LOOKING BACK DOWN A LONG ROAD (2)

Thiry six years ago what I knew about pastoring was about enough to write on the back of a stamp and it generally consisted of doing what I had seen my own pastor do.

I had never heard that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got.

It was 1970 and we had just come through one of the most defining decades of modern history. Everything changed and it was all either the Beatles' fault, Lee Harvey Oswald's or maybe even Martin Luther King's. Burning bras and college campuses went hand in hand and smoking tobacco had been abandoned in favor of a different weed.

So here I was trying to build church 1930's style in a whole new world and I didn't do too well at it because I didn't see that then.

I do now - the world seems to change annually nowadays and the importance of being culturally relevant means that we constantly need to be re-examining what we do and why. If the world is changing, we must too, or we are destined to become dust-covered antiquities.

That's what the church in Birtley was. I wasn't a leader, I was the curator of a museum and that is definitely not what I had signed up for.