Let me introduce myself

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My name is Danny McShane and I live near Aberdeen in Scotland. My  wife Jan and I have been married 30 years and have moved around the country a great deal. 30 years ago I was a convinced atheist trained in physics, engineering, psychology and education, with no time for anything remotely spiritual. I was a secular humanist to the core and considered that worldview to be unassailable and impregnable.But  I was converted while reading the Bible with the intention of  ridiculing and dismissing it. My world was turned upside down (or rather, the right way up). I saw in the Bible narrative the reasons for the world I lived in. I saw how man had divorced himself from God and consistently refused to obey Him. From Eden on down through the ages, mankind is visibly rebellious and unreasonable. I read things that no-one had told me were in the Bible (and I also noticed in passing that it didn’t contain much that I had been told that it did). Reading God’s Word as an adult was quite a different experience from my previous brushes with scripture as a child at school. I came to see the necessity, inescapable truth, and sheer genius of the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. For the first time I saw the human condition explainedwhy Christ’s death was necessary and just what was accomplished that day. I was convinced of my own fallen nature and knew that I really did deserve damnation -previously I had considered I was a “pretty good bloke”, and better than most. But my previous understanding of the nature of sin was childish in the extreme, and my comprehension of God was absurdly limited. It took God Himself to straighten out my thinking.

As a new believer I naively presumed that churches would be the places where God's Word was actively followed. I expected to find grateful, humble, forgiven sinners worshipping the Almighty Creator and Redeemer in the way He had set out: with reverence and order, intelligence and humility. I thought that the Bible as God's Word would be seriously and humbly studied, reverently handled and given authority as the last word on any subject. I quickly learned more about human nature...

Church Denominations were a mystery to us, so we had to investigate them as systematically as we could. We found the general level of knowledge and internal awareness of denominational distinctives and their justifications to be dreadfully disappointing. Elders and even Pastors seemed lost for reasons for peculiar and unbiblical traditions.

Taking the New Testament pattern church as our guide, we found the first churches we visited were simply ignoring (and so breaking) the rules. Other churches had less obvious problems, but they surfaced in time. It took seven years to find a church that actually was Biblically based, despite almost all of them claiming to be. We had even found a description of the church we were looking for -historically described in the works of old writers, and feared that it was no longer to be found anywhere else. Finally we came across an independent Reformed Baptist church at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Elephant & Castle, London. (There are, I think, at most four or five Reformed Baptist churches in Scotland, depending how elastically you define the terms.) The long search taught us much as we worked through differences in theology and practice, and we had exposure to many of the gross and the subtle errors that are hindering the Church of Christ in Britain today.

Since then I completed the four year part-time Seminary course at London Reformed Baptist Seminary (we lived in Reading at the time) and then took three years to work part time and read theology intensively. (The UK doesn’t really have anything a Reformed Baptist could call a suitable full time seminary.) In 1996 we moved to Aberdeen. Our aim is to find like-minded believers in Aberdeenshire with a view to starting a work for the Lord. A fellowship in which to rightly apply the scriptures, teach people of all ages and safeguard the historical sound doctrines of authentic Christianity in the face of the pressure to turn church into an irrelevant and optional worldly pastime. We know that churches are never going to be perfect, but the regenerate are required to be pursuing personal holiness and shunning all known disobedience. All true  believers will progress in sanctification and we will all be at different stages and have much to learn, though moving toward the same goals. The local church leadership though, must be able, trained and called by Almighty God to undertake their role properly from the start. A true church will endeavour to do all things fitly and honorably to the Glory of God. The local church utterly depends on Him every step of the way, and constantly reforms  to the Biblical pattern by careful study and application of the Scriptures to all that is done in Christ's name.