On Saturday evening an almost full church sat down to watch the comedy magician John Archer. Introduced as a semi-finalist on ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, it was quickly obvious we were in for a treat.
His magic style was conversational and fun, peppered with jokes and puns (some in song format – he turns out to be an accomplished ukelele player!) and though he sometimes made it seem like something had gone wrong in some way with a trick you realised there was another one to rescue it and it was in reality incredibly slick. My favourite was the fruit in the bag trick. A member of the audience picks a card at random with the word ‘melon’ on it. The fruit on the card is supposed to be in a tiny paper bag sitting on the table, so it definitely wasn’t a melon! It was in fact a lemon. Just as we begin to wonder how this is going work, we realise the knife he was holding to cut the lemon has turned into a fork, and the lemon has then turned into a scrunched up yellow piece of paper, and guess what’s written on that paper……the word melon of course!
After the interval, the comedy continued woven through John’s testimony. It’s a skill to make growing up on the fringe of gangs in the north of England and leaving school at 16 funny, but somehow he did. Despite this rough start he told us how he came to faith via a friend at art college at 19 who took him through a series of steps introducing him to our good and loving God. Learning that the evidence for Jesus outweighed evidence for Julius Caesar, a figure in history we don’t question, had a significant impact on him. Finally, he challenged us to consider ‘Why am I here?’ as the most important and urgent question we can ask ourselves, encouraging us to look less at earthly things and more at Jesus.