From The Parish Office  May 2012

Timely reflections by the Bishop of

Birkenhead on being 'filled with the Holy

Spirit' and on the 'profound evil' of racism

Whitsunday (or Pentecost) is coming - 27 May. In March I went back to Birmingham to a 90^th birthday party for a Pentecostal Pastor. His name is Sydney Thompson, and a banquet was held in his honour. I would like to tell you a little about him and the impact he has had on my life. I hope the telling will help you in preparing to celebrate Whitsun. Pastor Thompson (I never called him by his first name) was pastor of a black pentecostal church in Handsworth, Birmingham, where I worshipped in 1981; I had moved from London to work as a solicitor, going north to train for the Anglican ministry at Cranmer Hall Durham later that year.

Dairy Man

Pastor Thompson was born in Jamaica in 1922. In 1955 he came to England, leaving his wife and two children until he could afford for them to join him. Like many others who came they had no plans to settle long term, but life was tough in the farming community in the Caribbean, and the mother country was asking for people to come and work. He worked as a dairyman, and in a number of jobs, his wife and children coming over in 1958. Life in England was not what he had expected, many of the churches were not particularly welcoming.

Pastor Thompson began worshipping with others from Jamaica in school halls or wherever they could find to meet. In 1960 he became a full time pastor having begun a church in Brixton which went from nothing to 100 in a few years. He took 20 people from the church and planted another in Catford, south London. Eventually during the 1960s (remember what else was going on during the 1960s) a whole network of churches was planted across London, and other cities, blessing communities beyond the church. In 1968 Pastor Thompson was asked to pastor in Handsworth, Birmingham, in a church that had grown to several hundred by the time I pitched up in 1981.

Two experiences shaped me through his ministry which I was able to thank him for at the party. The first, an overwhelming sense of the love of God flowing over and within me (Psalm 133 uses that word and it is the best word to use to describe the experience). Pentecostals speak of the "baptism of the Holy Spirit", others (myself included) prefer to speak of being "filled with the Holy Spirit", but baptism literally means "being drenched in" and I felt drenched in the love given to me through Jesus. Second, not at the same time, but around the same time, partly through being the only white person in the congregation, and partly through experiencing the profound service of foot washing, I came to see, and see in me, what people have described as racism - the disfigurement in our history and culture, which I saw as a profound and terrible evil.

Blessed

The heights of love and the depths of sin were given. This wasn't Pastor Thompson's intention, but it came through his ministry and I thanked him. At the party, as he was telling his story, I thought of those things that get me down, and I was blessed by a man who, when he had every reason to give up on God (back in England in the 1950s). he stayed faithful, he grew churches and planted them. Those plants have remained and borne much fruit.

The Holy Spirit is no respecter of persons (see Peter's discovery Acts 10:34­43) and he blesses us with Jesus' overwhelming love and Jesus' conviction of sin; they quite often go together.

At Whitsun we celebrate the pouring out of God's gift (whatever else was going on in the world then and now).

Have a good party!

+ Keith