A Monumental Gamble

 

The above is a photograph I took of an article in the Spring 2025 edition of a church magazine called Idea. The article is by Richard Gamble who is the driving force behind the building of the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer pictured above. I first took cognizance of The Wall in this post:

Norwich Churches and Belief Communities: The Eternal Wall of Answered prayer

The Wall (yet to be built) is a truly monumental sized mobius strip filled with the accounts of answered prayer. In my original October  2020 post I reported the Guardian Newspaper telling us that the wall was.... 

An enormous Christian monument, more than twice the size of the Angel of the North, is to be built on the outskirts of Birmingham, fulfilling a vision its instigator says came from God.

The Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer will be constructed using a million bricks, each representing a prayer from a member of the public and its outcome. The aim is to “encourage and inspire people going through the storms of life”, said Richard Gamble, the project’s chief executive and a former chaplain of Leicester City football club.

The monument, which has been granted planning permission with work to begin next year, has three goals: to “preserve the Christian heritage of the nation”; encourage prayer; and “proclaim Jesus for the country”.

Well,  nearly five years later the wall hasn't even been started. In the article above Richard Gamble admits that the project is facing two problems a) Getting funding, although that, according to Gamble, is easier than b) finding those 1 million answered prayers of which Gamble says that so far he only has 40,000. He goes on to say why he thinks support for the project is patchy. But in spite of that the article ends by telling us that construction of the wall is to begin this year.

The Four to Six Mix

 From Gender mix in Australian church attenders - NCLS Research

The 4 to 6 mix seems to be pretty steady although my sample taken

on this Easter Sunday returned a 3 to 7 mix. 

It is several years since I wrote on the subject of the "4 to 6 mix"; that is the ratio of males to females in the church I attend.  In my last post on the subject I recorded it as being steady at 4:6 and in an earlier post I was amazed that my very rough & informal sampling had returned the same ratio that had cropped up in a far more formal and rigorous church wide study. (See also the Australian stats above)

I've been sampling the male to female ratio on and off for around 18 years now and yesterday's count has finally come up with a different ratio: I was sitting in the gallery and counted the people in the two main pew blocks on the ground floor: Of the 112 people in these two blocks 34 were male and 78 female; that's a roughly 3 to 7 mix! Perhaps the variation has something to do with an increase in attendance on Easter Sunday. 

Links to Amos Study

The occupation of Amos was as a herdsman

AMOS Part I

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeTWdWbndUcFlXZjQ/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-alVHgcpym-s63IJ7XT_wTw

AMOS Part II

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzLwnl6qE_yeX1RrU1hGMGsxUFk/view?usp=sharing&resourcekey=0-PacjTNKtqE4nZnhpAFfHHA