In preparation for next year, I have moved to www.timsandell.wordpress.com. I'm hoping this means it should be slightly easier for friends and supporters to keep up with what's going on in Athens.
I won't be posting on here anymore, so please update your Google Reader and bookmarks accordingly.
Tim
Next year I will be working in Athens, hence why I'm currently learning Greek.
As we're in a recession, I thought I'd check out the cheapest routes to get there. By foot, Google Maps says it will take me just over 14 days to get there, but they seem to imply I'll have to take some lessons from Jesus at for the sea stage of the journey...
Here it is, the cheapest route from Manchester to Athens.
View Larger Map
Καλήμερα σας!
I was spending the morning learning Greek, when I realised today is Greece's Independence Day! How exciting!
Independence day celebrates the Greek declaration of independence from the Ottoman Empire on March 25th 1821. It signalled the start of their war of independence which they eventually won.
Apparently*, it was then that Ελευθερία ή θάνατος became Greece's motto. It literally means freedom or death, and was their rallying cry as the country rose up to fight against oppression and tyranny. The nine stripes on the modern Greek flag are representative of the nine syllables of the motto.
This is all lot more interesting than the vocab I've been learning this morning. Even thought the sense of satisfaction of completing another list on BYKI is pretty good, when the most exciting word you've learnt is "airport" (το αεροδρόμιο), most other things are way more interesting.
Here is a picture to celebrate:
*from what Wikipedia tells me...
Today I had a parcel delivered that's about four years late. It should have been delivered to me in Lesotho (I was there during my gap year) but it must have got lost somewhere en route.
Anyway, it contained a pack of fruit pastilles and some postcards from my family when they were on holiday. I strongly advise against eating three year old fruit pastilles and I'm lucky to have any teeth remaining after the first chew.
It's a great little surprise and this little time capsule from the year 2005 reminded me just how much I enjoyed getting parcels out in Lesotho.
This is what I where I was on March 12th 2005. Good times.
There should be some mission week and Relay updates coming sometime early next week, and you never know, I might even get round to putting up some of the posts that I promised months ago...
Apparently Richard Dawkin is launching a campaign to start secularist societies in every UK university. UCCF have stated that it "will excite CU members, who are keen to share their faith and raise the spiritual temperature amongst students."
Read the full press release.
This is a slightly belated update on the happenings of Salford Christian Union's events week.
Salford CU held three events during the week:
Tuesday night was the JazzCake event with talk on "Free to all". Salford University's favourite jazz and cheesecake night returned for the third time and about 60 students attended. Tim Hanson talked on how the good news of Jesus Christ is free to everyone. We looked at two facts from the Bible, firstly that human beings matter and secondly that we have all sinned - they've fallen short of the standard that God expects from us. He then showed us that there is a wonderful third fact in the Bible - that in Jesus, we have a solution to the problem. It was a great evening with about 45 non believers present, and many had great conversations afterwards.
Thursday night was the Grub Crawl. We went to three different locations to eat each course in our meal, and Tim did a talk on "FREE but at a price". We learnt that the price of the solution to the problem that was discussed on Tuesday night was the death of Jesus Christ, God's son. We saw that on the cross, the sins of many were put onto Jesus and Jesus righteousness was given to them in return. In essence it's a giant swap - Jesus was punished in their place and they recieve Jesus' obedience to God - and it's free to anyone who believes and trusts in Jesus. Six people attended.
Friday night was a talk on "FREE but costly". Ten people were there as Tim showed us that even though the benefits of the swap that occured on the cross is free to anyone who believes, living in the light of it is costly. Jesus sayst that the believer will repent and believer - that the new way of life is to be lived with God treated as God. This is the opposite of sin: sin is essentially living with ourselves as the most important person rather than God as the msot important person.
Each day CU members met for prayer, which I found really encouraging. It's great to see students really expressing reliance on God during mission weeks rather than drifting into the wordly way of thinking that more work makes things better. As it's God who does the work of saving unbelievers, it makes sense to ask him to work during evangelism!
All in all, it has been a wonderful two weeks of mission in Salford University. In those two weeks about 1100 gospels were given out and at least a couple of hundred students heard the good news about Jesus explained by students, friends of the CU and Tim. During this mission I have seen CU members who have become more confident in evangelism and have been encouraged by the openness of non believing students at Salford to talk about the good news of Jesus.
As is the way with most university missions these days, this mission was much more about sowing seeds rather than about seeing many people come to believe in Jesus. We're in the same situation as described by Jesus in the parable of the growing seed in Mark 4:26-29:
And he said, "The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. But when the grain is ripe, at once he puts in the sickle, because the harvest has come."We won't know when these people who have heard the good news and received gospels will begin to believe in Jesus, but the seeds have been sown and there will be an effect at some stage in the future.
It's about a week since I last posted on here. Time for a bit of an update!
Last week was University of Salford Christian Union's gospel distribution week. Here's a few numbers for what happened:
5 days of gospel distributionIt was a fantastic week and the CU members are really pleased (and pleasantly surprised!) with how it went. It was really encouraging seeing CU members step out of their comfort zones and doing questionnaires and handing out gospels. Great work guys!Nearly all CU members heavily involved in it
15 hours of having a stall in the foyer of the main building on campus
100s of good, gospel focussed conversations
1000 gospels distributed
1 in 20 students in Salford University now have a FREE gospel
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving. Colossians 3:23-24This week Salford CU has their events week, so please pray for us that we'd be confident in sharing the gospel and that God would show Salford students that the gospel is true!
Lately, there's been some helpful blogging on how as Christians we can begin to engage with culture.
Peter Dray writes on how we can engage with popular music, whilst Dear Freedom writes on engaging with movies. Both are really useful and well worth a read.
Today I was privileged to be able to go back to my old university CU, University of Manchester Christian Union, to do a seminar looking at God's role and our role in evangelism. I'm going to post my notes in three parts over the coming week, looking first at Our role, then at God's Role and finally at some great truths we can hold onto as Mission Weeks approach.
But before I start posting, I thought I'd say that preparing for it was wonderful.
It was great to have an excuse to spend time re-reading JI Packer's brilliant Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, which I think might be one of the most influential books I've read so far as a Christian. It's one of those books that are available via Amazon's market place at a few quid, so buy it if you haven't read it and are involved in evangelism in some way!
And it was also a timely kick up the butt to remember that evangelism is not about me. It's God who gives belief (Ephesians 2:8), who gives repentance (Acts 11:18) and who rescues us (Colossians 1:13). We don't do any of that, all we do is tell people the gospel (Matthew 28:18ff). God saves. We do not.
It was a timely reminder because for the next three weeks I will be in some way or another involved with a CU mission week in Greater Manchester.
Next week is the Distribution week at Salford Uni CU, where they are aiming to hand out a couple of thousand FREE gospels (Mark's Gospel in trendy covers!) to students in Salford. During the day we'll be spending three hours chatting to students around campus, whilst in the evenings we will be knocking on doors in halls of residence.
This is part of a series of posts on Zephaniah. The following is a brief summary of part of one of Mo's talks on Zephaniah at Relay 2.
At the start of the Josiah’s reign Judah had several problems. They’d lost the Book of the Law, but that in itself was only a symptom. In what would have been a moment of comedy had it not been so serious, they rediscovered the Book of the Law and officially started doing the things they should have been doing all along. But that only sorted out a symptom. They still had problems.
Their main problem was that they thought there were other gods worth worshipping besides Yahweh. They looked at the pagan nations around them and noticed that those guys seemed to be getting everything Judah wanted, and so started worshipping their gods to get those things.
Their other problem was that they thought the main problem wasn’t a problem. They didn’t take it seriously because they thought life felt normal.
Zephaniah is God’s answer to these two problems.
They’re problems we have too. We also look at the people around us and want to be the same as them. We worship the same things they do – sex, money and power. And the other problem we have is that, just like Judah, we don’t see that there’s anything wrong with this first problem. It feels normal to us.
At Relay 2 we studied Zephaniah in our Fellowship Groups. In the coming few weeks, as I work through my notes from the conference, I’ll be blogging some of my thoughts and some of the things that really struck me from our studies on Zephaniah.
I should say up front that most of what I type on Zephaniah is going to be recycled from the talks that Mo gave us and from the studies that other people in my Fellowship group led, so my thanks and all the credit goes to them!
Mo has posted some helpful thoughts on Zephaniah here.
You would have thought that in the North we would get more snow than the South. Wrong! They woke up to over a foot of very Narnia-esque snow back home in Guildford on Monday morning.
In Manchester we had a smaller, yet still exciting, offering. Whilst it's not quite as pretty as the Surrey countryside, I think it's quite nice in a Moss Side kind of way!
The North East's contribution to the Karaoke fun.
"I can be your Relay Worker, but I'm not your CU slave!
I do more than go for coffee, every day's a Relay rave"
53 years ago to the day, Jim Elliot (one of my missionary heroes) and his four missionary friends were martyred whilst trying to reach the Waodani people in the Ecuadorian jungle with the gospel.
I read Through Gates of Splendour, a biography about Jim Elliot, a year or two ago and it has been really influential in my growth as a Christian. One thing that's really struck me was that they were no different to you or me. They were just normal Christians who were obedient to God and took the Great Commission seriously.
Here's a brief video explaining the story of how the Waodani people were reached.
(HT: Justin Taylor)
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