It was really, really exciting and a huge privilege to speak at the 4th ever “Carols at the Rec” event at Bath Rugby ground.
The idea for the event comes from Widcombe Baptist Church, (where our friend Tom Heaseman is the pastor) and Grace Church Bath, which is an Anglican church plant in the city, lead by Michael Farrier. Rather than have a little carol service for the usual congregation within their usual premises they hired the rugby ground and invited the town!
Organiser, Sam Eaton said, “We advertised through flyers and posters distributed by our church families, social content, and local print media. We hoped that through this and the genuine excitement from our own congregations that a large crowd would appear, and wonderfully with God’s provision they did! The vision is simply to be sharing the Good News at Christmas. We know that increasingly Christ is being lost at Christmas and we want to take the opportunity to publicly show, in quite an unusual setting of a rugby stadium, what this time of year really means. In terms of non-Christians attending, we don’t collect that information, but have anecdotally heard encouraging stories of friends, family, colleagues being invited along and loving the event.”
The stand was full, with 2,000 people coming to sing carols, see the dancers, and hear the local primary school perform “Away in a Manger” too. I also had the opportunity to address the crowd in two five-minute segments either side of the carol ‘Silent Night’.
Thankfully – and in answer to prayer! – it wasn’t raining. The stage area was uncovered, so it was great that nobody talking part got soaked. It was cold though, and I took my coat off to speak in my Christmas jumper and tried not to shiver too much!
I spoke about the great subject of “peace”: why we long for it, and why the world struggles to find it. I told the story of the Christmas truce in World War One, which although inspiring was not transformative – as they went back to killing each other two days later. In the second half I explained that we need to be transformed from the inside out, in order to know peace ourselves, and not just peace with one another but ultimately peace with God. That’s what Christmas is all about. You can read my talk here.
Sam Eaton wrote, “Andy did nail it with the two 5 minute talks, hitting both his time and the tone of the event really well.” So that was encouraging! Helped by 10ofThose funding, they gave a copy of Colin Webster’s book, “Special Delivery” to everyone who attended and I encouraged people to read it, and go to church this Christmas to hear more. Folks were also given information about the Christmas services as well as follow-up courses in both churches.
It was a wonderful opportunity to present something of Christ to a large group of people -which was incredibly exciting. It was also a massive logistical effort on the part of the churches who did a mammoth job organising and staffing the event. Just as good is that they are keen to do it all again next year!
