Well we return home to London today, (Friday) in order to get home in time for our Sunday meeting at Grace East. It has been a great trip. We always enjoy spending time with Steve & Melanie McVey but this trip held extra meaning for us as we not only ministered together at the first of this year’s Radical Freedom conferences, we also got to travel with them to their home in Atlanta. We had quite a road trip. Among the many neat things that we did, yes of course we went to Gone with the Wind Country but frankly my dear I could give a da-yam about that compared with our visit to the Martin Luther King Center; that was a profound experience for all of us.

I don’t mind telling you I sat and wept as I watched the video presentation of the life and work of Dr. King. It was made all the more profound for me given that I had been speaking at the weekend about focussing on our “destiny” more than our destination. It was amazing how the decision of one woman, Rosa Parks, who refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery that proved to be her moment of destiny and flung wide the door of opportunity for Dr. King to step into his!

Reliving the story of the Civil Rights struggle has heightened the sense of destiny that I feel about our struggle for the freedom to worship Jesus free from the guilt and the oppressive hand of legalism. Standing outside The Ebenezer Baptist Church (the church that Dr. King pastured) and walking through the home where Dr. King was raised for the first twelve years of his life really stirred something inside of me.

It is with a somewhat heavy heart that I write to let you know that this coming Sunday will be the final meeting of Grace West, which has been meeting at the Encore Hotel in North Acton and of course was the original work that we started in Chiswick in September 2000. Hayley and I would like to express our gratitude to all those who have helped us to “Heal the hurts and build the dreams” of the hundreds of people who have come our way over these last eight years. We would like to especially thank David & Loretta and Jon & Anne who took care of the work when Hayley and I went to East London to plant the new work, Grace East.

Whether this is the end of our “westbound service” is too early to say. There are a number of us who have put our roots down in West London and certainly those stakeholders will want to explore alternative ways to express their life in Christ together. But in terms of regular Sunday meetings in their current format that chapter is about to close.

When I wrote the Bonsai Conspiracy a couple of years ago I said that were there to be a second edition of the book that the one section that I was felt sure would be revised would be the section on the way we meet.

“Our meetings have gone through a seemingly endless evolution. I imagine that if I ever need to revise this book in years to come, this section will require the most radical updating."

However, I did not envisage that the process of evolution would become a revolution. I wrote:

I am bold enough to assert that any queries as to where the message of God’s grace is leading us are going to be shattered by this, the third literary production of Paul Anderson-Walsh. Far from the clinical precision of his first work “The Bonsai Conspiracy”, his new work “The Apprentice” will catapult you from the child like truths of grace that were so beautifully expressed in “Safe and Sound” (his second publication and first in the series “Until Christ is formed”), deep into the mystery of union.

Here we see a new side to Paul Anderson-Walsh, his vulnerable side. To borrow his own illustration, Paul has thrown a proverbial rock through the tinted hidden pain of his own "Johari window", and invited the reader to take a peek into his very soul. Through painful introspection Paul will take the apprentice on a journey towards healing and wholeness, taking time on the way to coax the very life of Christ from the spiritual teenager, who at times may be overcome with angst.

The text itself flows with a personal touch that engenders the reader with the impression that they may just have received an instructional epistle from the greatest (or even the least) of the apostles. Paul’s ability to draw the reader into the mystery of Christ is juxtaposed by his ability to dramatiSe biblical accounts with an incredibly effective contemporary style. The account of Adam’s transformation from saint to sinner in the garden is nothing short of genius.