The fourth session followed on from the third and was chaired by retired minister Paul Brown, now based in Lancaster. (The poor chap due to do it had gone down with 'flu').The paper, on Christ’s ascension and heavenly ministry, was presented by the youthful Matthew Sleeman of Oak Hill Theological College, London. Matthew is a New Testament teacher. He also trained as a geographer and this factor informed his approach to the subject of the ascension. His PhD was on the Book of Acts and so that shaped the paper too, though references were also made to Hebrews and other NT books. His argument from Acts was that the heavenly location of Christ is more important than is usually thought to be the case. The group discussions helped us to think things through a little more, especially so as Matthew was in our group. It was good to get to know someone from a quite different background a little. It is certainly too easy to fail to focus on Jesus’s present location in heaven and what that means as the paper demonstrated. Somewhere along the line attention was drawn to the phrase Your Master in heaven in Ephesians 6 and the full significance of that term began to dawn. Another group reported back to say that at communion we must argue for a physical absence but not a spiritual one and felt that this point was sharpened by the insights gained from the paper.
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