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War Cry World
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, Lieut- Colonel 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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Ex-Home Office chief chairs churches trust
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.
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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 Rules offer player may take three alternate strikes at their opponent’s conker. There must be a minimum of guidance 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.
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.
‘The people I met were at rock bottom’
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.
‘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
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.’ This discovery led Rupen into work in relief and development and helping refugees, including a I was overwhelmed role with global charity World Vision. He did by the poverty in India 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
A refugee camp in Syria
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 People want a tears. They said: “All these years we prayed but we God who’s real 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
Broken by loss, my faith was restored
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
HANK VISCHER
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.
‘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 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.
‘Then everything changed the day my
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 I had hoped depth of her loss devastating. Coping with grief as a teenager threw up extra right until the challenges. She explains: ‘I remember when my end for a miracle 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
From page 9
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.’
I was full of a
desperate hate 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
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 I don’t need to defies explanation.’
understand everything God does
l With or Without
