People often say there’s nothing to do in our area, but on Friday 11th December from 4 p.m. until 8 p.m. there will be a Christmas market on Market Street in Goldthorpe, and we’re getting involved!

At the market, there will be a variety of craft stalls (including one selling Christmas wreaths) and in the car park at the bottom of Market Street, there will be a variety of rides. So far, the following things have been booked:

• Rodeo reindeer
• Mega Jungle Christmas Trailer
• Coconut Shy
• Tin Can Alley
• Bungie Trampoline
• Six Bed Trampoline
• Mini Waltzer Ride
• Ball in the Bucket
• Santa’s Grotto

Inside the church building, we’ll be selling refreshments (to keep everybody nice and warm!) and we also hope to run some craft activities and sell some Christmas crafts, with money raised from this going to the Salvation Army Christmas Appeal (to buy presents for children of needy local families.) We’ll also be running a Christmas present wrapping service, a bargain at 10p per present, so if you’re one of the many people who hate wrapping Christmas presents, why not come along, buy some presents at the Christmas Market and then bring them along to the building to have them wrapped while you enjoy a cuppa?!

All the local churches will be involved with this, and at 6 p.m. we’ll host the ‘Churches Together’ carol service, singing carols outdoors in the car park so that everyone can enjoy the festive spirit!

How can you be involved?

1. Come along at some point between 4-8 p.m. to support the event!
2. Get involved in running a stall or looking after some of the activities (if you’re a crafty person, please offer ideas and suggestions as well as your expertise!)
3. Provide some craft items to sell
4. Make refreshments or wash up
5. Join us for the carol service at 6 p.m.

We’ll have a variety of Christmas literature available to give out and we hope this will be a great way of serving our community as well as enjoying all the festive activities ourselves.

Don’t forget the prayer meeting on Thursday (12th November) at 7.30 p.m. We need to pray and connect with God – come along if you can!

On Friday, there is a ‘Breath & Life’ network meeting at Stocksbridge (at The Hub church) for all involved in music worship. See Garry and Julie if you’d like to go.

On Sunday morning, we will be at Cherry Tree Court for the morning service, starting at 10.30 a.m. and in the evening at 6 p.m., Kevin Horseman from Mission Aviation Fellowship will be speaking about the work of this missionary organisation. I’m sure he’ll have plenty of exciting stories (and resources available!), so this will be a great evening of encouragement and vision.

Looking a little further ahead…

1. There is a fitness session for the over 50s at church on Tuesdays from 10 a.m. until 11 a.m. throughout November. This is a ‘gentle exercise class’ run by Be Well Barnsley and all are welcome!
2. In December, there will be a Christmas market on Friday 11th December on Market Street from 4 p.m. until 8 p.m. We are hoping to be involved with this, along with other local churches, so watch this space for more details!
3. The church carol service will be on Sunday 20th December at 6 p.m.

This Sunday evening (15th November at 6 p.m.) we are having a guest speaker (Kevin Horseman) from the missionary society Mission Aviation Fellowship. This charity provides aviation, communications, and learning technology services to more than 1,000 Christian and humanitarian agencies, as well as thousands of isolated missionaries and indigenous villagers in the world’s most remote areas. It has three major operational centres, in the USA, UK and Australia, and these centres provide operational support in the Americas, Africa and Asia Pacific regions. In 2010, MAF served in more than  55 countries, flying 201,710 passengers with a fleet of some 130 aircraft.^[1]

This is an amazing charity, providing disaster relief services, air ambulance services and a whole host of practical help for missionaries and villagers in remote areas, focussing its mission work in the areas of evangelism and church nuture; medical assistance; disaster response; community development and training.

If you’re interested in aircraft and want to know more about what God is doing in other parts of the world, come along on Sunday to find out more! In the meantime, check out their website.

It’s one thing to be able to know about the Bible (the books of the Bible, the themes of the Bible and the way it came to be handed down to us), but God is interested in so much more than our head knowledge. The Bible is a living word, not just ink on paper. God still wants to speak to us today through His word. ‘In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways,’ the writer to the Hebrews says at the start of that book, ‘but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom He made the universe.’ (Heb 1:1) God is still speaking to people today through His word, but the key thing for us is to have open, listening ears.

Ps 40:6 says ‘my ears you have pierced’ or ‘opened’; the Message version says ‘you’ve opened my ears so I can listen.’ In the Hebrew, the words literally say ‘you have dug ears for me’, as though they have been dug out of clay, fashioned into the ability to hear by God Himself. It’s not enough for us to believe in the accuracy and reliability of the Bible if we disregard its life-giving power or ignore what God wants to say to us through this word. We need to understand that we read the Bible not simply to know facts about God, but to know God; it’s not enough to have knowledge and understanding if we don’t have those dug-out ears that hear what God is actually saying to us. After all, the Pharisees and Sadducees had a good head knowledge of Scripture but consistently failed to understand what God was saying to them.

The children’s song says ‘listen, obey and be blessed.’ That is the key for us all: to listen and hear what God is saying, to assimilate those words into our lives, chewing them, eating them, absorbing them into our very beings and then obeying them. James says ‘do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.’ (James 1:22) It really is that simple. God told Noah to build an ark. He built it and was saved from the flood. God told Naaman to dip into the river Jordan seven times; when he did that, he was healed. When we listen to God’s word and obey it, we will be blessed. ‘The one who has an ear, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’ (Rev 1:7) Let’s be people who listen, obey and receive God’s blessing.

The Bible was originally in Hebrew and Greek, so there will be errors made in translation.

Anyone who has used Google Translate or tried to decipher a menu literally translated into English will understand that the fact the Bible was not written in our native language brings another set of problems to us: the problem of translation and interpretation. (My personal favourite was a pupil who wrote that a pop star was married to ice cubes, a misinterpretation which came from looking up ‘on the rocks’ in a dictionary and failing to understand that this referred to a drink with ice, rather than to a failing marriage…) There is a difference between literal word-for-word translations (which we often may find difficult to understand) and paraphrases (which try to convey the gist of a passage but which may not be totally accurate), but all modern translations of the Bible go back to the original manuscripts and by comparing different versions of the Bible, we can seek to find out not only the exact words but the meaning behind those words.

Jesus said ‘not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.’ (Matt 5:18) The ‘jot’ and the ‘tittle’ (as they are referred to in older versions of the Bible) were small symbols in the Hebrew alphabet which could alter the meaning of a word considerably (think of the English p and q or b and d, for example.) For us to really understand another language, we have to be able not only to understand the actual words, but also what they mean: in the example about ‘jot’ and ‘tittle’, for example, those words are meaningless to us unless we understand what they meant to a Hebrew writer. The NIV gives us a meaning for those words rather than simply using the translation ‘jot’ or ‘tittle’: ‘smallest letter’, ‘least stroke of a pen.’ We don’t need to know any Hebrew at all to get what that means, but it’s not a literal translation of the words. A paraphrase might go even further, talking about ‘minding your ps and qs’, a phrase which shows any English speaker that a small difference in letters can make a big difference in meaning! These kinds of things explain why different versions of the Bible sound different, even when they are all in the same language. Nonetheless, all modern translations of the Bible and even most paraphrases have gone back to the original manuscripts and the original languages to work out what was originally written, and therefore we can have confidence that what we read in English is an accurate representation of what the original Hebrew or Greek said.

If prophecy is one of the gifts of the Spirit, why can’t we keep on adding to the Bible now as people are ‘God-inspired’ when they prophesy?

Scripture in the form of the Old Testament as a revelation from God through the prophets ended around 450 B.C. with the close of the book of Malachi. This was the Bible of Jesus and His disciples, and it was precisely the same in content as our Old Testament. By A.D. 240, Origen from Alexandria was using all our 27 New Testament books as “Scripture,” and no others, and referred to them as the “New Testament.” He believed them to be “inspired by the Spirit.” But it was not until A.D. 367 that Athanasius, also from Alexandria, provided us with an actual list of New Testament books identical with ours.

Although we believe God still speaks to us through prophecy, we believe that the Bible as we have it is God’s inspired, revealed word to us and therefore all modern-day prophecy has to be subject to that written word. Rev 22:18-19 reminds us that nothing must be added to or removed from that word of prophecy; we also see that there has to be some objective ‘measure’ by which prophecy can be judged, which is the Bible. Prophecy is, we believe, still important today, but God-inspired prophecy will never contradict what is revealed to us in the Bible. Paul says ‘two or three prophets should speak, and the others should weigh carefully what is said’ (1 Cor 14:29); he also wrote ‘Do not treat prophecies with contempt but test them all; hold on to what is good, reject every kind of evil.’ (1 Thess 5:20-22) We need to test and weigh prophecy carefully against Scripture.

There are bound to be errors in copying that make it impossible to know what the original meaning was

The Bible as we know it today contains 31,173 verses and even if scribes (the people who copied it) were extremely careful, it’s inevitable they would make simple copying errors. People say we can place no reliance on the infallibility of the Bible and many go even further, dismissing it as inaccurate and unreliable.

Jesus said ‘not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.’ (Matt 5:18) The ‘jot’ and the ‘tittle’ (as they are referred to in older versions of the Bible) were small symbols in the Hebrew alphabet which could alter the meaning of a word considerably (think of the English p and q or b and d, for example.) Clearly, a scribe had a difficult job when copying words when such tiny marks could alter the meaning of a word radically. Nonetheless, the most common mistakes (haplography, when a letter, word or phrase is missed out; dittography, when a letter, word or phrase is repeated and metathesis, when something is inverted by mistake) were generally quite easy to spot by those checking work (as indeed any proof-reader nowadays would say.) Because of the great reverence the Jewish scribes held toward the Scriptures, they exercised extreme care in making new copies of the Hebrew Bible. The entire scribal process was specified in meticulous detail to minimise the possibility of even the slightest error. The number of letters, words, and lines were counted, and the middle letters of the Pentateuch and the Old Testament were determined. If a single mistake was discovered, the entire manuscript would be destroyed.

As a result of this extreme care, the quality of the manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible surpasses all other ancient manuscripts. The 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provided a significant check on this, because these Hebrew scrolls antedate the earliest Masoretic Old Testament manuscripts by about 1,000 years. But in spite of this time span, the number of variant readings between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text is quite small, and most of these are variations in spelling and style (like the difference between the American spelling of color and the English spelling colour.)

The fact that we have more than one manuscript of the whole Bible and lots of manuscripts which have parts of the Bible means that we can compare the manuscripts and if there are copying errors, we have enough manuscripts to work out what the correct version is likely to have been. The Old and New Testaments enjoy far greater manuscript attestation in terms of quantity, quality, and time span than any other ancient documents and since the Scriptures continually refer to historical events which are verifiable, their accuracy can be checked by external evidence as well.