My
name is Danny McShane and I'm 48, living near Aberdeen in Scotland.
My Canadian wife Jan and I have been married 22 years and have moved
around the country a great deal.
My
name is Danny McShane and I'm 48, living near Aberdeen in Scotland.
My Canadian wife Jan and I have been married 22 years and have moved
around the country a great deal.
21 years ago I was a very antagonistic atheist with a degree in physics, diplomas in psychology and education, and no time for anything remotely spiritual. I was a secular humanist to the core and considered my world view impregnable. I was converted while reading the Bible to ridicule it. But it was my world that 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 why 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 young believer I naively presumed the 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 have since 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 independent Reformed Baptist churches at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in Elephant & Castle, London and a pioneer work – Whitley Wood Reformed Baptist Church in Reading. (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 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.)
I was made redundant from my job in Reading in 1996 and found my next job in Aberdeen.
Since arriving in Aberdeen we have been aiming to find like-minded believers in Aberdeenshire with a view to starting a work for the Lord in this area in which, to put it very bluntly, we have found no church that is rightly applying the scriptures, teaching people or safeguarding sound doctrine in the face of the pressure to turn Christianity into an optional, irrelevant, worldly pastime.
I know that churches are never going to be perfect. All believers will progress in sanctification and we are all at different stages and still have much to learn. But, and this is perhaps the point, the excuse cannot extend to ministers. The leadership must be able, trained and called by Almighty God to do the job properly. A true church will do all things fitly and honourably to the Glory of God, utterly depending on Him every step of the way.