Return to Bamburgh and Exeter

We left Calgary and Winnipeg on Friday 17 July. This time we did not fly to London but to Edinburgh, which, as we had learned in February, is much nearer to Bamburgh. We collected a hire car at the airport and set out south for our lodgings near Newcastle.

At the hire desk something happened that we understood only later. We never buy car insurance on these trips, because of the mounting additional cost. But when the agent handed Chidera the waiver to sign, something in him said, Just do it. He did not understand why. He asked for the most basic cover and signed.

About five minutes from our hotel, as we came slowly through an intersection, a car crossing at speed struck the front of ours, tore away the grille and damaged the bumper, and drove off. No one was hurt. That night we found that the agent had not given us the basic cover Chidera asked for, but a fuller package. The whole of the damage was covered, and the most we would pay was about £590. We received it as the intervention of God, who had gone ahead of us. We were not alone on the road.

On the first full day the mission stalled. We photographed the damage outside our lodgings and telephoned the rental company's incident line. We asked for a replacement car, and asked whether we were covered. The incident line could not say, and customer service was closed until half past eight on Monday morning. No one called back. No replacement came.

We did not sit still. The car could still be driven, and that afternoon we drove it the hour north to Budle Hall to see Ralph and his family. He was very kind to us. We had a time of sharing with him and his family, and told them how Christ had gone ahead of us at the hire desk in Edinburgh.

On the Lord's day we kept our appointment with Polly and John. Polly had confessed Christ in February and received prayer for healing, and she and John had since decided to marry. We sat with them for more than an hour at their kitchen table. John, a devout man active in his parish church, spoke of the tension there between traditional and evangelical forms. We answered that worship is not something we do but who we are; that the Holy Spirit is not Presbyterian, Anglican or Baptist; and that truth is not an idea but a person.

John pushed back, and fairly, on organisation, on the habit of church, and on the last days. He did not believe the Lord would come in his lifetime. Chidera answered that readiness is not only going to church and saying our prayers; it is the putting away of sin. He invited them to meet at two o'clock every Sunday to open the Scriptures together. John thanked us: “It's a real honour you've come this way.”

In the afternoon we came to Andrea's home on Front Street. The little church was meeting every week, in her home or on Holy Island as the tides allowed. And she had news of Ralph: she had left a Bible, the version called The Message, at his bothy on the moors. He had begun with the Acts, and was recommending it to his friends. “Ralph and I never spoke to each other until you came,” she said.

On Monday morning we sat with Ralph at his kitchen table for a little over two hours, the longest conversation of the mission. He asked every question he could think of, and then played the sceptic against his own answers. On Polly's illness we told him plainly she should keep taking her medication, and that we expect healing as she grows in Christ.

On surrender he was candid: to give up an independent mind “is too much for me now”. Then he said something that moved us: “I wouldn't be interested unless I could see that it was having that effect on you.”

About twenty-five minutes in, Martha came into the kitchen, a friend of Maria's from Granada, twenty-seven, staying at the Hall. Ralph said she did not want to hear our message particularly. She sat down and stayed for the rest of the morning. She asked whether the body is a cage, and whether we were different before being born again. “Night and day,” Chidera said. Ralph noticed that when Chidera bears witness to his faith, he loses his stammer. Before we rose we exchanged numbers with Martha. Another young Spaniard at the Hall, Alejandra, was unwilling to meet with us.

The rest of the day went to the car.

With the rental offices open again after the weekend, much of Monday and Tuesday went to the telephone and the road, arranging to exchange the damaged car. We had to go a long way to collect the replacement, and it cost us much of two days of a short journey. But in the end the car was changed, and we were on the road again.

On Wednesday morning we were back at Ralph's table for another hour and a half. He asked whether love of country sits badly with the faith. Chidera answered that God made the nations and set their bounds, and that at the end John saw a multitude of all nations before the throne, each still itself. Ekaba told him that what was happening to him was regeneration, the enlightening of the mind. “That's actually a comfort to me,” Ralph said.

Chidera read him Revelation 3:20: Behold, I stand at the door and knock. Ralph answered honestly: “If I was fully convinced by what you're saying, I would be opening that door.” He brought out the Bible Andrea had left at the bothy and read aloud John 3:16.

He asked how two men could reach the young and the clergy of Bamburgh. We told him: prayer, and the Holy Spirit, and long-term patience, one soul at a time. We asked him to come to Andrea's on Thursday. “I probably won't,” he said. “I see myself as a mangy little dog circling a fire, but I'm not ready to come into the circle.” That, we said, is exactly the type of people Jesus walks with.

Our last day in Northumberland: the morning at Budle Hall, and the afternoon with the church at Andrea's home. Seven of us in the room, with Polly among them. Ekaba brought the word from Revelation 22: the river of the water of life, the leaves of the tree for the healing of the nations, the angel's command to worship God, and the invitation of the Spirit and the bride. He tied it to the outreach the church had planned for Monday 27 July, The Land of Hope.

When he read verse 15 and said that sorcery is strong in Bamburgh and Northumbria, Andy, the husband of Anna, stopped him: it was not relevant, it sounded like accusing everybody around them, and it was drowning the message of hope. Ekaba apologised, received it, and finished the chapter without returning to the point. Others spoke of illness and injury among them since they had prayed over the land. “There is resistance. But it's not from the people.”

The brethren, Anna among them, felt that what Andy had done, and the tension it brought, was very bad. Anna thanked us for our patience and humility in the Spirit. Andy met with us afterwards and apologised. As Polly left, Andrea told her, “Just come. You don't need an invite.” Then we said our goodbyes, and drove the 674 km south through the night.

In Exeter we met James. It was a year, almost to the week, since he had first heard the word in Plymouth. The fellowship that began there now gathered in Exeter as the Fellowship of Christ Church, and the next morning it would hold an open meeting the brethren had called Rise. James had had cards printed: “Come as you are, discover God's word, find community and grow in faith.”

We walked the High Street and the streets around it, giving out the cards, preaching, and ministering to the people we met. James went with us and spoke to people himself. The city was busy, prosperous and sunlit, and yet the people were cold.

That day Ekaba said a thing the brethren took up the next morning: your faith in God is your constant, and your job is a variable. We also sat with James and Elouise about the fellowship, Elouise's baptism, and their wedding in October. We counselled her that the decision of where to be baptised should be governed not by the considerations of men, however kindly meant, but by what is true. “Our home is your home,” Elouise said.

On Saturday morning the Fellowship of Christ Church met at 17 St David's Hill, a plain, bright room with the tables pushed into a square. Chidera opened with a song taken word for word from Revelation 19:6, and taught on the theme the brethren had chosen, Isaiah 60:1: Arise, shine. Darkness covers the earth, he said, “and we saw it yesterday”; but God is set to use those on whom His glory has risen to recover the land. He told of his first years in Canada, timid before the police until he knew his rights. So it is with the sons of God.

The brethren spoke frankly. Mark, a Christian for twenty-five years: “I don't know why there's no power.” Others spoke of church as keeping up with the Joneses. James gave a short talk on the precision of creation and of the Word: “Let's light up Exeter.” Ekaba closed with a charge on the burden of leadership: first to come, last to go. James said: “We feel so small now, to be part of something bigger than us.” The church that began with two young men in Plymouth now gathers ten or twelve.

That afternoon we drove north to Derby, to Emmanuel Akpet and his wife Josephine, friends and brothers from our youth in Calabar. Josephine laid a table for us. As the evening went on we laid on them the burden of the house of God: the need for a kingdom church in Derby. They received it.

It was almost midnight when we left Derby, up the length of England and over the border into Scotland. We reached Edinburgh in the early hours of Sunday, returned the car, and caught our flights: Ekaba to Calgary, and Chidera to Winnipeg. We had begun with a car at a crossroads and ended with a car on a motorway in the dark, and in between the Lord had kept us every mile.

Since then: a church is being born in Derby, and its first gathering has been called for Friday 2 October 2026, on St Peter's Street.