Wild Goose Chase 1

Tony and Debbie drove to Piddledon in their quirky little blue car.  They parked beside one of the six houses on the main street, if you could possibly call it a main street.
"There's a public footpath," said Tony, looking out of the car window at the sign that stood on the edge of a field.  They got out of the car and followed the sign on to a little mud track.
"It's not much of a footpath, is it?" said Debbie.  The track was only a hundred yards long and faded away into the long grass.
"At least we can walk across this grass," said Tony.  "What a beautiful view down into the valley.  This is such a nice place.  I think we should live here."
"We can't live here," said Debbie.  "There's no shops, there's no schools, there aren't even any bus stops."
"We're going to have to live here, Debbie."
"Why?"
"It's the only place we'll ever get a mortgage."  Tony led Debbie back to the six houses that were on the main street.  One of them had a For Sale sign in the garden.  "This house is for sale.  It's only £60,000."
"It's not very big," said Debbie.
"It's got two bedrooms.  It's as big as the flat we've got now."
"It's a little bit delapidated."
"It needs a bit of work on it.  Never mind, I'll fix it.  I'm going to ring the estate agent and make an appointment.  We'll have a look around it.  It's better than paying £850 a month to live in an ex council flat in a tower block."

The big minibus belonging to Piddledon Community Church was down in Newport Newtown city centre.  It was late on a September evening.  Matthew stood wearing a highly visible yellow jacket he had bought for working on the farm, waving a church newspaper, standing in the narrow beam of the street lamp that was on top of a concrete bollard, trying to attract people's attention.
"Don't stand too close to that light," said John.  "You'll frighten people away."
"How come?" asked Matthew.  He then caught sight of his reflection in the minibus window.  He walked up to the street lamp.  "Aagh! Is that what I look like?"  Matthew decided that a man holding a newspaper and wearing a fluorescent jacket was visible enough without walking right up to the light.
"Where are the DVDs?" asked Pastor David.
"I left them in the house," said Rachel.
"What do you mean, left them in the house?  They were in the box, with the literature and everything else."
"I took them out, David, and put them in the house, because that's where we're watching the films tonight."
"No it's not, we're supposed to be watching them right here and now," said David.
"Well, I didn't think you could get a projector on to a bus."
"A projector?"
"How else are you going to watch a film?" asked Rachel.
"There's a video screen on the wall."
"I didn't think the bus was big enough for a video screen."
"Big enough?" asked Pastor David.
"The National Express coach used to have a big video recorder and a big television," said Rachel.
"You show your age, Rachel," said Matthew, laughing.
"She's only 45," said Pastor David.
"I might be only 45, but I remember when a film was recorded on a big reel of film and you had to put it in a projector."
"Really?" asked Matthew.
"Thirty years ago.  And when the first domestic video recorders came out, they were big bulky things, and plugged into big bulky televisions."
"Why didn't they just put a DVD into a computer?"
"The computers of that day wouldn't play a DVD.  They had green writing on the screen and were called Word Processors.  There was no internet."
"That's rubbish," said Matthew.  "The world would come to an end."  

Two women, one middle aged and one quite young, came up to Matthew in the street.
"We're Catholics," said the older woman.  "Can we come on your bus?  Are we allowed to?"
"Yes," said Matthew.  "Catholics are very welcome.  I have the greatest respect for the Roman Catholic church."
"Do you?" asked Rachel.
"When I was a teenager I rebelled into Roman Catholicism," said Matthew.  Rachel and Pastor David began laughing.  "Catholic worship is very beautiful," Matthew continued.  The two women sat down on the bus.
"Do you want a cup of tea?" asked Rachel.
"Yes, two teas with no sugar," said the older woman.
"What you're doing is very lovely," said the younger woman, "although we both know the Lord."
"You don't know the Lord," said Rachel.  "You don't really know him like we do."
"Steady on, Rachel," said Pastor David.  "We don't know if these ladies know the Lord.  They might do.  Are you born again?"
"No," said the older woman.
"Well, there you are then," said Rachel.  "There's no way you could be saved and be in any doubt."
"Maybe they are saved," said Matthew.  "Maybe they don't understand your terminology.  Do you have the Holy Spirit?"
"We all have the Holy Spirit if we've been baptised," said the older woman.  "It has to become manifest in our lives."
"You haven't really been baptised," said Rachel.  Matthew looked at the younger woman.
"Are you a committed Christian?"  he asked.  Her face lit up.
"Oh, yes."
"Have your sins been forgiven?"
"Praise God, yes."
"That's what being a Christian is," said Pastor David.  "I'm sorry, we were so busy trying to convert you, we didn't ask your names."
"I'm Martha," said the older woman.
"I'm Bernadette," said the younger.
"Come to our meeting on Saturday afternoon, at the community centre," said Matthew, handing them a leaflet.

It was 5 o' clock on Saturday afternoon.  All the members of Piddledon Baptist Church sat in Newport Newtown Community Centre for their evangelistic meeting.  They sat there by themselves.  None of the people they had invited during the week long street campaign had come.  Undaunted, Rachel made some sandwiches and Pastor David's wife, Sarah, put out the cakes.  At half past five the tea was out and they had all begun eating.  Pastor David began preaching.
"You need Jesus," he said, holding a plate that contained a sausage sandwich and a cake with maltesers on the top, trying hard to be informal.  "Jesus is the answer, my friend."
"The answer to what?" asked Matthew.
"The answer to where you can find peace of mind.  Jesus can forgive your sins, no matter how terrible they may be, no matter how trivial they may be, he forgives little sins as well.  He took them all on himself when he died on the cross.  Oh Prodigal, God waits for you to come home.  It matters not how far you have wandered.  His heart aches and longs for you to return.  Come into God's kingdom.  Don't delay.  Come tonight.  Are you washed in the blood of the lamb, my friend?"
"I am, indeed," said Rachel.
"I am as well," said Sarah, smiling sweetly.
"Pastor," said Matthew, "all the people in this meeting are Christians.  You are preaching the gospel to people who are not here.  No one has come tonight.  Do you think that you are wasting your time?"
"You could be right," said Pastor David.  He finished eating his sausage sandwich.  "Get into the minibus.  I have something I want to show you.  Leave the food, we can come back for it later."  

Pastor David drove them to a church five miles away.  The building was boarded up.  It had not been used as a church for quite some time.  On top of the building there was a sign.  "In this place, on October 3rd 1907, the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the debt."
"What does it mean?" asked Rachel.
"They had all these bills they needed to pay," said Matthew, "so they put them on the table, and set fire to them.  Then God provided them with lots of money, and they paid all their bills.  That was how the fire of the Lord fell and burned up the debt."
"That isn't what it means at all," said Pastor David.  "The fire of the Lord is the Holy Spirit.  It came down with power and force here, and burned up the debt."
"I thought it was the blood of Jesus that paid for our debt," said Rachel.
"The Holy Spirit burns up our sin in its refining fire," said Pastor David.  "The statement is theologically sound.  The Holy Spirit came down here like it had never come down before."
"Well, if it did, it didn't do them any good," said Matthew.  "The church is closed now."
"Of course it is," said Pastor David, "it's a hundred and ten years later.  It did them a lot of good then, didn't it?"
"Darling, why are you showing us this?" asked Sarah.
"Our church has grown stale and dry.  We need the fire of the Lord to fall and burn up our debt.  Lord, let your glory fall, as on that ancient day.  We want it to happen now, we want it to happen now," said Pastor David, animatedly jumping up and down, waving his right arm as if pointing at something, expecting to hear a roar like an aeroplane taking off, or to see some flames.  Nothing happened.  "Come on, pray, people, pray.  I want the fire of the Lord to come down.  Pray in tongues."  The women started praying in tongues.  "Louder, louder," said Pastor David.  "God's not deaf but he's not nervous either."  The women and men were now all praying very loudly.  Pastor David once again pointed at the Holy Spirit with his arm, if that had been possible.  "It's going to happen now, it's going to happen now, now, now!"

There wasn't much food eaten when the group returned to the community centre.  All they wanted to do was pray and sing.  The noise of spontaneous prayer, in tongues, in English, from everyone all at the same time took up most of the evening.  Matthew walked around banging a drum.
"The spirit of Africa is upon me, the spirit of African revival."  He began chanting and singing the same unintelligible words over and over again, and making a strange hissing noise from the back of his throat.
"What are you doing?" asked Rachel.
"I'm praying in tongues."
"That's not how you do it."
"I used to pray with an African brother, that's how he taught me to pray."
"It's weird," said Rachel.  "If you want to pray in tongues, can you please do it like the other Christians do."  Matthew stopped hitting his drum.
"If I want to pray in tongues, do I have to do it in English?" he asked.  "We have Anglicised the gift of tongues.  When you pray in tongues can you please be eloquent, use as many logical sounding words as possible, pray in a respectable tone of voice, don't chant, don't sing and don't go wild.  Well, I would be surprised if the Holy Spirit came down to party like 1907 if we put him in a spiritual straight jacket."  Matthew put down his drum, sat down and had something to eat.
"He's got a point," said Pastor David.  "The Bible doesn't say what praying in tongues should sound like."
"When you've been a Christian for a long time, you'll learn to do it like we do," said Rachel.
"Maybe that's the problem," said Matthew, in between mouth fulls of sausage sandwich.