Turn The Tide

For my part, the most obvious activity in this category was a monthly event which we called "Turn The Tide". This was created by a small team in the spring of 1997. Bill Townsend, the vicar of St. Paul's Banbury, had asked the curate, Chris Knight, to consider how to improve the monthly "Let's Celebrate" service. Whether this request was intended to have the result it did is doubtful, but Chris's idea of improving was to make it very definitely "evangelistic" - telling people the good news, spreading the faith.

To this end it was crucial to make this new "service" accessible to unchurched people, and to be lively and entertaining as well as true to God's word. That meant using music and drama. Chris's wife, Helena, is a musician of some ability and had the enthusiasm to take on that side. For some reason Chris asked me to think about the drama side.

After a few discussions we had a proposal, which Bill liked, and we gathered together the core of a team. In addition to the three of us, we had Ros Hume and Dave & Astrid Keen. Dave was our props man, Ros and Astrid were willing to act. We chose the name "Sunday Roast", then rapidly changed our minds and settled on "Turn The Tide". You see, the world puts a lot of temptations and suggestions in our way, most of which are not good. It's far too easy to get dragged along with the flow and get lost in futility. To make a positive comittment to Christian faith sets us against the flow, but in doing so it turns the tide of our life, away from death and towards God's glory.

I should perhaps say that both names were arrived at in a pub. We seem to do a lot of good planning work over a couple of pints......

So the concept was sorted, the team was formed and we had a name. We also had a launch date set, and a guest speaker (Andy Paine of the Damascus Trust) to help with the launch. We chose two sketches.... that is we chose one narrated mime and Astrid wrote a second sketch. The mime was actually a Damascus Trust one, and while discussing it I rather foolishly illustrated my reading of how the mime should be done. There was instant universal agreement that only one person in the room was a candidate for the mime artist. That rather set a pattern leaving me as the "star" actor. Ooops! Mind you I wasn't alone - Astrid's series of monologues sketch needed the whole team as cast members so Dave's purely behind the scenes role was pretty short lived.

Well that first event was a success. It was rather better attended than our usual services, and although it ran on longer than we'd planned it was well received - as witness the popularity of the ones which followed. Then we got brave - we picked for the third one a sketch that needed a larger cast than we had, so we drafted in some new "occasional" members, who promptly became regulars. The thing is, doing Turn The Tide is fun. Hard work at times, scary even, but very enjoyable.

The November 1997 Turn The Tide was based around a hard hitting couple of sketches, and was very effective. We then repeated that one two weeks later in Bullingdon prison, where Chris has been working with some of the prisoners for a while. Apart from him none of the team had ever been inside a prison before, so we were a little nervous, but the reception we got was superb. We were all rather amused that a self-confessed atheist prison visitor (with particular responsibility for checking on religious activities) happened to pick that day to check the Anglican service, and rather pleased by the effect it apparently had on him! More to the point though, some of the prisoners responded to the call at the end.

We continued to develop the concept of Turn The Tide, becoming more adventurous with our drama, trying different musical ideas, using backing tapes and so on. In June of 1998 we used only one long sketch, another of Astrid's, which involved a rather significant prop - a seven foot tall signpost. This was also the second Turn The Tide that we took into Bullingdon, signpost and all.

It was all about choices, how to face them and how to avoid making the wrong ones. But mostly it was about the most important choice we are ever faced with - whether to accept God's gift of salvation or reject Him and go our own way. So ultimately that's basically the theme of all Turn The Tides. In the prison of course, they don't have so many choices as most of us, but they do still have that choice and plenty of discouragement from making the right one.

As with all things, life has moved on, and so have most of the Turn The Tide team. Chris has taken a post as a prison chaplain in Nottingham, I've moved to Cambridge. Even Bill is leaving Banbury fairly soon, so Turn The Tide no longer happens. It had run its course, but the call to spread the gospel remains.