Swansea and Cardiff

Church visits this week have taken me to Cardiff, to Swansea and back to Cardiff.

Easter Sunday at Saint Mellons was very happy and encouraging with a splendid morning worship together with Holiday Bible Club prize-giving attended by lots of Sunday School children and their parents. In the evening I preached and it was good to be back in a traditional Welsh chapel building again.

On Easter Monday some long-time friends collected me to take me to the Easter Convention in Maesycwmmer. I was sick with excitement. It was a real nostalgia trip back to the Easters of the 1980s, when Maundy Thursday and Good Friday evenings were spent in Tredegar, then Easter Monday in Maesycwmmer with usually the same speaker for all the meetings. Those were very memorable times, with Scottish heavyweight preachers firing all cannon. This year the preacher was Sinclair Ferguson.

Then my friends took me to my sister's house in Porth where I spent the remainder of the week.

On Tuesday evening I was at Ebenezer in Swansea. Then on Wednesday my hosts took me to Swansea bay to dispel forever the image of "lovely, ugly Swansea".

I caught the train to Cardiff - a train every half-hour, but just small, two-carriage trains so very full, then met my old friend, Ian Parry, founder-pastor of the Bay Church, which in its 12th year counts 50 members and a congregation of about 80 people. Ian and his wife, Liz, have four gorgeous children.

A couple of hours spent with my other sister in Rhiwbina, then back to Porth.

Tomorrow I am going to take a rest-day in Cardiff, my old stomping-ground.


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