Patterns in the Chaos

She always ran the water first thing in the morning - for a full five minutes. Then she would rinse and shake the contents of the kettle bone dry at least three times in a capacious energetic jig before finally, it was ready to serve in the production of a cup of tea.
I witnessed this ritual everyday, or else heard its sacraments wafting in from the next room.
She was born in 1901, before an aircraft had flown, long before radio (or 'wireless,' as it was called) had appeared, when thoroughfares were called 'the horse road' because horses were the machines that travelled them and the motor car was a novel, odd rarity.
Vinnie - born 'Vinilia' in the year Queen Victoria died, was ten when the Titanic sank.
Of course I never called her 'Vinnie' - I called her mom! It was never the convention to call grown -ups by their first name, not until long after I was a grown-up too!
Mom came from another epoch. She inhabited a slice of time that was dressed in all the regalia of quaint etiquette along with a regimen of daily drudgery that has long vanished from this part of the planet. She ran the tap because in the Victorian slums of Birmingham where she grew up, you needed to clear all kinds of sediments from the pipe first thing in the morning.
Her speech was laced with those picturesque colloquialisms that abounded amongst the working class of the time:
'You'll laugh the other side of your face one of these days' she would say whenever I scoffed at her lofty pronouncements, which was often. I grew up a mocker in the shadow of those marvellous, self-exploding epithets which were once part of everyday day language, the standard currency of speech in the age she came from.

Vinnie had faith in abundance although she gave it away constantly. The more she gave away the more she had left. All sorts of people would come to her in need - for help, advice, or just the comfort of her ever-ready ear to their problems. She was a therapist to all who got to know her and the call of her counsel would draw to her doorstep the downtrodden and broken of all kinds: neighbours in trouble with the law, girls pregnant out of wedlock, drunkards, gamblers, homosexuals. She befriended them all, anybody in trouble. Vinnie would never be embarrassed at the things she would hear, although heaven knows, it was the other end of the universe from the place she inhabited. I think the only person who never came to her for advice was me!

Because of her beliefs, she constantly ran the gauntlet of her family. Their mockeries were exhibited if not verbally then in rolled eyes or else, hurtful indifferences toward her. But she was not to be swayed one iota.
'Only dead fish go with the tide' she would say (and there was never any doubt just where she thought the tide was heading for) 'but it takes a live fish to swim against the current.'

Buses
After dad died, it would often be just her and me out on some errand, visiting somewhere. In her gritty Victorian way, she showed me the bounds of her world, and I tagged along behind, a reluctant tourist. Proudly she would stand me at centre stage when she used to show my drawings of buses to aunts and uncles and the friends she met in Kunzles tearooms. Isn't he clever? isn't he talented? And in saying so, made it true for as long as the exhibition lasted. Pageants of scratchy paper, spread out on Formica-topped tea tables. They were like the first taste of the footlights to me; where I first became an addict for the approval of others. And how better to gain their approval than to draw buses? Giant ships that sailed from ports called bus stops to fanciful places I'd never heard of and longed to visit one day: Quinton Road West, Pheasey Estate, Lakey Lane Loop, wonderful enchanted places, surely better than Aston or Tile Cross, but maybe not quite as nice as Shirley, where mom's parent's lived. Buses would take you wherever it was you desired to go - and in the fifties that meant with trimmed wood panelling and the smell of leather and cigarettes and a conductor who danced up the aisle with a ticket machine and a purse while up front, like some inscrutable warrior captain, the driver sat in a cab sealed from the rest of us, responding to the coded bell signals from the conductor: one 'ding' for stop, two for go, three for go and don't bother stopping at the next bus stop because we're full up! Buses were to me, the most exciting and magical machines ever created, moving theatres of drama and promise. And to cap it all, dad had been a bus driver - yes, when I was born that was his job, and if I had anything to do with it, that is what I would be too, when I grew up!

Then in December 1986 she fell down the stairs at Tile Cross and spent the night on the linoleum hall floor with a broken leg. Such was her stamina that she kept herself awake in the freezing cold, knowing that in the morning a postman would come and her only hope was to attract his attention. She made it through the night and the postman heard her cries and alerted the emergency services. Eventually a fireman broke the door down and by mid-morning Vinnie was safe and warm in hospital.
She never went back to live at Tile Cross after that, although for a long while she wanted to. One day while visiting the place with me she suddenly seemed to accept the inevitability of the new reality she was in and turned to me, declaring bluntly: 'That's it David, I will never live here again. Sell it please!'

Joe had not been at Tile Cross the night of Vinnie's fall - he had been in hospital again with his 'nerves.' He was not able to look after himself, and after her fall, Vinnie was not able to look after him, or herself, any more. The result was they went into the care of residential homes and before too long, they were reunited at the same home in Selly Oak, Birmingham.
In September 1988, Joe went into hospital for the last time. Vinnie sat at his bedside all afternoon, just holding his hand until he passed away at eight fifteen in the evening. When I returned, she was sat alone in the corridor outside his room and I knew from her face he was gone.

Vinnie

The leg that Vinnie had broken falling down the stairs came back to haunt her in 1991 when a persistent ulcer turned into the creeping black of gangrene. When the dire situation was explained to us by the doctor at the hospital, she grabbed the forms and signed them resolutely, saying to me:
'David, it's going to kill me if I don't have it off. I want to live!'
She had her bad leg amputated and it made not one iota of difference to her outlook, even her mobility seemed only marginally impaired. She recovered in record time and was sitting up in bed exchanging jokes and small-talk with Karen and me on evening of the op.

We slowly became pals. Yes we did, and her gritty verdicts, always delivered with such Churchillian drama, became like anchors to me instead of the dead-weights they had been a lifetime before. We began to have fun and to laugh at the same things together. I was proud to be with her when we went out to a restaurant or on some jaunt to visit a friend or relative, and I know she was proud of me.

Then something happened. A sad thing, in fact an unmitigated disaster:
One day at Christmas 1993 my wife Karen left me. We had been growing apart for some time. Karen had long stopped coming with me to church and things got so bad between us that even the mention of the word 'church' stood a chance of causing an ugly scene. She had developed a yen for going out on the town with her friends and I had given up dissuading her, a fugitive from the arguments that might cause. Somewhere I thought it would be okay if we just hung in there but Karen was not a lady given to 'hanging in' anywhere and at some point she made the decision to leave. It was a shock. I descended into a period of intense self-examination, remorse and gloom.

Vinnie - yes it was about that time I started to call her 'Vinnie' - was tearful and terribly upset when I told her about it and as the days went to weeks, and weeks to months, the disaster of my second broken marriage had the effect of throwing us closer together. I found myself in need of her advice and she found herself in need of giving it. I became her patient; therapy sessions were held at any time, day or night, at the Lickey Hills Nursing Home, room number 20.
I was at my lowest point. I really bottomed out. I went to stay with Corky in America for a week in March, but just took my gloom with me. Back in England I joined a cookery class, went for counselling, worked on a new invention, wrote songs and answered the telephone with a sprightly 'hello' but it was just a vacuous façade and really I was desperately sad for a long time. Karen and I tried to recover our differences during our many meetings and phone conversations, but we never did. She would also pop in frequently on Vinnie (who she kept in close contact with) and I know Vinnie's heart for a long time was to broker a reconciliation between us.
Early in 1995, after we had been apart over a year, Vinnie enumerated to me bluntly what the portends had already been screaming:
'Karen's made up her mind, she's not coming back. You need to get on with your life David.'

During most of 1995 I busied myself taking a professional pilots licence course while the legalities of becoming divorced went through their cold motions. Finally in October 1995 I completed the very last test of the pilot course and a decree absolute was issued by the courts, ending my marriage to Karen. I paid her settlement fee and the flying tuition fees on the same day and was left flat broke!

Mandy
Vinnie's sadness at Karen and I breaking up turned to the other extreme when I told her the news that Mandy and I were together in April 1996. A mothers' happiness at the good fortune of her wayward son. She knew of Mandy as a Christian lady and she was over the moon to know I was with her and even more, when I told her that we planned to marry. One afternoon in her room she spoke to us both at length and gave us a biblical blessing over our union.

By now Vinnie was ninety-four years old and very frail. He once upright frame had shrivelled and shrunk so much that when she rode in my car she was unable to see the road ahead over the bonnet!
When I look back now, I can see that she relinquished something when she knew Mandy and I planned to marry. Like a weary warrior rests after a long battle … She had lived her life for others, and I know she had lived for me over that period, until she knew I was okay. I don't really understand it but I know she had come to a place of completion, of resolution, and inside her worn out body, she was at peace. I saw it in her face.
One day at the end of May 1996, Mandy and I were discussing the details of getting engaged and had reached a point of hiatus over the question of a ring - neither of us knew how to go about it.
'I'm not very good at this. Have you ever bought a ring?'
'No.'
'No, me either.'
We had no idea what sort of ring to get.
Mandy left for Bradford where she still lived at the time, saying she would make enquiries at a jewellers' she knew up there.
The next day after working as an instructor at Stratford, I drove up to see Vinnie in the evening. Her eyes were closed and her breathing very shallow. The faces of the nurses told me I should stay.
I sat holding her hand at her bedside, just like she had done with Joe. She opened her eyes just once and looked briefly at me. I saw a glimmer of recognition and a faint smile before she closed them again for the last time.

I called Mandy in Bradford to tell her. She had to work until midnight (waitressing at an Italian Restaurant) but insisted that she would drive down to be with me. Her car screeched to a halt outside my house in Birmingham at about two in the morning and we fell into a deep hug. Then we sat talking for ages and somewhere in the middle of it all, our attention fell upon a small brown envelope lying on the table. The nurse had pushed it into my hand as I left the nursing home earlier. On the outside she had hurriedly written: 'Vinnie's rings.'
I don't know who spoke first, it was one of those moments where words say an 'Amen' to what the spirit has already screamed… We both knew instantly that Vinnie's three gold rings should be the basis for our tokens of engagement and marriage.

Vinnie died on May 31st 1996, just six weeks after Mandy and I had come together.
She was a giant to me. A lady with a palpable, living faith. In the end, despite her disabilities or maybe because of them, I know that her example helped others not to lose heart when faced with life's challenges. And yes, this book is in part a celebration of her, I am not ashamed of that.

Vinnie's funeral, like Joe's before it, was an affair full of joy and hope, just as she would have wanted it to be. Dave Woodfield led the service and I sang a couple of songs at the church, standing right behind her coffin (I'd thought, "I wonder if I'll be able to do that".. but whatever resources I didn't have the Lord provided). At the graveside committal, pastor Dave, always seeking to be the harbinger of lightness to the sombre situation, made an announcement of our intention to be married. We hadn't yet told Mandy's parents about it and as this incandescent newsflash was broadcast I saw Mandy's mom, Rose, sway visibly, to the point I thought she might fall down the hole right on top of Vinnies' coffin!
But Rose Scott, when we spoke afterwards, insisted that I was to call her 'mom' from then on. Which is what I do. I don't suppose she could appreciate exactly what that meant to me: I had become orphaned and gained another family, all in the space of a few weeks.

David Scott-Morgan
A month later in July, I changed my name by Statutory Declaration to David Scott-Morgan. Yes I wanted to make a declaration - a statement of God's audacious and bountiful goodness to me. I would have liked to engrave it on tablets and drape it on top of the Empire State, to make it as manifest in message as it was in fact. I had been rescued out of a pit and scooped up to a high place. My horizon, once blighted by loneliness and divorce, had turned into a rich vista of amazing grace. God had brought me the most wonderful companion.
And I am quite clear about it: I did not deserve Mandy.
Maybe I could have got a job with a famous group through my own efforts, and maybe I deserve to have my house, maybe I can pat myself on the back to have written a hit song and I dare say I can claim some worthiness for the myriad other things I am thankful for, but I could NEVER have been married to Mandy without the Lord's help.

Mandy was, and is, my crown and the jewel in my crown. She is to me the first prize, the jackpot. The garland, the bunting and the streamers all rolled into one! Her and me being together seems so natural now, but it wasn't that way to begin with. Quite the reverse.

Arranged Marriage
Yes I guess you could call it an arranged marriage. Mandy certainly didn't want it. Not at all. We were friends and that was as far as it went. Indeed she was severely offended by my approaches at first.
But I had a vision: I didn't know quite what I would be doing or where I would be, but I knew I would be with Mandy. I didn't know that we would be married, just that we would be some kind of item together. There was an odd sense of the inevitability about it all, like a premonition.
It was a strange and unfamiliar time for me. I was sailing on uncharted waters, suspended on a thread I didn't understand and responding to signals that were not the carnal ones I was so used to. It was a new and different thing - deep, weighty and scary. I knew that the idea of Mandy and me being together was crazy, impossible and totally out of sync with reality. I was more then twenty years her senior, an old rock 'n' roller who had breezed into the church while she was a former missionary, a church worker who was waiting for the 'minister' she was to marry… But I had a vision. It had been planted so deep I couldn't dig it out!

And so we went through a period of circling around each other in some kind of Mexican stand-off but then finally, the day before her thirtieth birthday in April 1996, we got together. And that's the way it's been.
It was an amazing time for me. Things were restored. Things that I had cast nonchalantly off and scorned in a former epoch - simple things that I had no right to expect to get back and surely didn't deserve. We courted. Yes, we held hands and then after a while, we got engaged. I learned to do everything totally different to how I'd done for the thirty years before! Instead of going to bed first, we got married first!
Nowadays everyone talks about having protected sex, but I finally discovered what that really means - It's sex protected by God, because I do believe if you do it God's way, your protection becomes His business. Otherwise you're on your own! I knew all about doing things my way, and all about being on my own. Mandy was a virgin until we were married and I know now that the one place to have protected sex is under the covenant of marriage. So if I use the phrase 'arranged marriage' please understand it's just because that about explains it best. It's our story and it's true. One magnificent fact I always praise and thank God for.

I underwent a metamorphis. It took some time and it caused some pain. I shed some layers, some protections, some skins and emerged a different person with a new pecking order of priorities and a new level trust in God. It was a long night of despair before the dawn came, but when it finally came. Boy, what a sunrise that was! And all I can really tell you about it, all I have to share of any value is just this: God is good. Yes I went through a metamorphis and coming out into the new day, I thought all the hard stuff was behind me. But I'd only just begun…

It was a bedraggled, sad, place. The shell - the walls, the roof and floor were intact, but little else. Every single fitting and every pane of glass was distributed around the floor in a carpet of chaos. The big wooden cross from the wall lay on top of the pyramid of scrap items heaped in the centre of the chapel - chairs, the wood from the altar, the old organ, bits of masonry...

I stood in this carnage, surveying the Blitzkreig scene. Every brain cell was screaming to get out of the door and yet oddly, another part of me was at peace. I lingered while the arguments raged inside me until, in my spirit, I caught the strangest of signals: It was a whisper as soft as the wind swaying the trees: 'They haven't chased ME out of here!'

The church had been seriously vandalised by local thugs. I had only gone there because well, the building was close to where I lived and it just so happened I had a slender connection with the owners - the Church of the Nazarene - through a friend of a friend.
With the 'okay' from the owners, I called the local TV and they came down to run a story on it. Kids were trying to break into the place again when the camera team arrived and they actually filmed a dialogue with one of them:
'What are you doing?' said the presenter, interrupting a ten-year old as he industriously wielded a jemmy to the back door.
'What does it look like?' the kid answered back, and then continued his exertions with the jemmy while the camera whirred… The episode was replayed on the local TV News that evening, 18 November 1998, with the face of the kids mosaiced out. I think the police had a copy of the video, but I don't know what, if anything, happened to them.

A few weeks later, the Nazarene Church invited us to a meeting.
'If we get the church repaired,' they asked, 'would you keep it open as a place of worship?'
'Yes' I said trepidously, while Mandy blinked. She had some experience of church work, having been an assistant to Pastor Dave Woodfield years ago. She knew what I was letting myself in for.

I have to say it was not my plan or my idea to run a church, to be called a 'pastor.' No, definitely not.
It could never have happened without a succession of things dropping into place like the bricks of some galactic jigsaw puzzle. It rose up on a long string of happenstance that slowly painted a backdrop against which, when I was asked, I could say 'Yes.' Just two years before, the proposition would have been completely out of the question.

You see, I could never speak from a platform, never say anything of value - not until I became David Scott-Morgan. Not that changing my name made any difference you understand, but the fact is, that is the way it happened. I became David Scott-Morgan first.

Storyteller
Yes I changed my name in 1996 and Mandy and I were married in April 1997. We had not been married many months when the phone rang: It was the pastor of the little church in Tile Cross, the one just down the road from where I had lived back in the Early Days, the same church, albeit under another name and another pastor, where years ago my mother had married Alf.
Could I come to his church and do a concert in May '98? he asked.
'Tell him yes,' said Mandy, as if we were hoofing before the footlights every night of the week. I dutifully said 'yes' with all the conviction of a man who means 'No,' and then after hanging up, asked Mandy: 'How on earth are we going to do a concert?'
'We can play some music and in between the songs you can tell them your story' she said.
My eyebrows went up, my mouth hung open and cogs whirred… My 'story' was not exactly a video I could pluck off the shelf and mime to at that point, but necessity is known to be the faithful mother of invention.

Everyone has hidden treasure buried somewhere in their lives, some latent ability or talent, maybe something discarded and put in the box marked 'that doesn't work for me!' And it's a fact that God is able to show you where your treasure is buried, to draw you a map and put an 'X' on it. He is able to get you digging for your booty when you don't even know what it looks like. For it's surely true that if you knew what it was, then you would have dug it up yourself long ago.
The treasure chest I needed to unearth contained the secret of how to stand up in front of people and speak to them. I had to convince myself I had a story to tell and then become some kind of storyteller.
It didn't sit well with me: Years ago, I had never wanted to stand up and sing my God songs in front of people - Dave Woodfield got me through that ordeal. Then, when I had grudgingly accepted it, people would suggest I push the boat out a little further: 'Maybe you could give your testimony?' they would say. 'Aaaargh' I would think while nodding vacantly and espying the position of the exits. Constantly prodded by encouragements from well-wishers, I would occasionally give 'speaking' a try only to disappear inside an immobilising cloud of stuttering gobbledegook until the thought of it used to terrify me.

Mandy encouraged me that my story was worth telling and, egged on by the ever-shortening concert date, I worked at developing ways I might speak about the more publishable of my life's exploits. I was helped in my quest by all sorts of people - Orson Welles, Jesse duPlantis, T.D.Jakes - these became my unpaid coaches like John Lennon had been thirty years before.

The worst thing that can happen to you when you are speaking publicly is to dry up. Anyone who has ever stood up at a wedding, a funeral, or the Christmas do in the works canteen, will tell you this.
As I studied other speakers - 'the professionals' - and practised to myself, it percolated down to me that I needed to make contact with just one simple thing - passion!
The problem wasn't that I couldn't speak at all, but just that I couldn't speak unless I was emotionally engaged. Passion was the carrot to drive my donkey along and without that, it didn't want to move.
If I had thought about it, I could have twigged the similarity with singing:- If you can lose yourself in a song and 'live' it while you're singing it, then you can get beyond your fears and start to connect with your spiritual assets instead of only the intellectual ones.
The discovery melted away an impenetrable barrier before me. There was a way out of my cocoon of shyness and inhibition after all. Of course, it helped to make notes and to try and organise what I planned to say but for me, the thing I needed most was to find a point of passion and hang on to it.

It's a fact that everybody has a story to tell. The problem is that the really explosive and interesting things are often hidden inside a thicket of the mundane, trivial and outright embarrassing. It's one thing to talk about riding high on a hit record but quite another to talk about some seedy subterranean swill-house where you first met the song while in a state of mortified lust with some nubile companion whose name you cannot remember. (No, that was not part of my story, I just made it up as an illustration!)
At that time, I was choc-a-bloc with the amazing things God had done for me and I knew that speaking about it was a way that I could encourage others positively and also give thanks to the Lord for what He had done for me. I realised something else: The wonderful thing about telling your story is that nobody can argue with it! - People might think you've got it wrong, that you are crazy, they might think a lot of things, but when you declare 'God has done this for me' - they can't put hand on heart and say: 'No he hasn't!' That is what makes testimony so important and why it is so uniquely powerful.

Then, in short order, a divine chronology seemed to catapult me out of rehearsal mode:
Local Northfield Pastor Harry Hewat invited me along to a 'Prayer Breakfast' at Birmingham's Council House at the end of January 1998. I got up and sang 'This is my Prayer' (easily the most anointed 'God' song I had written) in front of an august assembly of businessmen and local dignitaries. The fallout from that resulted in me being asked to appear at the National Exhibition Centre in March - at a conference called 'Prayer for Revival.' There were about 4,000 at the NEC that day and my short contribution prompted a write-up in the Birmingham Evening News. The article leaned heavily on the fact that the last time I was on the stage in the NEC Arena was with the famous pop group ELO twelve years before. This exposure raised a level of press interest so that in June, Mandy and I were guests on BBC Television's Sunday morning Christian show called 'First Light.'

Tile Cross
But before that, in May 1998, we had done the 'concert' at the church in Tile Cross, right around the corner from where I used to live. Yes there was something quite spooky about the placement…

The old estate looked to me like a youth who had lost the fresh-faced glow of innocence: It didn't seem to care any more about its appearance. There was that feeling of isolation in the air as people shuffled past without ever making eye contact. Tile Cross, the once proud model of socialist re-housing and a place where kids would always be playing in the streets, had turned into a ghost town. The streets that once rang with the sound of children playing now exuded the silent ambience of a drug ghetto.
But inside the little church, insulated from all that, it was brim full for our first concert. There were three of us on 'stage' - Mandy and myself and Mark Jago, playing guitar and helping with the singing.
We played Buddy Holly and Beatles and ELO and many of my songs interspersed with Mandy and I telling our story and of course, telling the gospel story too.

After the concert, Mark Jago had secretly ordered a stretched limmo to take us back home in style. We didn't know anything about it until murmurings at the door made us look out of the window: Outside in the roadway was an enormous white Cadillac, elongated into a bizarre cinemascope like it was entering a black hole, with its driver in peaked cap waiting ceremoniously for his fare… 'It's for you' someone said. 'Nah, can' t be!' But it was. Yes we departed like pop stars after our first ever gig.

Above a 'Dave and Mandy' publicity shot, 1998.    
(Foto by Paul Yates)


Right a poster at one of our evangelistic presentations.

The upshot of all this activity is that when, in November 1998, the Church of the Nazarene asked Mandy and I would we keep their church open, we had by then travelled around singing and telling our story all over England. We had even done gigs in Northern Ireland and Canada. I had overcome my reticence to public speaking and that helped me enormously to say 'Yes' but I have to add, the main reason was that I was not on my own. I could never have contemplated leading a church without Mandy's help. If we had not been married I would not be here. That's why I had to become David Scott-Morgan first.

I think in all honesty the Nazarene Church were about ready to throw the towel in on their Northfield outpost and their overtures to us were a last-ditch effort to keep it open as a church. A long shot indeed. We had never done anything remotely like it. Mandy and I were without credentials or experience; Ministers without portfolio, called up to the battlements with a knife, fork and spoon, and daft enough to go.

Church on the Hill
It looked more like a place in the process of demolition than one being restored as a place of worship: The windows, or rather their apertures, were boarded over (and stayed that way until the repairs were complete), giving it an abandoned, dead but-not-buried appearance - about as inviting as Dracula's castle. I remember having the 'loud thought' that it was going to need a powerful injection of friendliness in its public countenance. The idea that immediately followed was the name: 'Church on the Hill.' After all, it was on a hill. Where all beacons should be: 'Egghill' was a sub-peak of the local vantage point 'Frankley Beeches' just half a mile away, where the elevation rose to 1000 feet if your electricity is in rubber wiring, or 330 metres if its in plastic.

The repairs were finally completed in May and the church was re-opened for business on June 4 1999. We painted a sign and hung it above the front door announcing the name to the world in friendly shades of blue and white: 'Church on the Hill.'

Nehemiah
I had never thought of myself as a Nehemiah - he was the administrator who got involved rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem back in 450 BC. No, definitely not: Handyman about the house, fixer of things, builder, plumber, decorator or gardener, these things I am not. Anything practical I am not. Yet that is what it seems I was called to be over the first two years of running Church on the Hill.

At some point in the past a lorry had reversed into the brick wall that marked the border between council pavement and church forecourt. About a third of the wall had been knocked over and big sections were lying dejectedly around the frontage. We pieced them back together and heaved them into place, and then bricked in the remaining gaps. I was cementing the last line of bricks into place one evening when two teenage girls came slinking past, arm in arm. As they walked by, one of them inclined her head and called back bitingly: 'We'll have that down again by tomorrow!'
The next day, one brick had indeed been assiduously chiselled out, but that was all. It was repaired and the wall resisted all further attempts by the kids to refashion it.

The insurers had wrung their hands of any responsibility for glass at the front of the building and so places where three vertical 'slit' windows had been were left covered with sad looking boards. They announced better than any bunting that the main business of the area was running scared from the intimidations and lawlessness.
One of the first things I did was to un-board the centre 'slit' window and have its panels re-glazed in multiple colours and then establish a permanent light behind it. The American group who had built the church in 1960 had named it the 'Pillar of Fire.' Now symbolically, their pillar got to burn once again over the area. About a year later the boards were taken down on the two smaller 'slit' windows either side and coloured windows installed in those also.

Red Carpet
All our attention to these details were outflanked and ruined by the dilapidation of the forecourt; it was an unadulterated mess. The old tarmac surface was long past its sell-by date and had become a patchwork quilt of black and green with vegetation poking through everywhere. Several builders came by to give us their quotations for re-surfacing it in black or red (for some reason I felt it should be 'red'). We looked at the prices in gloom - we had nowhere near enough for black, let alone red, which was a lot more. So we sent out our begging tray to the council grants department, even contacted local businesses to see if they would help.
Then, at a Wednesday prayer meeting in July 2000 we prayed specifically into finances: 'Lord help us get a grant so that we can smarten the drive up'. The next evening, I noticed a scrappy bit of paper had been pushed through the letterbox at our house. I picked it up off the mat and unfolded it - a short note about making a donation to the church was squashed around a cheque for a very substantial sum of money! I knew where it had come from - a neighbour who, it just so happened, had emigrated to New Zealand the day before. I figured he'd got someone to push it through my door after he was well away. He wasn't even a member at the church, he had visited it just once.
I said to Mandy: 'I think the Lord wants it in red!'

So in the autumn of 2000 the forecourt of Church on the Hill was re-surfaced in a rather sumptuous and expensive red block paving. The building crew soldiered on through atrocious weather and the attentions of local kids out to wreck anything nice, to complete the task of laying our 'red carpet,' supplied by dint of miraculous provision for Kings and commoners to walk upon. It did not go un-noticed amongst the locals that the church, once a foreboding eye-sore was beginning to look part of the solution rather than another part of the problem of the area.

 
Red Carpet  The forecourt is paved, November 2000. 

Work on the garden at the back of the church took two years to complete. It's not surprising - when we started it looked like something out of a Richard Attenborough jungle documentary; - An impenetrable barricade of foliage with all kinds of nasty prickly things, some towering well over a mans height. Most of the congregation turned out to help clear a path through this matto-grosso in the summer of 2000, and again the following summer, to dig and scrape at the scrawny earth below. The result is that now, the garden at the back of the church is a veritable haven of beauty and sanity, landscaped to a design of Mandy's, a far cry from what it used to be.

Everyone had said there would be trouble. We expected it. After all it was one of the roughest areas of town. When we first opened I asked a local church could we use their spare PA system?
'Only if you take it home with you and don't ever leave it at the church!' was the reply. That about said it all.
But contrary to all expectations, no damage of any significance has been visited upon the church in the four plus years since we took it on. There have been stones thrown, windows cracked and things stolen out of the garden at the back, but that is the extent of it. The worst that has happened has been attacks on cars parked on the forecourt - a couple of times cars have been broken into and my car was severely vandalised one day, but then it did happen right after some aggro with local kids. Of course the kids that inhabit the area are still a handful, often coming in to a meeting bent upon disruption. We accommodate them as best we can, only resorting to throwing them out if they really get out of hand! We continue to pray for them along with the Lord's protection to remain upon the church property.

Money, money, money
The congregation started with two people and has slowly grown to a modest twenty plus. Despite the small numbers the church finances have been consistently and amazingly strong, enabling us to fund refurbishments and also to support the many needs that arise. Really the provision of money has been miraculous, ever since that 'red carpet' episode.

It is something I like to tell people about - the astonishing the level of gifting to Church on the Hill. I don't know whether it has anything to do with it, but the fact is, we never pass the collection plate around (nor a hat, tray or bucket…). 'Why not?' People ask. 'What's wrong with that?
Is it because you are so filthy rich, you former pop star you, that you don't need our flimsy donations? Or is our money not good enough for you?'
No, none of the above. Your money is plenty good enough.

The bible says it is more blessed to give than to receive and we don't intend to rob anyone of that blessing so we leave the collection plate at the back of the church. This way of doing things grew out a conviction I had at the outset that the finances should be demonstrably faith based; God-centred not man-centred. I reasoned this way: If God is who He says He is, then I don't need to shake my piggy bank under your nose, or implore you by word or deed into giving to the Kingdom. God is able to move upon your heart to provision the church with that which it needs. The only question was whether I could trust Him to do it without my interventions.

The fact is since year one we have never been short of finances. In fact the funding has been enough to completely renovate the building. Of course, nobody, except visiting preachers or musicians, gets paid anything. The only time that Mandy and I had any recompense was in the first year, when we received £50 a month for six months. I have to admit that when we started I was sure the church would be a drain on us and cost us money. But it never has. Not one brown penny.

Added to this, since the summer of 2002 we have been funding an aid program in Romania (under the banner of 'The Romania Fund') and in 2004, we set up and became the financial patron of a Christian School in the Philippines. 'Madeline's Learning Center' in the town of Talavera, which was opened in June 2004 with all costs supported by us here. Think of it, this little church in a poor area of town, with a congregation of about 25, sends £500 a month abroad and looks after its own. Isn't God good?

The Church of the Nazarene have been wonderful in allowing us a free hand in their building. They have not required us to join their denomination although naturally, that is what they would prefer. In their dealings with us they have demonstrated their priority to raise up the banner of the Lord Jesus regardless of the badge of denomination. I can say from some experience that this is quite a rare thing in the annals of church politics where parochial, inward concerns will often dictate the pecking order of policy. The Nazarene leadership have indeed shown themselves to be real 'kingdom' people.
And so when people ask (and they do) 'what denomination do you belong to?' - sometimes couched differently as 'what sort of church are you?' - I answer them simply:
'We are a Christian church.'
It's true. Church on the Hill is a Christian church operating outside of the umbrella of an organised religion. It's not that we are against denominations. We are called to be 'Watchmen and Worshippers' to our community of believers, and of course administrators and wall-builders to the property.

Carl Wayne interviewed me in July 2002 on Radio West Midlands and was curious about the church and my position in running it.
'Do I address you as "Reverend" now?' he asked mischievously.
'No, I am a "Slightly Reverend"' I responded, explaining that we are not ordained and so we don't do weddings, funerals or bar-mitzvahs'.
I am in point of fact, officially a 'lay pastor' - that means a sort of spokesman who has bubbled up from 'the laity' - the common folk. You know, the unwashed lot who sit in the pews.
No I am not a Reverend. You can call me slightly Reverend if you want.