les Davey de France

We were invited to lunch yesterday with some church folk, so I collected Pat from the café where I found everything in disorder and clearing up after the kids' Easter workshop not even begun. Still we slowly got everything sorted. I seemed to take an age to lock the toilet and tidy everything up. Then off we went to find the apartment. I'd not been before. It was raining heavily. Just two tram stops, but it took us ages as we dithered our way along.  We got to the flat, and first had to inspect the living room. The dining room was being kept shut to keep in the naughty cats. The living room was very impressive. I passed the time looking out of the window at the park opposite as various aspects of the sofa were discussed. Then into the dining room. Surprise !  I was gobsmacked. Speechless.  I'd been duped, like the hapless dupe I am, and the church folk were all there for a birthday barbecue, complete with inextinguishable birthday cake candles and enough meat to march Nap...

Christmas comes early in International Churches, because so many people travel home for the holidays. So it was that the Marseille Carol Concert was held on 1 December. Here in Bordeaux we held off until 15 December, and some of our students waited to go home until the following day. Now we're in the post and pre Christmas period - our major festivities are over, but the great day has not yet arrived - so we've suspended our Sundays in Judges and we're spending a few Sundays looking at aspects of the incarnation until the New Year. 

ICC-Eurasia is the network of International Churches to which we belong. Last week they held their annual Prayer Retreat in the city of Montpellier, somewhere I've never been before. It takes five hours to get there by train. The deal was to stay in a hotel together for which a group price had been negotiated. It was quite a pleasant little hotel in a residential part of the city, but close to where the Montpellier church meets and not far from the edge of the city centre. Montpellier seems to exist mainly because of being a staging post on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostella in Spain. It's right on the Mediterranean, so it's sunny and bright most of the year though it doesn't have beaches itself. We spent the bulk of our time sharing news of the churches and of the ICC, and praying for the various issues raised. Pat didn't come with me, though some wives came. She was kept pretty busy at home.

 Christmas Day was a comparatively quiet day, with a shorter service at our flat, followed by lunch. In the end we represented the USA, Egypt, Nigeria, France and the United Kingdom. We did not watch the King’s message this year, I caught up with it later on YouTube. On Christmas Eve we had had a video call with Gwilym and Beth in Norwich and with Catrin and Froim, who were on the autobahn from Munich to Vienna.  This week has been restful and festive, though we’ve had lots of leftovers to eat so we haven’t sampled any the eateries that I shortlisted to try. We did call in at a coffee-shop and we’ve also been to the cinema to see ‘Living’, a reworking of a Japanese film with a screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro. The main character played by Bill Nighy, whose name I try to avoid attempting to pronounce.

 I’m pretty well back to whatever usually counts as ‘normal’. I have a sticky cough but I no longer absolutely need to nap during the day, I have resumed my forced marches to local supermarkets and I think I’ll try running next week, though early in the morning to avoid the sun. Pat is also fully recovered and no longer needs to nap. At least not every day. The city is now in summertime. This means fewer trams with more people in them. Since covid is once more on the rise we wear masks in the trams and try to avoid the busiest ones… Except we have no idea when the busiest times are!  Summertime means parks, and the Jardins de l’Ars are resplendent with their trees and shrubs, picnic tables, sun-loungers and little platforms for performance poets. The trees are not yet tall enough to provide much shade, so the picnic tables are not as busy as they will be, but it’s great to wander through the paths and that’s where I will run next week, if I can rouse my inner pig-dog. The summ...

We have this project of a kind of shopfront church centre - A Cœur Ouvert - Espace Gallien. It’s a small shop premises just in front of the church. It’s taken a LONG time for everything to get in place and has known such fun as : An estate agent who said, in her first call to me, ‘if we don’t sign the lease tomorrow I’ll let the place to someone else’. I duly met her the next day to discover that she didn’t have the lease ready… The counsellor at the bank, where it takes about a month to open an account, ordering our bank card for the wrong account and also sending the code for internet banking for the wrong account. This is not yet entirely sorted out. Anyway, I have no idea at all what I’m doing, I don’t understand French leasing law and yet I am the best placed person to navigate our way through this.  Earlier in the week this all became a little stressful, especially as the cursed WhatsApp beeped incessantly on my computer as people let off steam.  But we’re through that f...

 May 1 is the Fête du travail , the festival of work, which we celebrate by not doing a stroke. This means no buses or trams. It's also the first Sunday of the month, so in theory cars are not allowed in the city centre. As most of our folks come to church by bus or tram, and it's the last Sunday of the Easter hols anyway, and lots of us are away, then tomorrow will be a small, select band. Hey, let's not forget the value of calm, quiet Sundays when we can relax and take things a bit easier.

 We got back Tuesday evening and a happy and full week of activity awaited us. Wednesday was Bible study and prayer at the home of a couple who live in one of the suburbs - Mérignac. It's quite a hoof from the tramline, so you switch to the bus and the journey, though not long, takes up to an hour. Sometimes I reserve a pool car but it takes just as long because of having to get around the city centre, then negotiate a maze of different routes. The evening was good, however. Wednesday morning we had met up to work through the statutes for the association which will run the café-style centre in front of the church building. We met in one of the local coffee-shops and I drank a great flat white to kick-start my little grey cell. Then it was preparation. We changed our preaching schedule a while ago but, still high on San Sebastián, I totally forgot so launched into reflexion on Luke 3, instead of the end of Luke 2. Luke 3 is a fascinating chapter and Rory will preach that this coming...

Our Ukrainian friends had car trouble in Germany and the repairs required a part to be ordered, so instead of arriving on Wednesday evening they arrived on Friday. Not only that, but nine people had swelled to seventeen.  This changed our plans. We had imagined accommodating them in church members’ homes but on Saturday two of our folk were having their wedding ceremony and reception, and spare rooms were full of guests, so we decided that the best thing was to get them rooms in one of the basic hotels on the ring road. There’s one just over the river from us, so once we knew they were definitely going to arrive I phoned and booked the rooms - four I think - and then booked a pool car for the journey over. We anticipated cooking them a meal, but we abandoned that idea when we realised that they would arrive late at night, with very young children. Church folk had bought vast quantities of boxed drinks and cartons of coffee as well as bread, ham, cheese, biscuits, cookies, chocolate...

 Next week Bordeaux Church hosts the Annual Pastors' Prayer Retreat of our network of International Churches. Friends will be coming from Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary and Turkey, as well as some from the USA who are en route to Portugal etc. There'll be about 20 of us. It'll be great to show them the city as well as to pray together.

 Mrs Davey was ill from Thursday and I fell ill on Saturday. We're pretty sure it wasn't covid related. Pat tested herself, but mine was what we charmingly call here a gastro . It led to me sleeping in the spare room on Saturday night so that my frequent risings might not wake Pat. I alerted the lads on Saturday afternoon - we'd met on Wednesday to thrash out the main cut and thrust of the passage for this week - Luke 1:57-80, and I was very much anticipating preaching on it, but it was not to be. Instead the lads took charge like bosses and I was able to sleep most of the day.

 Having reluctantly decided not to spend Christmas in the UK, we had some work to do. The following morning, Wednesday, I got onto the websites.  Boots had sent our day two PCR tests out, so we couldn't get that refunded. Trainline made it very easy to cancel our return tickets from Stansted to Norwich. There was a button to click. We had booked return lateral flow tests with a lab at Stansted. They were easily cancelled, too. Ryanair - I was reconciled to losing the price of our tickets - expensive ones given the hold baggage we added, and sure enough, we were not allowed to cancel our trip. However, we COULD change our flights for a "small fee". We discussed dates with our people in the UK and changed the dates. It meant the tickets now were really very expensive indeed - were we throwing good money after bad? - but it gives us a date to visit the Norwich part of the tribe. So now we were staying, but how to make it festive? Well on Wednesday we contacted people quickly...

"Remember that the Orangeman is coming between 10 and 12 to fit the alarm." So read the sundry text messages and emails that I received since last Friday. We'd invited church people to come round for the afternoon - some work in cafés and stuff, others are students and are at a loose end just now, so they were coming for lunch and discussion and games. The Orangeman came at about 11, quickly surveyed the flat, concluded that only Batman could gain access via any of the windows. I was wearing my Batman t-shirt, but I told him I always use the door and sometimes even resort to the lift.  So he installed a movement detector in the hall which takes a flash photograph of any uninvited intruder, then showed us how to dial in our codes and use our red and blue tags and to set and unset the alarm. Meanwhile church folk started arriving. I'd found hobnobs in the shop and they met with general approval. The café people brought savoury flaky pastry rolls ( roulés fueilletés ) an...

 Wednesday is "the fourteen July", France's national holiday. To mark the occasion the town hall puts on a firework display in the centre of the city. Meanwhile we have our midweek meeting in someone's home.  So this Wednesday, weather permitting, we will meet on the quays for a picnic and for prayer, then stay around for the fireworks. If the weather is bad, and rain is forecast, then we'll meet at the home nearest the quays and then scuttle up for the fireworks.

Last night was the Assemblée Générale of the local branch of the Conseil National des Evangélique de France. One of the big items on the agenda was electing new committee members. There were four candidates. Two were elected.  This election was necessary because two of the current members were leaving the committee - our excellent former délégué départemental - and me. Soon after I arrived in Bordeaux I was taken along to what we then called the "Evangelical group" - a group of pastors and christian workers who met to pray, to share news and to encourage each other. With the formation of the CNEF about 10 years ago now, I think, we changed the group into a local CNEF group. I became its chairman. Later the secretary resigned and - as a temporary measure - I took on the essential functions of the secretary. So I'm glad to pass on the baton. I hoped to see a younger and more diverse committee, and it is certainly younger. So this morning I typed up the minutes of the meetin...

 It's not an easy time. The government wants to tackle youth radicalisation, so it's targeting religious groups with a new proposed law. This was originally called the anti-separatism law, but is now renamed the law for the reinforcement of republican principles. The problem in France is that Evangelicals are seen as being relatively new in the country - many churches have been founded essentially since the Second World War, and as an import from US culture - in France dubbed Anglo-Saxon. Recent US history has not encouraged a positive view of US evangelical politics, especially if you have limited exposure to real life French evangelicals, so there's a lot of ignorance around. Thus our Minister of the Interior (equivalent of the Home Secretary) quite regularly gives the most horrifying TV interviews saying things like "anyone must be able to state formally that the laws of the republic are superior to the laws of any god", and "evangelicalism is a big proble...

 Bit of a wobbly day yesterday.  For one thing we were all waiting for the government to decide on the rules for social distancing for places of worship. They had set a limit of 30 people. This had caused great consternation all around. Imagine the great cathedral with 30 people!  Then we were still wondering whether we'd be able to go to the UK for Christmas. We had tickets - on the fourth flight we tried. The first booking with Ryanair was changed to a different airport. Then it was cancelled. So we booked with Easyjet. Then that was changed to a difefrent airport and we were given the choice of cancelling. We really wanted to go, but what about testing, quarantine in the UK and in France, and would our flights be cancelled last minute. In the end we decided that we would accept that Christmas in the UK this year was not going to happen. I cancelled our flights and took a voucher so that we can go over as soon in the New Year as we can. That just left the government. Th...

 Anti-covid regulations change and we have to change our plans with them. So we are in a phased deconfinement at present. This means that shops are open again, with longer opening hours permitted, up till 9pm. Also Sunday trading is permitted. This doesn't affect us in Bordeaux much because Bordeaux is a tourist city, so Sunday trading is allowed anyway between certain hours. Cafés and restaurants are not allowed to open, but they can do takeaways and delivery. People are showing huge ingenuity in finding ways to encourage people to buy takeaways. One of our favourite places was doing picnic baskets to take to the nearby park. Others are selling takeaway drinks in a huge variety of containers.  Churches have stayed open for private prayer, but now services can be held with a maximum of 30 people, not including those officiating. Since we have a disproportionate number of people on duty, doing video-projection, accompaniment, stewarding, etc, this means we can meet with no diff...

 Got through a whole service with multiple screen shares and assorted jiggery-pokery without panic and without having to ask for help. Even found the red buttons and stuff. Amazed.

A couple of things have helped.  Catrin came round and clowned around with music. A future bride came round to eat, and to plan her wedding in three weeks' time. I listened to Vaughan-Williams' Fantasia on a theme of Tallis.* I took a nap. I needed it, too, after a short and disturbed night. My preparation for tomorrow morning and for Sunday. * one bright spot in the covid experience has been the artists finding new ways to reach the public with their music: the pianist Igor Levit's micro-concerts, Voces8 and Apollo5 and so on with their chamber choir stuff, orchestras performing from unusual halls, the Wigmore Hall broadcasting wonderful singers. I can't always spare an evening or the cost of a ticket for a concert in Bordeaux but here world-class music has come to our homes, and I'm very thankful.