James interviews Dr. Nick Needham and then we Play the Castle Church Sermon

Greetings and welcome to The Divine Line. My name is James White. We have a lot to get to today, and so we're gonna dive right into it. My apologies for us not being able to do the program yesterday. That's when we announced we were gonna do it.

Bill Gates had other interests, however, and the computer that streams this to you said, I've got updates too, see y 'all later. And then it was like 1 and then like 2%, and we weren't able to do it.

So that's all right. Thankfully, our special guest that we've been telling you about for a while is able to join us today at the same time. And so we are joined there from Inverness, Scotland by Dr. Nick Needham.

Dr. Needham, I guess it's good afternoon for you, yes?

It's five o 'clock in the afternoon. Five o 'clock in the afternoon,.

And you are at the college. Tell us a little bit about the college. How long have you been there? Where is it located? Let people know sort of where you're coming from.

Right, this is the Highland Theological College, which is a confessional college based on the Westminster Confession of Faith, but with liberty of conscience for Baptists, all those naughty bits in the Westminster Confession that we don't believe in.

We're located just outside of Inverness in a place called Dinwall, it's about 12 miles out of Inverness. And the college was founded back in 1994. I've been teaching here since 1999. For five years, I was a full-time tutor here, teaching all the church history modules.

But then in 2004, my own church decided to set me aside as their full-time preaching elder, which I am still at the moment. That's in Inverness Reformed Baptist Church. So I'm now part-time at the college, but I do still teach most of the church history modules here.

Well, good.

Obviously, I did have the opportunity of coming up there. In fact, so my first visit was in 2005. So was that sort of a transitionary period at the church there? Because I believe some others were still there, or?

That must have been a year after I was inducted as the pastor. Yes. I was still getting used to it.

I still am getting used to it. Well, that is a lifelong process. And I do have a picture that Roger Brazier took of me next to the lake, and I'm pointing at Nessie. And so I... Oh, yes. You can't really make her out real.

Well, but I tried to get some money off that picture, but I guess there's a lot of those. Do you ever get asked, when people figure out the connection between the school and where it is, about that particular subject?

Not very often. And I'm an agnostic, I suppose, myself, on the existence of the Bible. It seems scientifically very unlikely there is anything. But on the other hand, you've got all these strange, credible eyewitness testimonies.

I'm not quite sure what to make of it. I've never seen it myself.

Well, there you go. I do have to tell a story. I don't know if you remember this, but I think the second time I came up there, I even took the time to do some research, and I bought a tartan tie, the official Inverness tartan.

And when I wore it, I asked some folks after the service, and they all just sort of looked at me and said, nobody up here really cares about that stuff. Is that sort of how it is, unfortunately?

About tartans and ties? Yes. Oh, people in the more conservative churches here do care very much about ties. I was rebuked once because I turned up without wearing one. It was in my pocket and I hadn't put it on yet.

As for the tartan side of things, I think that's probably more an American preoccupation, to be honest, rather than a Scottish one.

Yeah, yeah, I'm sorry about that. Now, you're somewhat of a transplant yourself, aren't you?

Indeed, I am English, not Scottish. I was born and brought up in London, and I first came up to Scotland way back in, oh dear, I don't even like to say how long ago it was. A very long time ago, I came up to Edinburgh University, where I studied theology.

That's where I did what we used to call the BD, the Bachelor of Divinity, which doesn't exist anymore. It's just a BA in these days. And having done my BD there, I stayed on for another five years to do my PhD in Edinburgh University.

So that meant I'd been in Scotland for nine years, solid, studying. So that kind of cemented my relationship with the country, really, and I've been here most of the time since.

So, now, I've gotten to spend a lot of time in London. Whereabouts did you grow up?

Well, I grew up south of the river, in a place called Plumstead, near Woolwich, which you may not have heard of.

Haven't been there, even though the church that I last spoke in was, quote-unquote, south of the river as well. But just such an incredible, incredible city. Do you get to get back there once in a while, or are you stuck up in the cold?

No, my family still lives in southeast London. That's my sister, niece, and my nephew, and my two grandnieces. So I get back to see them about three or four times a year, but that would be between April and October.

I just don't venture back during the winter months. It's not worth it. There are too many problems with weather and trains breaking down and so forth.

Well, I imagine it might be getting a little cold there. I mean, it was near freezing here in the desert southwest this morning. So I don't know what the weather's like there, but we finally have some cold here.

Now, you went up there to do your studies. So PhD in church history, you know, most church historians are sort of odd ducks. What causes someone to want to study church history? What grabbed hold of you and said, this is where you need to go?

Why Church History Became a Lifelong Passion

Yeah, well, that's quite interesting because when I was at school, I had no interest whatsoever in history and I dropped the subject as soon as I possibly could. But when I was converted, almost instantaneously, I developed a thirst for church history.

My thinking was, in becoming a Christian, I've joined a people, the people of Christ. And now I want to know all about their life story. So that was there right from the word go. I was instantly plunged into the study of church history as a kind of corollary of my conversion.

Now that's how it began and it's just remained with me ever since. I can't understand people who are not interested in the history of their spiritual community, to be honest.

Well, that means you can't understand, unfortunately, a very large portion of folks. Now, maybe not so much in the United Kingdom, in Scotland and London. I mean, you're surrounded by history. I mean, you can't escape it.

It's chiseled into the walls around you, though I think most Londoners just walk past that stuff and never really take much interest in it, unfortunately. But here in the United States, I have often said, and unfortunately, the only reason it's humorous is because it is so very, very true, but the vast majority of folks, church history began with Billy Graham.

And so your experience is, I want to know what Christ has been doing with his people all these years. Absolutely. For most everybody else, that's something that has to be explained, maybe cajoled, maybe even use a little bit of a guilt trip, just to say to people, what, you think you're the first person the Holy Spirit's been working with?

Don't you think you might have something to learn from somebody else? Doesn't that strike you as making Americans just a little bit self-centered?

Well, I wouldn't load Americans with a peculiar burden of guilt, man. The problem is universal, probably, and I have encountered it quite a lot over here. And to some extent, I might not be the right person to try and deal with that, just because I don't understand it.

It doesn't resonate with me at all, that kind of ahistoricism. As I said, my very conversion seemed to me to be a joining of a people, and I could not conceive of not wanting to know about what this people had been doing and experiencing over the past 2 ,000 years.

So I might not be the right person to deal with that. Although I have tried in various talks, I've given here and there to encourage people to take an interest in the history of the church. Quoted things like, you know, a nation without a history is like a man without a memory.

And we are the nation of God. If we don't know our own history, we're suffering from a kind of amnesia. Amnesia is unnatural and harmful. Let's get ourselves out of that state of mind.

Well, now, what was your focus in your PhD work? What was your specific narrow field?

Oh, yeah, well, it was very narrow, of course, as PhDs tend to be. I looked at the life and the theological work of a 19th century Scottish theologian named Thomas Erskine of Linlatham, who I came across when I was doing my B .D.

I was reading a book by C .S. Lewis. I forget which book it was now, but in each chapter of the book, he headed the chapter with a quotation. And one of the quotations was by someone, Erskine of Linlatham.

And the quote was, I think, those who will not have God for their religion make religion into their God. And I thought, that's quite a nice snappy quotation, but who on earth was Erskine of Linlatham?

I did a bit of research into who he was and I became interested in him. So when I got the opportunity to do a PhD, I thought, well, let's see if I can do my PhD on Erskine. Let's see if I've got an original thesis here.

So basically what I did was an intellectual biography of the man. I plotted the development of his thinking through his published writings. Basically, he began as what you could call an evangelical Calvinist.

And he ended, unfortunately, as a typical Victorian liberal, believing in the universal fatherhood of God and the universal salvation of all mankind. So I was looking at how did he get from the one to the other?

What was this process? And can we see it emerging in different stages? So that was what my thesis was about.

Well, now that raises a real interesting question. And that is, okay, for a lot of folks, when you say we're a part of a people, they look back through the history of the church and they see a tremendous number of concepts and thoughts expressed that would be troubling from an orthodox perspective, of course, depending on how you define and delineate the term orthodox.

That's one of the reasons that a lot of conservatives struggle with even what they might consider an over interest in church history. Or if someone comes from a fundamentalist background, one of the reasons that church history is primarily ignored within fundamentalism is you encounter way too many people that didn't look like us and act like us and believe like us and worship like us and dress like us and talk like us.

So how did you deal with that? I mean, was your, what, well, first of all, what kind of, when you were converted, what kind of a church were you a part of? Same type of church, you're an elder in a reformed Baptist church, right?

Yes.

I began as an Anglican. Okay. I worshiped in my local Church of England, parish church for several years, where the curate, that's the kind of second in command under the vicar, was an evangelical. I'm not quite sure, to be honest, what the vicar was.

He was a believing man, but I'm not quite sure how you would describe him theologically. But the curate, who was evangelical, ran the youth group. So, of course, I was young at the time, so I gravitated towards the youth group, and the evangelicalism of that group was undoubted.

It was only a few years after that that I began to drift away after I discovered reformed theology, of which not much was in evidence at this particular church. And so that set me off on a quest for a church where I would feel more spiritually at home, and that ended me up in a reformed Baptist church.

But I personally didn't have that sense of looking at troubling ideas when I was looking at Erskine of Linnolathum. I guess right from my conversion, I'd been exposed to all kinds of eclectic ideas, and I'd had to forge my own way towards what I considered to be a sound understanding of the faith.

So I was quite used to interacting with folks of different opinions, different backgrounds, and different periods in history as well. So I didn't actually have that troubling problem that other people do seem to have.

Well, yeah, other people do seem to have that. That seems to be, in my experience, one of the barriers in my trying to get people to really do much reading is if you, for example, if you just pick up the Holmes edited edition of the Apostolic Fathers or something like that, even in something that early, you're going to find quite a range.

I mean, you've got some great stuff. I mean, I love reading Ignatius, and there's just some incredibly deep theology there, and I mean, his references to the deity of Christ, and I love that. I love that text where you have the Father, the Son, the Spirit.

The Spirit is the engine raising up the cross and all this kind of stuff. But then there's some other stuff that, let's just be honest, isn't exactly going to thrill us with its depth or even its orthodoxy from our perspective.

That seems to be really problematic for people. You're saying that was not something, was it just simply your upbringing? Was it just simply the Anglican Middle Road type thing? What is it that gave you the ability to filter and to go, hey, we live in a fallen world.

There's going to be people who have different opinions. A lot of people over here, once they're exposed to that, just go, eh, nobody really knows what the truth is. Look at all these people, all these different opinions they had.

Let's just simply not worry about it anymore. That's sort of where they go. You didn't do that. Was it the context that kept you from doing that or what?

Difficult question, but I think if I try to answer it with as much memory of my early Christian life as I can muster, then my memory is becoming increasingly fallible. But at around about the same time, very soon after my conversion, and by the way, the chief influence in the process of my conversion was C .S. Lewis.

His writings were what convinced me of the intellectual truth of Christianity coming from basically a background of atheism and agnosticism. So under God, I know an awful lot to C .S. Lewis. But quite soon after my conversion, I discovered around about the same time, maybe not exactly the same time, I discovered firstly, Bettinson's two volumes, the early Christian Fathers and the later Christian Fathers.

I'm sure you know those. Collections from the writings of all the major fathers, father by father, and within each father, he arranges it like a systematic theology. So it's topical what this particular father taught, taught about God, the Trinity, creation, the fall, redemption, the church and sacraments, the last things and so on.

Now, as far as I can recollect, I devoured those two volumes and found them almost immeasurably helpful in my understanding of the basics of the faith, particularly the Trinity and the incarnation. So right from almost the word go, I would say I owed a lot to the teaching of the early church fathers.

But around about the same time, I also discovered the Reformation. I can't remember now how that happened, but I discovered in particular the two great giants of the Reformation, Luther and Calvin. I remember reading Calvin's Institutes.

I remember reading Luther on the bondage of the will. So those two foci became quite important to me, the fathers and the reformers. And of course, the fathers are not necessarily identical with what the reformers are saying, and Luther isn't necessarily identical with what Calvin is saying.

So from that very early point in my Christian life, I had these three elements overlapping in my thinking, patristic theology, Lutheran theology and reformed theology. So maybe that was what enabled me to have an attitude of sifting and filtering and thinking things out for myself, rather than just having some monolithic outlook sort of imposed on me.

So maybe that was it.

Well, it would seem to... Someone like myself didn't have that kind of a background, and so it's something that I had to develop. Again, studying church history is gonna force you to recognize that people have not always looked like me and thought exactly like me and spoken exactly like me, et cetera, et cetera.

So... Very much so, yes. Yes, well, they didn't have coogies back in early church. So that was definitely a... Rich just yelled something from the other room, and I'm not really sure what it was, but I'm not gonna worry about that.

He's just trying to distract me. But the idea being, though, that I've been talking a lot recently about what are foundational and definitional things over against adiaphora, things that do not define.

And I think a lot of people listening, and certain people even within our own ranks that would hear names like C .S. Lewis. Oh, oh, but he said this and he said that. People who have a very small list of adiaphora and a very large list of absolutely foundational, definitional, those that have more of a fundamentalist streak in them, automatically start going, oh, I'm not so sure about this guy.

And they're the same ones that I would think would struggle with the continuing validity or relevance of reading the early church or any part of church history, I suppose. Somehow you avoided the twin terrors of either going into a form of fundamentalism that would cause you to reject everyone in the ancient church who didn't look exactly like you, and then the other side being, well, there can't be any one truth.

I mean, because if you're an elder in a Reformed Baptist church, there's a confession of faith. It's a pretty full statement of faith. You've managed to keep that balance. Any words of wisdom to try to help the rest of us try to keep that balance as well?

And it is the 1689 Confession, yes, in my church. So it is quite detailed. I don't know, I mean, if you take that fundamentalist, as you call it, I mean, we don't have an awful lot of that kind of American fundamentalism in the United Kingdom, but if you take that attitude that you were just describing there, where you've got an awful lot of doctrines and positions that are considered non-negotiable and perhaps very few that are considered to be adiaphora or things indifferent, then, I mean, you have to ask yourself the question then, don't you?

If this is Christianity, this dotting every I and crossing every T of a fundamentalist outlook, if that's what Christianity is, then how come it hasn't existed for very long? What was happening the previous 1 ,800, 1 ,900 years?

I mean, was there no Christianity before this? What about the Lord's promise? I will build my church and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. There's actually a theological principle involved here that when Christ founded his church, he promised that the gates of Hades never would prevail against it.

So there always has been a church of Christ on the earth. And if that's the case, it becomes us to discern it, to see where it was and what it was doing and how things that have been said and done in the past have unavoidably shaped the present because we can't escape from that legacy.

And when it comes to the early church fathers in particular, I don't see how we can really avoid saying that they were the ones who, in the providence of God, laid all the foundations for our understanding of the Trinity and of Christology.

So if they got that right, which I think they did, they can't all have been a load of irrelevant people whose ideas we can just scorn or ignore because we today are still standing on their shoulders regarding the doctrine of God and the doctrine of the person of Christ.

And I myself still derive a huge amount of blessing and benefit from reading the fathers, even though I don't necessarily agree with every single thing that any particular father said. I think I'm running out of steam here, but maybe you'd like to chip in and contribute something yourself at that point.

No, well, it is interesting. It seems that that then would be behind... I have a set of books sitting here next to me called 2 ,000 Years of Christ's Power. And now, I currently have four volumes. Isn't there a fifth in the works?

That's a terrible series of books. I don't know why you've got those. I mean, of course, I wrote them. That's why they're so terrible. The first four volumes take the story up to roughly the beginning of the 18th century.

So volume one is the early church fathers, volume two is the Middle Ages, volume three is the Renaissance and the Reformation, volume four is very, very roughly 1550 or thereabouts to 1740 or thereabouts.

So that's as far as the series has got thus far. And yes, there is theoretically another volume in the pipeline where, of course, inevitably the dominating subject for the fifth volume is gonna be the Great Awakening, or as we call it, the Evangelical Revival.

To be honest, I haven't actually started writing that volume yet. The last year has been, I've been preoccupied with other things. But that volume is scheduled to be written and I have a committee breathing down my neck to make sure that I do begin to write it and even finish writing it.

So hopefully within the next few years, volume five will appear. It will begin with the Great Awakening. I'm not quite sure where this fifth volume is going to end. It certainly isn't going to bring the story up to the present day.

It's probably going to stop somewhere in the 19th century, I would imagine.

Well, doesn't it get dangerous when you start getting close to the period of your PhD dissertation because then the book has to be like 8 ,000 pages long just to cover everything?

Well, one problem is that the further you get, or should I say the nearer that you get to the present day, the more information you have on your hands. There's this continual information explosion which became absolutely atomic or nuclear once the printing press was invented.

And of course, the other thing is that the closer you get to the present day, the more Christianity branches out into different storylines. So sort of having a multiplicity of information, you've got a multiplicity of stories to try and tell, which is why each volume gets fatter than the previous one.

And the other thing is that the nearer you get to your present day, the more difficult it is to have a sense of historical perspective. So I certainly don't intend to bring the story, when I get to the last volume, I don't intend to bring the story beyond the impact of the Second Vatican Council.

That's going to be my cutoff point.

Oh yeah, I would imagine so. So, when did you first, volume one, when did you start this whole project?

Right, well this project was the result of time that I spent teaching in Nigeria. I taught in the Samuel Bill Theological College, which is the denominational college of the Kwa Ebo Church in Nigeria.

Quite an interesting denomination. It has a Presbyterian form of church government, but practices believers baptism. I believe there are one or two others like that in the world, but there aren't many of them.

Now, the Nigerian students, English was their common language. There are many tribal languages in Nigeria. So in order to communicate with each other, they need a lingua franca, and that's English. But it's not a particularly sophisticated kind of English.

I mean, it's good and it's workable, but it's not sophisticated. And so I was landed with this problem. What shall I ask my students to read? What texts shall I ask them to read in church history? Because on the one hand, you've got these really good, solid, scholarly, academic books full of superb research and thoroughly historically grounded and reliable.

But the range of English used in these books is rather too high for my Nigerian students. On the other hand, you've got books that are written at their level, books that are written in accessible English and are presented accessibly.

But to be honest, the kind of history presented in those books is not particularly well grounded in historical scholarship. So there seems to be a gap here. Maybe I can fill it. That was the idea that I had.

So when I got back from my time in Nigeria, I floated that idea to a friend of mine, who at that time was involved in Grace Publications, which is a Grace Baptist, a Reformed Baptist publishing house over here, John Appleby, who went to be with Christ not so long ago.

I said, look, I've got this idea, a church history series, which is well-researched historically, which is academically credible, but it's pitched at a level that the average person in the pew should be able to understand as long as they're ready to sit down and read it as a piece of hard work.

Do you have any ideas who might be prepared to publish a work like this? Because I mean, I don't know the publishing world. You're involved in the publishing world. Do you have any suggestions? So John Appleby said, yes, we'll publish it.

So that set me off. And within a few years, I'd written volume one on the early church fathers. And that came out, I believe, was it about 1998? I think that was first published. And ever since then, Grace Publications have been behind the publication of this series until recently, when for various reasons that are far too complex to go into, the project is now with Christian Focus Publications.

And all the volumes, was it last year, have been reissued in hardback. And they're all revised versions, apart from the most recent one, which hasn't had a chance to be revised yet. But volumes one, two, and three are not only in hardback for the first time now, but they are substantially revised.

Yeah, I love the format.

They're doing a great job. They look great together. We've certainly been recommending them to folks. And yeah, at first, it was these fairly large paperbacks when I first saw them. And I like the new format a lot better.

So do I, so do I. Yeah, yeah, they look great. And we're trying to, people are always asking for resources, you know, what can I get? And so we've certainly been seeking to direct folks to that set. It'll be very helpful to them.

Now, so, as far as your publications goes, would you consider that the central aspect of what you've done? You know, is that really where you want to keep focusing your attention in the future? Obviously, if you've got volume five to do, you're gonna have to be focusing your attention on that in the future.

But was that something you had planned or just sort of jumped out at you because you saw a need?

It was the inspiration provided by that experience in Nigeria. I had no idea, however, that the series was going to be so long. I mean, my first idea was to do it in one volume. That soon became impractical once I'd started writing because I realized I already had enough to fill one volume dealing purely with the early church period.

And then I started saying to people, oh, it would be a three-volume work. And then that idea was scotched when I wrote volume three and it didn't get beyond Reformation. So then I started telling people it would be a four-volume work.

And now that idea has been scotched as well because volume four only goes up to the 18th century. So, I mean, who knows how many volumes there will be? Maybe it'll have to be called 3 ,000 Years of Church Power by the time I finish.

So there is that ongoing work. But I do dabble in other things. I occasionally write articles or chapters in other books, multi-authorship books. So there's a book on the doctrine of justification coming out.

I thought it might perhaps be out this year to celebrate the 500th anniversary, but it hasn't come out. It's edited by Matthew Barrett and it's quite an exhaustive treatment. It's got a systematic theology section on justification, an exegetical section and a church history section.

And for my sins, I was tasked with writing the chapter from Augustine through to the end of the Middle Ages. Oh my. Which was mind-boggling for me and might well be mind-boggling for anyone who ends up reading that chapter themselves.

So there is that kind of thing. And then my most recent thing, as you'll know, was my little book of readings from the early church fathers, which took quite some time to try to gather that material together.

So that finally came out, was that October maybe? That finally came out. It's in a series done by Christian Focus, these daily readings handbooks in a kind of nice pseudo leather design. So they have books like daily readings from Matthew Henry, from George Whitfield, from the Puritans.

So they approached me and said, how about doing one on the early church fathers? So I mean, obviously I jumped at that because it's a kind of a dream come true really for me, given my appreciation of so much of what the fathers said and achieved.

So there I've got each month is given over to one specific father. So I chose my 12 favorites. And within each month, I've tried to give us a spread of readings on topics like the nature of theology itself, the doctrine of the Trinity, the person and work of Christ, general edifying passages to be applied to the believer's own life.

And then lastly, the last things, heaven and hell. So as I say, that's now out. And personally speaking, if all my works perished except one, I'd rather have that one survive because that isn't me speaking.

That's the best wisdom of the fathers speaking in that particular volume.

Oh, well, that's interesting. I'm holding it for folks here. Yeah, I wanted to get to that next, the early church fathers daily readings. You did crush me though, just a little bit there when you, this isn't real leather.

I'm really hurt now. I thought that was pseudo leather. Shortly, 10 times more expensive if that was real leather. Probably so.

Obviously over here, Crossway Publications has made this leatherette type thing extremely, extremely popular. But anyways, we've got January. We've got John Chrysostom, John the Golden Mouth. We've got February is Irenaeus.

March is Gregory the Theologian. How would we know him? That's different. Is that just Gregory? That's not Greg,.

Because you've got Gregory of Nyssa. Nazi Answers. Okay, all right. In the Eastern church, he's called Gregory the Theologian. And since he's an Eastern father, I decided to give him his Eastern name.

I see, okay, all right.

That'll help people understand that one, because we've got Gregory of Nyssa down below, so sometimes we've got to keep them separated. We've got Saint Cyprian in April, Basil of Caesarea in May, Jerome in June, Gregory of Nyssa, July, Augustine gets, well, Augustine gets August.

That was purposeful, wasn't it? It was. Cyril of Jerusalem for September, Ambrose, October, Cyril of Alexandria for November, and currently reading with the great Athanasius in the month of December. Now, I'll be perfectly honest with you.

I'm a little bit on the biased side. November would be slim pickings for me. I don't know. I'm not sure why, in my readings, Cyril has, I've got other favorites, shall we say, but we all have our favorites this direction and that direction, but

We all have our theological blind spots, James, and you all have Cyril of Alexandria, obviously.

Okay, well, I think he had a few as well, but maybe it's just simply how he interacted with others. But so I guess there's a whole series of these, but it would be a great way of introducing folks, obviously a little late on the Christmas season, but a great way of before the new year, maybe something to give to your elders, your pastors, some daily readings, some introduction to church history topics and things like that.

It's very, very well done. And I was glad, I guess when I got mine in the mail, initially, I made reference to the fact that mine wasn't signed, and your publisher evidently heard this. And so we received two copies, and the one that I have now, it has the signature in it, and I'm hoping it's yours.

It is mine, it is mine, genuine. I mean, you know, the publisher could have done it. I probably wouldn't have asked, you know? So I'm glad to have that.

And it's worth its weight in gold, so you look after it.

So obviously Volume 5 is gonna be taking up a lot of your time, but are there other writing projects that you have coming up?

No, nothing specific in the way of writing projects, but people may like to be reminded that I teach at the Highland Theological College, so we've got a whole new semester coming up in which I'll get the first year students for the first time.

And that's always our largest body of students, the first years, and for various reasons.

I was gonna say, you might wanna expand upon that a little bit. We whittle them down over the years.

Well, there's an element of that, but it's that it's only in the first year of our BA that subjects are compulsory. Once you get to the second year, you choose. And so obviously not all of them are gonna choose to carry on with church history.

So given that we have one year in which all the students are going to do church history, we decided the thing that they should know about would be the Reformation. So first year, church history, Reformation.

So there'll be that coming up. And I also teach the Medieval Church History module in the second semester too. So I have two classes running with all those wonderful essays that I have to mark and grade.

And then there's the ongoing discipline of sermon preparation. I have to preach three sermons a week, Wednesday, Sunday morning, and Sunday evening. So I've got things that keep me going when I'm not working on a literary project.

So y 'all haven't given in to the No More Sunday Night movement across the world yet, huh?

Well, that is beginning to catch on among even Reformed evangelicals in the United Kingdom. Not in our particular congregation, and I'm not aware of any Reformed church in Inverness that has gone that way.

But I've got a very good friend who lives in Edinburgh, and he was telling me that that's definitely the way that the evangelical churches in Edinburgh are going. Drop your evening service.

Yeah, yeah, it's popular. I mean, we are absolutely encased in stone in our own group, so they would have to board up the doors to get us to not have our Sunday evening services. But it does seem to be more and more the case around the world.