Settling Down & Christian Fellowship

Settle Christian Fellowship meets in an older chapel which was presumably built by one of the various Methodist denominations (my money is on the Primitives) before the great merger of 1932. The current occupants are of a Pentecostal persuasion and they have a busy-looking website, led by a married couple who are both described as the church’s pastors. It is good to see that in a fairly remote settlement, there remains a nonconformist, evangelical witness.

I was unable to gain entry to the building, though I admired it from without. Built onto a rather steep hillside, the chapel enjoys the use of several floors as the gradient demands. From the front, it all looked very typical, though the back revealed a peculiar set of little windows, each ascending higher than the other. I thought this rather curious, and attributed it to some end-of-building staircase.

British governments love to talk about social mobility: getting poorer people higher up the economic scale, and quite rightly. Yet mobility implies descent as well as ascent. Some of my ancestors were manor lords and knights, while other were poor, paupers and peasants. I have sunk lower than some and risen higher than others.

The Christian life is characterised by falling and rising, as would many in Israel on account of the Lord Jesus. Some have fallen from a previously great height, while the majority slowly grow in wisdom and stature. Is that line of windows going up, as suggested, or down? Both, I suppose, depending on the direction of travel. Are you growing as a Christian, or declining? There really is no middle ground.