War Cry 8 October

Yes to the dress

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What is The Salvation Army?

The Salvation Army is a Christian church and registered charity seeking to share the good news of Jesus and nurture committed followers of him. We also serve people without discrimination, care for creation and seek justice and reconciliation. We offer practical support and services in more than 700 centres throughout the UK. Go to salvationarmy.org.uk/find-a-church to find your nearest centre.

What is the War Cry?

The Salvation Army first published a newspaper called the War Cry in London in December 1879, and we have continued to appear every week since then. Our name refers to our battle for people’s hearts and souls as we promote the positive impact of the Christian faith and The Salvation Army’s fight for greater social justice.

WAR CRY

Editor: Andrew Stone, Major Deputy Editor: Philip Halcrow Production Editor: Ivan Radford Assistant Editor: Sarah Olowofoyeku Staff Writer: Emily Bright Staff Writer: Claire Brine Editorial Assistant: Linda McTurk Graphic Designer: Rodney Kingston Graphic Designer: Mark Knight Email: warcry@salvationarmy.org.uk

The Salvation Army United Kingdom and Ireland Territory 101 Newington Causeway London SE1 6BN

Tel: 0845 634 0101 Subscriptions: 01933 445445 (option 1, option 1) or email: subscriptions@satcol.org

Founder: William Booth General: Brian Peddle Territorial Commander: Commissioner Anthony Cotterill Editor-in-Chief: Major Mal Davies

Published weekly by The Salvation Army © The Salvation Army United Kingdom and Ireland Territory ISSN 0043-0226

The Salvation Army Trust is a registered charity. The charity number in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is 214779, in Scotland SC009359 and in the Republic of Ireland CHY6399. Printed by CKN Print, Northampton, on sustainably sourced paper

From the editor’s desk

BON JOVI’S song ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’ continues to receive plenty of radio play three decades on from its release. The lyrics depict a young, hard-up couple desperately struggling to cope with nothing more than each other, hope and prayers to keep them going.

Part of the song’s appeal is its relatability – particularly the concept of turning to prayer when it seems that there is nothing else to be done. In the pages of the War Cry, we often include stories of people who have turned earnestly to God in prayer and seen him work in wonderful ways to help them through their tough times.

But what happens when God doesn’t answer those prayers in the way that was hoped? That was the experience of Esther Maria Magnis. When she was just 15 years old, she was told that her dad had terminal cancer. Being part of a Christian, churchgoing family, Esther naturally prayed that her dad would get better. It didn’t happen, and he died two years later.

‘When my father died, it felt like such a shock. I couldn’t believe it was true,’ she tells us in an interview in this issue. ‘It destroyed my faith in God.’

Esther’s experiences initially led her to walk away from the faith with which she had grown up. Even when she found herself wanting to return to it, the path back to God did not seem straightforward.

‘I worried that, after telling him I hated him, I couldn’t turn back to him,’ Esther says. But those fears proved to be unfounded and she renewed her relationship with God.

The good news is that Esther’s experiences with God are not unique. Even if we have had times in our lives when we have walked away from him, God will always accept us back if we return to him. All we have to do is ask – he’s only a prayer away.

Dress to impress

A middle-aged London cleaner sets off to Paris in search of a Christian Dior gown Film feature by Emily Bright

STRIDING across a lamplit Battersea Bridge in 1950s London, Mrs Ada Harris (Lesley Manville) pauses to examine her mysterious parcel. ‘What’s it to be, Eddie?’ she asks in the opening scene of Mrs Harris Goes to Paris, now on general release in cinemas. ‘Good news or bad?’

Ada’s husband, Eddie, went missing in action as an RAF pilot during the Second World War, and years later she’s still wondering what happened to him. Sadly, the contents of the parcel confirm that Eddie is dead.

In the absence of Eddie, Ada longs for something to add colour to her life. Enchanted by the beauty of a Christian Dior gown at the home of a wealthy woman where she works as a cleaner, she decides to save up to visit Paris and buy her very own designer dress. When she is told that she qualifies for a war widow’s pension and receives a couple of other unexpected windfalls, she makes a trip across the Channel.

At the House of Dior, she is initially snubbed by store director Madame

Colbert (Isabelle Huppert), who doesn’t believe that she can afford the high-end designs. But once Ada reveals her cash savings, she is invited into a fashion show, where she purchases a beautiful dress. The downside is that bespoke fittings normally take at least two weeks, and she can’t afford to stay in Paris. Thankfully, help and accommodation are offered by store staff.

As her dress fittings progress, Ada sends ripples through Christian Dior’s team, providing a refreshing contrast to the haughty and demanding clients they’re used to. She gets acquainted with the people behind the fashion and the pressures they face. Despite their initial impressions of Ada, her forthright yet kind nature might be just what the staff need to set things straight in their workplace.

Whether it’s how we’re dressed, what job we have or what our lifestyle looks like, society often judges us by appearances. But someone who lived thousands of years ago had a radically different view of

how we should view others and ourselves.

The Bible tells how on one occasion Jesus, who Christians believe was God’s Son, overheard his followers bickering about which of them was the greatest. So he used the example of children, who were ranked the lowest in that society, to illustrate his point. He said: ‘Anyone who welcomes a little child like this on my behalf welcomes me, and anyone who welcomes me also welcomes my Father who sent me. Whoever is the least among you is the greatest’ (Luke 9:48 New Living Translation).

In saying this, Jesus challenged conventional ideas of identity. Today he invites us all to know him, and he teaches us that every individual has value and should be treated with dignity, regardless of their social status. Jesus loves us just as we are, and the seemingly least important people hold great importance to him.

We don’t need to put on airs and graces. If we let Jesus into our lives, we’ll enjoy a relationship that’s richer than anything we could have ever imagined.

Every individual has value

FILMS

SQUARED KFT

Ada Harris admires gowns at the House of Dior

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nSIX-time Grammy-winning gospel singer BeBe Winans talked to Radio 2’s Good Morning Sunday about the central role that faith plays in his life.

He said that every morning, he takes care of his spiritual wellbeing ‘through prayer, through God’s word and in putting it into practice’.

BeBe recalled how he grew up in a ‘house of faith’ and how his family were driven by a passion for God and gospel. As a child, he said, he was ‘taught to give everything you have’.

He explained that this attitude shaped his approach to performing. ‘Whether there was five people in the audience or 5,000,’ he said, ‘we sang with all our heart and all our strength, because we knew we were glorifying God.’

Garden grows ‘sense of God’s presence’ at hospice

AN RHS Chelsea Flower Show garden inspired by a Bible passage is offering a place of peace to patients, families and staff at Winchester Hospice a year after it was created.

Bible Society’s Psalm 23 Garden, which is based on the psalm that begins ‘The Lord is my shepherd’, was relocated to the hospice after last September’s show.

In an interview with the War Cry last year, the garden’s designer, Sarah Eberle, said: ‘Psalm 23 is pretty much a parable for life. It’s about the journeys you go through: some are pleasant and some are unpleasant. The destination you reach is one where you are at peace. The garden is really about restoration, nurturing and safety.’

Head of palliative care at the hospice, Maddy Thomson, says: ‘This garden has brought this psalm alive for people and helped them to realise what they love about it, and which bits speak to them.

‘The beautiful flowers and the sound of the water help us to take a deep breath and go back inside and be as compassionate and kind as we have ever been.’

Hazel Southam, the Psalm 23 Garden project manager, adds: ‘We are so delighted that the Psalm 23 Garden is giving people a living sense of God’s presence and restoration at Winchester Hospice.’

Mini-budget has mini effect for people in need

THE Salvation Army has said that the mini-budget will ‘have little effect’ in helping people who use its services.

Responding to the recent government announcement on changes to the budget, LieutColonel Drew McCombe, The Salvation Army’s secretary for mission, said that the church and charity is concerned about users of its food banks, homelessness support and debt advice services.

‘Every day, up and down the country, we have been providing essentials like food, coats, shoes, even bedding to struggling families,’ he said. ‘We will always do our best to give someone emergency support but, while a food parcel helps a family cope for another week, what’s desperately needed is more government support for those living hand to mouth.

‘To help people survive the cost of living crisis, benefits must urgently be raised in line with inflation so people can afford to feed their families and pay their bills, and those desperate to work must be helped into jobs with decent pay. This is not only the morally right thing to do but also financially right as increased prosperity for all means everyone can contribute to boosting the economy.’

The Salvation Army wants housing benefit to be raised so that it covers the full cost of rent and free childcare provision to be expanded to help people into work.

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FORMER top civil servant Sir Philip Rutnam has become the chairman of the National Churches Trust.

On taking up the post, Sir Philip, who was permanent secretary at the Home Office until his resignation in 2020, said that the importance of the trust’s work in helping churches keep their buildings open ‘cannot be overstated’.

‘Too many of the UK’s 39,000 churches struggle to find the money they need to stay open and in good repair,’ he said. ‘I know the immense community contribution that churches make to the UK and to local communities. So much happens in churches – from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to maths classes and daily nursery schools and, of course, a range of religious services.

‘Churches make an amazing difference to people, believers or not.’

Last year, the National Churches Trust awarded or recommended 304 grants for urgent repairs and maintenance, totalling £5.2 million.

Huw Edwards and Sir Michael Palin are among its high-profile supporters.

Cnuts o ple mtely

Players get together for the World Conker Championships

Feature by Claire Brine

COMPETITORS are in for a smashing time when they rock up to the World Conker Championships in Northamptonshire tomorrow (Sunday 9 October). In the village of Southwick, conker enthusiasts are preparing to compete against one another in various categories, after which the players with the most intact conkers remaining will be crowned the winners. Or should that be conquerors?

Organised by Ashton Conker Club, the first competition took place in 1965 on Ashton village green, after bad weather prevented a group of locals from organising a fishing expedition. Once they’d staged their initial event, interest in the competition grew, and today it attracts hundreds of entrants from around the globe.

Although the competition is a lot of fun, with many participants choosing to wear fancy dress, there are strict rules that must be obeyed. According to the World Conker Championships website, each player may take three alternate strikes at their opponent’s conker. There must be a minimum of 20cm of lace between knuckle and nut for both striking and receiving players. All conkers and laces must be supplied by the event organisers, and the laces must not be knotted further or tampered with during play. If a conker is smashed to less than a third of its original size, the player is out.

Rules offer guidance

Though reading the rules makes the playground game of conkers suddenly sound very serious, there’s no doubt that they are necessary if competitors want the event to be fair. Having rules means everyone understands what is acceptable. Rules offer guidance and often help to keep people safe.

In the Bible, God gives us a set of rules for life that, if followed, enable us to live together peacefully. The Ten Commandments include instructions not to steal, not to tell lies and not to desire others’ possessions. They urge us to put God first – because it’s the best way to live.

When we make God our focus and allow him to guide us, we can experience a relationship with him that is full of love. We can receive his forgiveness for the times we mess up and feel broken. And we are able to draw on his strength, which helps us to conquer anything life may throw at us.

Sir Philip Rutnam

‘The people I met were

Over the years, RUPEN DAS has carried out humanitarian work in some of the poorest parts of the world. He talks about the role that faith has played in his life and in the lives of the people in poverty he has encountered Interview by Sarah Olowofoyeku

ACROSS the world, more than three billion people live in poverty, and a quarter of that number live in extreme poverty. When people live in such circumstances, others may expect them to feel that they have been forgotten and forsaken by God. But author and president of the Canadian Bible Society, Rupen Das, sees things differently.

‘God has compassion for them,’ Rupen says. ‘He created human beings, but they are marred. He sees what we have done to each other and ourselves and his heart breaks.’

Rupen’s interest in poor people began on a visit to his country of birth, India.

started reading the Bible and my life had changed, but no one who taught me how to be Christian had ever spoken to me about poverty, what God thought of poor people or even what our responsibility to them was.

‘So I read the Bible myself, right from the beginning to find out what God had to say about poverty. I discovered there was so much in the Bible about poverty and injustice and how God cares for poor people.’

I was overwhelmed by the poverty in India

‘I left India when I was a year old,’ he says, ‘but in my early 20s I had this feeling that I wanted to go back to my roots. When I went to India, I was overwhelmed by the poverty. I had recently become a Christian, I had

This discovery led Rupen into work in relief and development and helping refugees, including a role with global charity World Vision. He did further studies on how God thinks and cares about people in poverty and wrote some books on the issue. But he was still left with one particular question, which formed the basis of his most recent book, The God That the Poor Seek

Rupen Das

at rock bottom’

‘In my work with poor people, I saw a lot of them become Christians,’ he tells me. ‘But my question was, “Why do they turn to God?” Because if I was poor, I’d ask God why and conclude that he has betrayed me and doesn’t really care.’

For the book, Rupen interviewed people living in slums in India, who had been Hindus but became Christians. He also spoke to Syrian refugees who had converted from Islam to Christianity.

He explains that the two groups of people experienced different kinds of poverty. Those in the slums were in chronic generational poverty, meaning they had come from many generations of poverty and had no obvious escape. The Syrian refugees had faced event-based poverty. Most of them were middle class, but when they became refugees because of war, they became poor. But both groups, he says, were ‘at rock bottom’.

‘They would say: “Nobody helps us and nobody really cares for us. Governments and politicians say great things, NGOs, churches and organisations give you food for today and tomorrow, but when their funding stops, they go.”

‘So they turned to their deities. But they felt nothing happened and didn’t know whether their god had heard them.’

That, Rupen says, changed when they were introduced to the Christian faith.

‘One pastor in Syria told some refugees that if they prayed to God, in Jesus’ name, he would hear their prayers. He prayed with them and many were in tears. They said: “All these years we prayed but we never knew if anyone heard us, and now we know that God does.”’

Rupen reports that many of those refugees were provided with jobs, were healed, came out of addictions and alcoholism and felt their lives were changed by God.

Rupen, though, wanted to know what happened at other times, when they felt their prayers weren’t answered. He wondered if that would stop them from believing.

‘They had this incredulous look on their faces,’ he says, ‘as if to say: “Why would I not believe in him?” They didn’t have a transactional relationship with God. Even if he didn’t meet their needs, the relationship was far deeper.’

What made the difference, he adds, is that the people experienced God being with them – even in their tough circumstances.

‘That is the God the poor seek,’ he says. ‘They want a God who’s real, an allpowerful God who answers their prayer, who will be there when they come to him, who will comfort, protect and guard them.’

As economic outlooks become bleaker in developed countries, Rupen emphasises that everyone can access that help. He encourages people to know that ‘God cares, and he wants to be with us’.

l The God That the Poor Seek is published by Langham Global Library

People want a God who’s real

Broken by loss, my

When ESTHER MARIA MAGNIS learnt that her father had terminal cancer, she prayed that God would heal him. Two years later he died – and Esther lost her faith as a result. But after telling God she hated him, she was surprised to find comfort in the Bible

Interview by Claire Brine

ESTHER MARIA MAGNIS was 15 years old when she learnt that her dad was going to die from cancer. It ripped her world apart. ‘It was a day or two after Christmas,’ she remembers, talking to me over Zoom from her home in Germany. ‘I was sitting at the dinner table with my brother and sister when my parents said they had something difficult to tell us.

‘It felt so surreal. Hearing that your father is going to die soon is the worst thing you can hear as a child. We were teenagers, so we were living between understanding everything and understanding nothing – old enough to experience the horror, but too young to really deal with it.’

Out of desperation, Esther and her siblings began to pray regularly for their dad to be healed. They knew his death could happen at any time.

‘We were begging God to heal our father,’ she says. ‘Our prayers were simple and pure – because that’s what happens

faith was restored

Esther Maria Magnis

when you suffer. I’d grown up hearing Bible stories in church, so I thought: “OK, I’m going to trust these now.” All I could think to myself was: “I want to keep Dad.”’

Two and a half years later, Esther’s father died. During our interview she doesn’t tell me much about him or show me any photos of them together, preferring to keep the story of their relationship private, but she recounts with brutal honesty the depth of her loss in her memoir With or Without Me, which was published in English earlier this year. In describing the pain and intensity of her grief, she tells me how it affected her faith.

right until the end for a miracle.’

Having been brought up as a Christian, Esther believed that God had the power to answer prayer. Growing up, she had contemplated faith a lot.

‘When I was young, I saw God as a very loving, strange being,’ she says. ‘He was a huge reality that I wanted to explore. And I remember hearing stories about his Son, Jesus, and finding them amazing and radical. The standard he set for his followers was very high.

‘But as I became a teenager, Jesus became boring to me. People in church would tell his stories and lower the bar so they didn’t have to make so much effort. It’s easy to “love your neighbour” if all you need to do is put some money in an envelope and send it to Africa. I felt that Jesus was growing smaller in my mind and I didn’t like him so much any more.

father became ill. It was clear he was going to die, and the only hope I had was Jesus and what people had told me about him – that he could do something to help. So I decided to pray with my brother and sister. I tried to trust that he was the knight to destroy all evil.’

After her father died in 1997 Esther fell into a deep depression. She found the depth of her loss devastating. Coping with grief as a teenager threw up extra challenges.

She explains: ‘I remember when my friends told me about their broken hearts or problems with school, they thought I wouldn’t understand. They assumed that all I thought about was my father. But I’d reply to them: “No, I have that pain on top of all those other things.” The emotional problems you face as a teenager are still there when you lose a parent. They exist alongside the loss, which makes everything seem very dark. Eventually I

‘When my father died, it felt like such a shock. I couldn’t believe it was true. It was as though a law of nature had been broken. For a while people had been gently telling me that I needed to let him go, but that just made me angry. Where would he go? I had hoped and prayed Turn to page 10 f

‘Then everything changed the day my

I had hoped right until the end for a miracle

stopped caring about everything.’

Esther stopped going to school and started spending most of her time alone in the woods near her house. She couldn’t understand why her father had died or where he had gone. His death seemed unfair and pointless.

‘It destroyed my faith in God,’ she says. ‘Most of the Bible stories I had read were about Jesus healing sick people. And I had really, really prayed for my father to be well. When he died, I thought: “The Bible isn’t true. It’s wrong.”

‘My father’s death also opened me up to the suffering of other people in the world –and that only added to my problems, because it made it even more difficult to believe in God. How can you believe in a God who created the world but then allows it to suffer? If there was a God who cared, surely he would stop it.’

One day, while sitting in church, Esther told God that she hated him.

‘But it didn’t bring me relief,’ she says. ‘I was full of a desperate hate that was eating me up. Once I’d told God that I didn’t believe in him any more, I also stopped believing in the whole invisible world. For the next few years the only things I wanted to believe in were things I could prove.

‘So that meant I broke away from concepts, such as truth and dignity, and my life became very materialistic. I believed only in things I could see and touch, simply because I didn’t want to feel stupid in the way I had after my father died. I didn’t want to trust invisible things. I wanted reality.’

During Esther’s lowest moments of depression, she even questioned her own existence. She no longer believed she had a soul, but saw herself simply as a complex combination of chemicals.

‘I couldn’t say the word “I” about myself any more,’ she says. ‘I felt I was

just something in the world who used air and made noise. But then I began to face another problem. If nothing mattered and the concept of “I” didn’t exist, then why did I suffer? It was because of love. Love for my father. I started to become curious about love. Why was it so destructive? Why is there love at all? I began to understand that, through love, the invisible did exist in the world – and I had to accept it.’

Though she didn’t understand how or why, Esther found herself slowly turning back to faith and even beginning to embrace it. It was a process that took several years.

‘I don’t quite know why I came back to God, but I think I have a tendency to lean towards him,’ she says. ‘I remember reading the Book of Job in the Bible, and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Job had suffered so much in his life and had all these questions for God. God’s reply

I was full of a desperate hate

to him was: “Where were you when I founded the Earth?”

‘When I read that, I felt that I too was experiencing the greatness of God and grasping how huge and complex he is. I understood that God is not my idea of him nor my idea of how I want him to be – but God is God, and he is great.

‘I began to develop a fear of God. Positive, but still fear. I worried that, after telling him I hated him, I couldn’t turn back to him. He was too big, suddenly. He was God. But in the end I chose to believe the rumours I’d heard about him: that God is good and wants us to turn to him. I had hope once more.’

Although Esther was able to rebuild her relationship with God, her questions about her father’s death remained. Today she wonders why some miracles happen, but not others. She doesn’t understand why her father had to die so young. She’s sad

that he never got to be a grandfather to her four children.

‘I don’t know the reasons why God didn’t heal my father,’ she says. ‘In a strange way, I haven’t accepted it. If I stood before God today, I would still cry and tell him that I don’t get it. But while my head is working on all of that, there’s another part of me which focuses on my relationship with God – which is healed and comforted. I’ve found acceptance in that I know who God is, and God isn’t defined by my understanding of him. I don’t need to understand everything he does. He’s very surprising.’

Nor does Esther feel afraid when she turns to him to offload the heaviest burdens on her heart.

‘It’s important to know that God allows us the freedom to say what we want to him,’ she says. ‘When we go through a

hard time and tell him “this is rubbish”, I think those are the kinds of prayers he is expecting from us. He doesn’t want the version of us that we try to represent in our prayers – he wants us to be real. When we build that kind of relationship with God, he becomes a reality to us that defies explanation.’

l With or Without Me is published by Plough

I don’t need to understand everything God does

Newington

jBecoming a Christian

There is no set formula to becoming a Christian, but many people have found saying this prayer to be a helpful first step to a relationship with God

Lord Jesus Christ,

I am truly sorry for the things I have done wrong in my life. Please forgive me. I now turn from everything that I know is wrong.

Thank you that you died on the cross for me so that I could be forgiven and set free.

Thank you that you offer me forgiveness and the gift of your Holy Spirit. Please come into my life by your Holy Spirit to be with me for ever.

Thank you, Lord Jesus. Amen

‘

TEA M TALK

talkTeam talk ’

Hats in new work of public art tell of a painful history

Sarah Olowofoyeku gives her take on a story catching the attention of War Cry reporters

THE figures of two men wearing hats have been unveiled as the latest piece of art on the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square. While the hats may seem an unimportant detail, they tell an integral part of the story behind the sculpture.

Designed by Malawian-born Samson Kambalu, professor of fine art at Oxford University, Antelope restages a photograph of black Baptist preacher the Rev John Chilembwe standing outside his church in a village in his native Malawi beside white British missionary John Chorley in 1914.

A year later, John Chilembwe staged an uprising against the British and became one of the first Africans in the 20th century to fight against colonial injustices. While it wasn’t until 1964 that Malawi gained independence, it was his actions that inspired people to take action in the intervening years.

In both the photograph and the sculpture, the Baptist preacher is wearing a hat. An unremarkable detail, except that in doing so he was in breach of the colonial rule that forbade Africans to wear hats in front of white people.

Such a rule seems frankly ridiculous in a 21st-century UK context, and it may be a shock to some people that such a rule could exist anywhere. For me, it’s a painful reminder that not so long ago, people who looked like me were treated as second-class citizens. I find it hard to understand how Britons believed it was right to colonise other countries and to abuse and mistreat the people who lived there. But it’s unsurprising that some of those sentiments do linger and, while I’m allowed to wear hats wherever I like, racism is still an issue today.

Although the link between Christianity and colonialism must not be ignored, it is encouraging to see that it was John Chilembwe’s faith in God that gave him courage to stand up against injustice and work towards gaining his people’s freedom. I’m glad that this statue has gone up in Trafalgar Square and that more people will learn about this figure in history. It’s important that the past is not hidden and that such stories are told to help ensure that amends are made and unjust history does not repeat itself.

Looking for

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People were treated as second-class citizens

QUIZ

Mal Davies explores song lyrics that have a note of truth about them

Wisdom in the words

Monk-y business produces odd hit

A

S years go, 1991 was a strange one in the music charts. While it featured the stars of the day – Kylie, U2, Madonna, Bryan Adams, UB40 and others – it also threw up some oddities. Perhaps the oddest happening of all was when a Gregorian chant hit No 1.

Gregorian music is timeless

In January, sandwiched between chart-toppers from Iron Maiden and Queen, came a track by a German act called Enigma. Originally released as ‘Sadeness (Part 1)’, alluding to the Marquis de Sade, the song also appeared under the less confusing – and less controversial – title ‘Sadness (Part 1)’. It was created by three producers, led by Michael Cretu, under the name Enigma – which is what they hoped to be, ‘invisible’ artists with a major hit. While the track incorporates a steady drumbeat, flute and some spoken French lyrics, at its core is a German choir, Capella Antiqua München, singing a Gregorian song in Latin. The choir’s vocals weren’t recorded for this track, but were sampled from their 1976 album Paschale Mysterium.

The song they’re singing, ‘Procedamus in Pace’ (‘Let Us Proceed in Peace’), contains a reference to Psalm 24:7, which says: ‘Lift up your heads, you gates; be lifted up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in’ (New International Version).

Gregorian singing – marked by its unaccompanied, monotonous sound – emerged from European monasteries in the 9th century. It was a way to chant Scripture, making it easier to remember long passages of text and to use them in corporate worship and private devotions. It is still used in some churches today, especially during ceremonies and rituals.

Who would have thought that a musical style from a millennium ago could find worldwide popularity in the late 20th century?

Gregorian music is a bit like Scripture itself – timeless. While some aspects of the lifestyle that the Bible portrays have dated – Roman soldiers, chariots, waving palm branches, clay pots etc –the teachings and life lessons it offers still ring true.

Which is why the Bible is always worth revisiting – and why it’s still No 1 on the bestselling-books-ever chart.

Cottage pie

Ingredients

1.5kg potatoes, peeled and chopped

50g butter

50ml milk

Salt and ground black pepper

30ml vegetable oil

300g onion, roughly chopped

3 garlic cloves, roughly chopped

300g mushrooms, roughly chopped

1tsp dried mixed herbs

300g carrots, roughly chopped

1kg minced beef

500g chopped tomatoes

100ml beef stock

Method

Preheat the oven to 170C/325F/ Gas Mark 3.

Boil the potatoes in a pan of water until soft. Once ready, drain and mash with the butter, milk and some salt and pepper. Set aside.

Heat the oil in a pan over a medium heat and sauté the onion and garlic until soft.

Add the mushrooms, mixed herbs and carrots, then stir. Add in the minced beef and cook until browned.

Pour in the chopped tomatoes and beef stock. Simmer for 30-40 minutes, until the beef is cooked and the sauce has reduced. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Pour the mince mixture into an oven dish.

Top with the mashed potato and cook in the oven for 20-30 minutes, until golden and crispy on top, before serving.

Courgette, pea and basil soup

Ingredients

1tbsp vegetable oil

200g white onions, peeled and roughly chopped

500g courgette, roughly chopped

500ml water

25g vegetable bouillon

500g peas

10g basil, finely chopped Salt

Method

Heat the oil in a pan over a medium to high heat and sauté the onions for 10 minutes, until they start to soften. Add in the courgette and cook for a further 5 minutes.

Pour in the water and add the vegetable bouillon. Lower the heat and simmer for 10-15 minutes, until the courgette is tender. Add the peas and bring to the boil, then simmer for another 10 minutes to cook the peas through.

Remove from the hob and stir through the basil. Whizz the mixture in a blender until smooth. Season with salt, to taste,

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GOD IS MERCIFUL AND FORGIVING