THE FIRST WEEK BACK FROM THE USA.

I have acted, and I have done something radical concerning these weekly ‘musings’ that you receive. The situation is this, that the number of my friends receiving them has increased over the past year exponentially (I have always wanted to use that word), and whereas I was able to send them out one by one for many years that activity has now come to dominate a whole day. I could occasionally pray for this brother or that sister as I Emailed each one, but now another dozen In Texas have asked me if they could receive my letters. I am glad of that but, reluctantly, I decided I would do what I should have done some time ago. I have compiled a list of those receiving my letters and the theory is that henceforth at the press of a button with a kind of ‘woosh!’ out will go all the weekly musings in one fell swoop. That is the theory.

But achieving this has not been easily affected. I fear I have added a duplication of the addresses of some . . .  perhaps many. My apologies. If you could write back and tell me that there is an old address that you do not want to be used then I will attempt to remove it, anything like that. I am an utter amateur in this business. I fear there will also be an awkward adjustment to this new system and some friends will perplexedly cease getting any letters at all. I am very sorry about that possibility, but we have to try to cruise along together until we get a bit of order into my communications. Of course, these days are also the perfect time to drop me a note and tell me that you are so busy that you do not have the time to read my musings. Then in a flash I will relieve you of that embarrassment, without any bitter feelings, and save you from being on the receivers’ end of my list. We are all getting too much Email. I hope that this decision does not result in much confusion and many new problems.

I got back from the USA very refreshed. I had the best of health while I was there after the hiccups of the last month and a half. Renewed friendships were a delight and I enjoyed the ministry I heard while I was there. Iain Murray once said to me that ‘something is happening in the USA.’ A couple of things struck me confirming this fact. The first was conversions. In both the Denton and the San Antonio congregations I met loads of converted men and women, old and young. It was perfectly natural for them to tell me of how they had become Christians six or ten years ago, with their spouses and children too. There was a vitality and earnestness in these congregations. There were well attended prayer meetings and no shortage of men getting to their feet and praying during the prayer hours. Timothy Conway had seen such blessings of saving grace during his years in San Antonio. Today he is confronted with the comparatively fallow ground of the UK where he is now working. The baptistry is not being used as it had been regularly opened in Texas. Of course, this happy phenomenon is not everywhere commonplace in the USA. It is in the South that I have been during the last month. New England is one of those other areas in America where spiritual growth is slower, just as it is here in Old England; it is hard going in the U.K. Things are more resistant to the true historic Christian message. Also decisionism has everywhere created, in the claims of ‘conversions’, a patronizing cynicism amongst observers. But I was impressed and encouraged at meeting many converted people and I joined those other British preachers who customarily testify of the refreshment received while preaching overseas meeting the interested response of new converts. There is a harvest time in some places that is not so readily evident anywhere in the U.K.

The second feature in the USA is the impact of the publishing houses, the volumes produced, as well as the expanding work of the seminaries - Baptist, Presbyterian and Reformed.  For example, take the city of Grand Rapids a community that is the size of Cardiff. Larger Grand Rapids and large Cardiff each contain about a million people though the city limits themselves have smaller groupings, Grand Rapids 200 thousand and Cardiff 470 thousand. But Grand Rapids has a tradition of evangelical and reformed Christianity that is quite remarkable. A few years ago there were three men living in that city, Joel Beeke, Al Martin and Greg Nichols. They each produced some enormously valuable big sets of volumes of theology. Amongst the many books Dr Beeke has written are the first three of a predicted four volume set of Reformed Systematic Theology, each volume lap-breaking in its size, that is about 1300 pages per book. While Al Martin has also produced three hefty volumes of Pastoral Theology on preaching, pastoring and evangelism, the smallest of which is almost 500 pages. Then Gregg Nichols of the Reformed Baptist Church in Grand Rapids, the former lecturer in Systematics in Montville N.J., has just completed his fourth volume of Lectures in Systematic Theology to be published maybe at the end of the year, which set he would like to see being completed in yet a few more volumes. This would then become the best ever and most comprehensive Baptist work of systematic theology. All these productions are nicely preachy and doxological in tone, exegetical and historical while remaining full of application. They are not ‘dry as dust’ dogmatics. There is gold dust. So those three men lived in that relatively small community, a half hour drive from one another and these tomes have appeared. But on top of that fact is the presence in Grand Rapids of the ‘Dutch Translation Reformed Society’ (a group of businessmen and professionals) that has organised the translation in the last twenty years of the four volumes of Reformed Dogmatics of Herman Bavinck, and that is being followed by three volumes of his work on Christian ethics which is still in the process of translation and production. In the meantime Reformation Heritage Books in Grand Rapids is producing for the first time in the English language the entire works of the Scottish Reformer, John Knox. Two volumes of his writings have appeared exclusively in Latin hitherto. Then there is the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and that is the largest seminary in the world with 5000 students and over 70 professors most of whom are Reformed in their theology. There are also over a dozen Presbyterian seminaries teaching up to 3000 students all of which seminaries would claim to be continuing the evangelical confessional convictions of old Princeton. Something is happening in the USA. One consequence is that there is hardly a valued conference in the England without one of the main speakers being from America and possessing a strong preaching gift and qualifications. We are encouraged and edified by the American contribution to the worldwide reviving of historic Christianity.

There was one other discovery recently made; when I was in Texas I came across a book entitled The Reading Life with all the chapters written by C.S.Lewis. It is a result of the work of C.S.Lewis Pte.Ltd. and the Wheaton centre of C.S.Lewis studies. There is an insatiable appetite for anything written by C.S.Lews (who died on the same day as President Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963). Notes Lewis made have been enlarged into books, and in this little volume his chapters and paragraphs on the value of reading books in all his writings have been gathered together. It is 165 pages in length with many blank pages and both large margins and a large typeface. A number of the chapters are less than a page in length. It can be read in a couple of hours and it is delightful to read.

What did I learn? The claim that C.S.Lewis was the best-read man of his generation, one who read everything and even remembered everything he read. He began when he was a boy reading Milton and Shakespeare. He hung onto all he read. He carried an entire library in his head. Thus he reminds one of C.H.Spurgeon. He got through to those books, and more important they got through to him. He often added marginal notes as John Murray did with his copy of Charles Hodge’s three volumes of Systematic Theology (which three books I now possess). When C.S.Lewis attempted to complete reading a book that he found unacceptable he wrote inside the back cover, “never again.”

C.S.Lewis read and wrote from nine until one, and then again from five until seven. The other hours were spent in eating and in walking, but he also did his light reading over meals and in the evenings. Up to seven or eight hours a day were spent in reading. He belonged to that community of people whose worlds have been enlarged by books. In reading great evangelical writings you become a thousand Christians and yet you remain yourself. In worshipping and loving you transcend yourself, but you are never more yourself especially when you are reading the Scriptures. There we learn to see with inspired eyes, and to feel with another more enlarged heart as well as with our own. We discover windows and even doors by which we get out of our narrow lives. We also get into the heart of a psalmist, an apostle, or someone who once walked with the Lord Christ. We get to understand not facts as the world judges them in so much as facts as they really are, for Christ is the absolute; he is the truth. We are delivered from provincialism, and from the bias of the 21^st century. We are pursuing knowledge and we lose much that is the devices of man, and we gain wisdom. We put on scriptural spectacles and find freedom, insights, joys, fears and wonders that those glasses bring into focus. The Book has power to make us live this fuller life.

There is the non-reader, someone like my mother, full of goodness and good sense but living in a restricted world. She was content to be only herself, while what I came to discover in me was not enough; I needed to see myself as Augustine or Bunyan or Spurgeon or Andrew Bonar saw themselves. They spotted the wound and how it could be healed, the weakness and how it could be strengthened, the joy and how it could be found. I learned to transcend the boy born in Merthyr Tudful. That was the way I became the real me.