further attempts
by the kids to refashion it.
The insurers had wrung their hands of any responsibility for glass at
the front of the building and so places where three vertical 'slit'
windows had been were left covered with sad looking boards. They
announced better than any bunting that the main business of the area was
running scared from the intimidations and lawlessness.
One of the first things I did was to un-board the centre 'slit' window
and have its panels re-glazed in multiple colours and then establish a
permanent light behind it. The American group who had built the church
in 1960 had named it the 'Pillar of Fire.' Now symbolically, their
pillar got to burn once again over the area. About a year later the
boards were taken down on the two smaller 'slit' windows either side and
coloured windows installed in those also.
Red Carpet
All our attention to these details were outflanked and ruined by the
dilapidation of the forecourt; it was an unadulterated mess. The old
tarmac surface was long past its sell-by date and had become a patchwork
quilt of black and green with vegetation poking through everywhere.
Several builders came by to give us their quotations for re-surfacing it
in black or red (for some reason I felt it should be 'red'). We looked
at the prices in gloom - we had nowhere near enough for black, let alone
red, which was a lot more. So we sent out our begging tray to the
council grants department, even contacted local businesses to see if
they would help.
Then, at a Wednesday prayer meeting in July 2000 we prayed specifically
into finances: 'Lord help us get a grant so that we can smarten the
drive up'. The next evening, I noticed a scrappy bit of paper had been
pushed through the letterbox at our house. I picked it up off the mat
and unfolded it - a short note about making a donation to the church was
squashed around a cheque for a very substantial sum of money! I knew
where it had come from - a neighbour who, it just so happened, had
emigrated to New Zealand the day before. I figured he'd got someone to
push it through my door after he was well away. He wasn't even a member
at the church, he had visited it just once.
I said to Mandy: 'I think the Lord wants it in red!'
So in the autumn of 2000 the forecourt of Church on the Hill was
re-surfaced in a rather sumptuous and expensive red block paving. The
building crew soldiered on through atrocious weather and the attentions
of local kids out to wreck anything nice, to complete the task of laying
our 'red carpet,' supplied by dint of miraculous provision for Kings and
commoners to walk upon. It did not go un-noticed amongst the locals that
the church, once a foreboding eye-sore was beginning to look part of the
solution rather than another part of the problem of the area.
Work on the garden at the back of the church took two years to complete.
It's not surprising - when we started it looked like something out of a
Richard Attenborough jungle documentary; - An impenetrable barricade of
foliage with all kinds of nasty prickly things, some towering well over
a mans height. Most of the congregation turned out to help clear a path
through this matto-grosso in the summer of 2000, and again the following
summer, to dig and scrape at the scrawny earth below. The result is that
now, the garden at the back of the church is a veritable haven of beauty
and sanity, landscaped to a design of Mandy's, a far cry from what it
used to be.
Everyone had said there would be trouble. We expected it. After all it
was one of the roughest areas of town. When we first opened I asked a
local church could we use their spare PA system?
'Only if you take it home with you and don't ever leave it at the
church!' was the reply. That about said it all.
But contrary to all expectations, no damage of any significance has been
visited upon the church in the four plus years since we took it on.
There have been stones thrown, windows cracked and things stolen out of
the garden at the back, but that is the extent of it. The worst that has
happened has been attacks on cars parked on the forecourt - a couple of
times cars have been broken into and my car was severely vandalised one
day, but then it did happen right after some aggro with local kids. Of
course the kids that inhabit the area are still a handful, often coming
in to a meeting bent upon disruption. We accommodate them as best we
can, only resorting to throwing them out if they really get out of hand!
We continue to pray for them along with the Lord's protection to remain
upon the church property.
Money, money, money.
The congregation started with two people and has slowly grown to a
modest twenty plus. Despite the small numbers the church finances have
been consistently and amazingly strong, enabling us to fund
refurbishments and also to support the many needs that arise. Really the
provision of money has been miraculous, ever since that 'red carpet'
episode.
It is something I like to tell people about - the astonishing the level
gifting to Church on the Hill. I don't know whether it has anything to
do with it, but the fact is, we never pass the collection plate around
(nor a hat, tray or bucket…). 'Why not?' People ask. 'What's wrong
with that? Is it because you are so filthy rich, you former pop star
you, that you don't need our flimsy donations? Or is our money not good
enough for you?' No, none of the above. Your money is plenty good
enough.
The bible says it is more blessed to give than to receive and we don't
intend to rob anyone of that blessing so we leave the collection plate
at the back of the church. This way of doing things grew out a
conviction I had at the outset that the finances should be demonstrably
faith based; God-centred not man-centred. I reasoned this way: If God is
who He says He is, then I don't need to shake my tin piggy bank under
your nose, or implore you by word or deed into giving to the Kingdom.
God is able to move upon your heart to provision the church with that
which it needs. The only question was whether I could trust Him to do it
without my interventions.
The fact is since year one we have never been short of finances. In fact
the funding has been enough to completely renovate the building. Of
course, nobody, except visiting preachers or musicians, gets paid
anything. The only time that Mandy and I had any recompense was in the
first year, when we received £50 a month for six months. I have to
admit that when we started I was sure the church would be a drain on us
and cost us money. But it never has. Not one brown penny.
Added to this, since the summer of 2002 we have been funding an aid
program in Romania (under the banner of 'The Romania Fund') and in 2004,
we set up and became the financial patron of a Christian School in the
Philippines. 'Madeline's Learning Center' in the town of Talavera, which
was opened in June 2004 with all costs supported by us here. Think of
it, this little church in a poor area of town, with a congregation of
about 25, sends £500 a month abroad and looks after its own. Isn't God
good?
The Church of the Nazarene have
been wonderful in allowing us a free hand in their building. They have
not required us to join their denomination although naturally, that is
what they would prefer. In their dealings with us they have demonstrated
their priority to raise up the banner of the Lord Jesus regardless of
the badge of denomination. I can say from some experience that this is
quite a rare thing in the annals of church politics where parochial,
inward concerns will often dictate the pecking order of policy. The
Nazarene leadership have indeed shown themselves to be real 'kingdom'
people.
And so when people ask (and they do) 'what denomination do you belong
to?' - sometimes couched differently as 'what sort of church are you?' -
I answer them simply:
'We are a Christian church.'
It's true. Church on the Hill is a Christian church operating outside of
the umbrella of an organised religion. It's not that we are against
denominations. We are called to be 'Watchmen and Worshippers' to our
community of believers, and of course administrators and wall-builders
to the property.
Carl Wayne interviewed me in July
2002 on Radio West Midlands and was curious about the church and my
position in running it.
'Do I address you as "Reverend" now?' he asked mischievously.
'No, I am a "Slightly Reverend"' I responded, explaining that
we are not ordained and so we don't do weddings, funerals or
bar-mitzvahs'.
I am in point of fact, officially a 'lay pastor' - that means a sort of
spokesman who has bubbled up from 'the laity' - the common folk. You
know, the unwashed lot who sit in the pews.
No I am not a Reverend. You can call me slightly Reverend if you want.
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