SOUL SURMISE

JULY 13, 1985... LIVE AID... HOW IT CHANGED MY LIFE

There are days that you remember more than others. July 13th 1985 is one of those days. Live Aid. What a day!16 hours of rock music, your favourite bands. Wonderful. Then that the music is doing something, standing for something, changing something. And the sun shone.

I remember it all. At 12 o'clock when Status Quo roared us out of the gate with Rockin' All Over The World I was in Ballywillan Primary School setting up Portrush CSSM 1985. As the first guitars crashed we were putting a banner high on the school fence. Radio blasting. My cassette tape rolling to record every single minute.

At some stage late afternoon I headed home to Ballymena. I was preaching the next morning in Ballykeel Presbyterian Church and had the excuse to leave beach mission set up to go and prepare a sermon as I watched the music unfold on TV. Cassette still rolling. I remember rushing out for a take away while George Thorogood was on.

There was so much to love.  U2. I knew they were good. Now the world did. Bono in the crowd. Bad going on forever. Dire Straits and Sting were wonderful. Elton John was all celebratory - Saturday Night’s Alright for saving the world. Bowie was at his Rebel Rebel best. Jagger joining him for the video Dancing In the Street.

I even enjoyed Queen a band I lost love for shortly after. I really loved Bohemian Rhapsody. The Who rocked it too. Phil Collins playing Wembley and New York on the same day. There was that video to The Cars' Drive and the cry of that little child.

I’ll always be frustrated about Paul McCartney’s faulty microphone and Dylan’s set in Philadelphia was shambolic but closing Wembley with Do They Know It’s Christmas was poignant, even on a hot July night! Emotional and inspirational.

Bed at 4am, after a very jittery Bob Dylan set, I cannot have been too fresh for a 10am preach.

40 years on and I am aware of the dichotomy of that day. There was CSSM and a sermon to prepare. There was constant rock music. I recorded 5 cassettes that I still have somewhere! 

On that day 40 years ago, those two things didn't meet. They were probably in tension. The sacred and the secular. How dare I let Live Aid distract me from the holiness of mission and preaching?

Yet, as I look back at the four decades of my life that have followed, discipleship, ministry and mission, that day was a game changer. Bob Geldof was like some kind of secular saint who helped transform my worldview and inspire me to a life that for me has been the life in all its fulness that Jesus invites us to in John 10:10.

I remember at the time, with a huge FEED THE WORLD poster on my Union Theological College bedroom wall, thinking that Geldof must have been sent to embarrass the church for not responding to African famines. I mean the scruffy foul mouthed punk from Dublin who sang, "Don't give me love thy neighbour/Don't give me charity/Don't give me peace and love or the good Lord above/You only get in my way with your stupid ideas" fed the world! Those who actually believed in loving your neighbour?

Geldof touches on this in his memoir Is That It? when he suggests that God looked down, asking who was the least likely and knocked on his door.

Less than a year after Live Aid I was in my college room with that very Geldof biography and the Old Testament book of Amos in front of me. Live Aid and the Bible were not in tension. They blended. This wasn't something that my Northern Irish evangelical formation was teaching me. I grew up with a faith that was limited to vertical relationship and that dismissed the horizontal relationships around me as a "Social Gospel". 

Thankfully something else was happening. In 1974 evangelicals had met at Lausanne and the Lausanne Movement was born, looking at how best to do world mission in a modern time. Looking back at the Conference, leading Christian thinker and writer John Stott sensed that the lack of social engagement among evangelicals in mission was the greatest heresy of the 20th century. His book, Issues Facing Christians Today sitting between Geldof's and Amos on my table, became powerfully influential. 

It was like God was doing something and I got caught up in the winds of that change. The last 40 years have seen me building houses in Cape Town, partnering with a school in Arua, Uganda, dabbling in peace making in my native Belfast.

If I look back on my ministry just beginning as Live Aid took place 40 years ago, I think of the Kingdom of God contributions of my grace lavished life and without doubt it goes back to a playground in Portrush. I had no idea when Rossi and Parfitt cranked up Rocking All Over the World at Wembley Stadium how my status quo was going to be shaken to its core and how my world would be rocked by that very special day.

Live Aid. July 13th 1985. It changed my life!

 

 

BONFIRE NIGHT

 

I have nothing against responsible bonfires on Eleventh night. It is a part of the culture of a large percentage of our Northern Ireland population. However, when flags, effigies and this year fellow humans in boats, symbols of the people that God loves and Jesus gave his life for, are set on fire on the bonfires then it screams of a culture of hate. I pray for, and commit myself to, creating better cultures across our land.

 

Strike the match of supposed tradition

Listen for what the flames tell

In every flag or effigy of boats

There’s a crackle of the devil’s yell

This is no cultural celebration

This is the hate of the clan

Sectarianism, racism loaded on wood

The fires of hell being fanned.

 

So, let’s take all those empty pallets

Old tyres, their tread worn thin

Pile our pride there, way up high

With all our arrogance and sin

Hurl on myths that we’ve been told

All those lies and exaggerations

The stupid caricatures handed down

That cripple our children and nation

Watch the sparks of repentance fall 

Our entitlement burn in the flickering light

Warmed by loving every precious human

On a glorious bonfire night. 

 

 

I have nothing against responsible bonfires on Eleventh night. It is a part of the culture of a large percentage of our Northern Ireland population. However, when flags, effigies and this year fellow humans in boats, symbols of the people that God loves and Jesus gave his life for, are set on fire on the bonfires then it screams of a culture of hate. I pray for, and commit myself to, creating better cultures across our land.

 

Strike the match of supposed tradition

Listen for what the flames tell

In every flag or effigy of boats

There’s a crackle of the devil’s yell

This is no cultural celebration

This is the hate of the clan

Sectarianism, racism loaded on wood

The fires of hell being fanned.

 

So, let’s take all those empty pallets

Old tyres, their tread worn thin

Pile our pride there, way up high

With all our arrogance and sin

Hurl on myths that we’ve been told

All those lies and exaggerations

The stupid caricatures handed down

That cripple our children and nation

Watch the sparks of repentance fall 

Our entitlement burn in the flickering light

Warmed by loving every precious human

On a glorious bonfire night. 

WENDY ERSKINE - BENEFACTORS

Benefactors is polyphonic. 

There. I had to get that word out quickly. It features in every review. My previous exposure to the word was the band Polyphonic Spree so I looked it up. AI says, “having multiple independent melodic lines sounding simultaneously, creating a rich, layered texture”.

Polyphonic this therefore is. Wendy Erskine has made her reputation in short stories. Indeed this is her first novel. There is no doubt that her short story telling skills are at play but in the end this is very much a novel. A good novel for that.

Benefactors is polyphonically filled with characters. Erskine can create characters. Everyone is intriguing. Everyone is believable. Everyone could have a novel all about them. 

The central story is a moment of a sexual assault by three late teen boys on a late teen girl. Erskine does not shy away from brutal, yet there’s tenderness and laughter woven through.

What Erskine does is take a lazy too easy arrived at judgement and add polyphonic threads that have led to the moment and carry on after it. She smudges the one dimensional sensationalised headline and takes us behind the sensational to ask ordinary questions of class, gender, identity, social media, societal and cultural warps, entitlement, justice and parenthood. Polyphonic!

For example in that sexual abuse it seems to easily male verses female until the female mothers of the boys come into play. All three women have fascinating backstories. What about the father of the young women? 

Best of all is Erskine’s ability to give her characters polyphonic traits. The complexity of the case is overtaken by the complexity of all of us. Everyone in this story has the best of us and the worst of us all mingled and meshed up. Our humanity seems ever tempted towards self while we seek to find other humans who will look past themselves and love us.

God’s in there too. Particularly at a moment of truth when many of our protagonists meet. We find ourselves in a Church car park with Jesus Loves You protruding from inside the building. That old hymn’s placement from a writer who is precise with every word leaves much to surmise. 

For me Benefactors was an enlightening piece of gripping novel. The world that our youth have to traverse, the dilemmas that marriage and parenthood face, how social media plays into all of it, what fairness and justice is like in a world seemingly lacking in both. Polyphonic!

Another vital Irish literary voice speaks to us... and I am listening.

BLUE ROSE CODE IN FITZROY

BLUE ROSE CODE

‘A set of almost religious intensity and sincerity. Wilson makes widescreen soul in the spirit of Van Morrison' The Times

"My favourite songwriter right now" - Steve Stockman

Saturday September 20, 2025 @ 7.30-10

TICKETS HERE

I cannot tell you how excited I am to see Blue Rose Code, never mind in Fitzroy. My musical discovery of 2024, I have gobbled up their back catalogue and of course their 2024 album Bright Circumstance was my Record of the Year, here on Soul Surmise.

 

This concert is under the promotion of Capital Music and Fitzroy is merely delighted to be the venue...

THE INAUGURAL NEWELL-REYNOLDS LECTURE

I am delighted to announce and invite you to put in your diary The Inaugural Newell-Reynolds Lecture.

Fitzroy's Minister Emeritus, Rev Dr Ken Newell and the late Fr Gerry Reynolds, Redemptorist Priest at Clonard Monastery, set in motion the Clonard Fitzroy Fellowship back in 1983 when Northern Ireland was at the height of The Troubles.

They brought their faith communities together across denominational, cultural, political and indeed class boundaries. Fitzroy a middle class Presbyterian Church by Queen's University and Clonard Monastery just off the working class Falls Road. Different communities came together and built deep fellowship.

Both Ken and Gerry played their part in wider peace building and indeed the talks that led to the Good Friday Agreement. In 1999 they were awarded the Pax Christi International Peace Prize.

On November 19th in Clonard we will remember the 10th Anniversary of Fr Gerry's death and now just a few days later we will have our first annual Newell-Reynolds Lecture.

We are also delighted to be able to say that Dr. Austen Ivereigh will be the speaker.

Austen might be best known to you as one of the BBC commentators at Pope Francis' funeral and indeed the days of the Conclave for the election of Pope Leo XIV. 

Austen is a Fellow in Contemporary Church History at Campion Hall, Oxford. He is also a writer and commentator and speaker on contemporary church affairs.

His own studies were in the Church of Latin America which he once told me didn't seem like a good job prospect but when the Argentinian Pope Francis was elected Pope in March 2013 suddenly Austen was in big demand. He wrote the biography, The Great Reformer, about Pope Francis in 2015 and later helped Pope Francis write Let Us Dream. He had a close relationship with Pope Francis.

So, we have asked Austen to speak about Pope Francis' Peace Legacy and how Pope Leo XIV might carry it on.

Austen is a compelling speaker and nobody knows this subject better than him. We could not be happier that he is doing this Lecture at this particular time. 

So... November 23rd, 7pm, Fitzroy (77 University Street, Belfast). Get it in your diary!