Categories: uncategorized
Date: 24 July 2007 07:00:26
It is an acknowledged fact that the history we learn is the history that people choose to remember, record and make available. This week I stumbled upon A Forgotten Revival by Stanley C. Griffin in the back of a Glasgow bookshop.
As I sat and read this book which bills itself as "recollections of the great revivals of East Anglia and North East Scotland of 1921" I didn't know what to feel. Whilst the bulk of the book focuses around Lowestoft there is reference to Ipswich and revival happening there. A wave of emotion came over me when I reached the pages which detailed how between May 30th and June 3rd 1921 revival had hit the town of my birth, with a series of meetings which took place in the town centre church of which I was a member for a number of years before moving. I felt cheated somehow that I had spent over a quarter of a century growing up, living and worshipping in that town and nobody had ever told me about this revival. Whilst we should be careful not to live in the past or simply want history to repeat itself history can inspire and inform.
The understanding of how little we know about anything around us was componded by a brief, almost incidental sentence later on in the book. Whilst outlining the decline of Douglas Brown's ministry, (Douglas Brown being the preacher who God had used within the revival), the writer refers to how Rev Brown had to resign his first pastorate due to ill-health. The church the book records him resigning from in 1897 is a Baptist church in the town I now live and so, I suppose, the church I currently attend.
There seemed to me just a little irony that it took this book, which I found several hundred miles from either place, for me to find out slightly more about the history of two of the churches I have attended. Yet somehow it seemed fitting for me to find it there. Glasgow has more respect for its social history than any town or city I have ever encountered. The history within the museums does contain the stories of the rich and famous and usual types of artifacts but it also carefully records the lives and experiences of "the everyday" and encourages people to remember, learn from and be inspired by these.