A life in letters: Keswick Convention

The trans-denominational Convention was first held in Keswick in the Lake District in 1875, organised by the vicar of St John’s Church, Thomas Harford-Battersby, and held in a tent on the vicarage lawn. Although in its early years the Convention sparked theological controversy due to differences within the evangelical community over how holiness is attained and sustained in the life of the Christian the annual event fairly rapidly became part of the evangelical mainstream. Thousands attended the Convention which inspired similar events around the world which shared its ethos, issuing a Bible-based call to commitment to Christ and to dependence on Christ for empowering for holiness and for Christian ministry.

The main Convention meetings are held in a large marquee in Skiddaw Street in Keswick. In 1987, a new, permanent frontage was constructed behind which the tent is pitched for the weeks of the Convention. Initially it lasted one week. A second ‘holiday’ week with a less intense programme was added in 1969 and a third week, with particular emphasis on families and young people in 2001. For many evangelicals the phrase ‘Going to Keswick’ is shorthand for ‘Attending the Keswick Convention.’

The Christian Brethren were among the denominations supporting the Convention, and my father’s parents sometimes attended it. I never ‘went to Keswick’ with my parents, but I recall being at the Convention on four occasions.

My first visit was in 1980, when I attended both the Convention weeks on my own. Over the previous six summers I had been involved in Scripture Union seaside missions, but in 1980 having stopped working for Scripture Union and taken up a post as school librarian at Airdrie Academy, I decided to do something different.  I wasn’t especially drawn to Keswick or to the Convention – it was simply the case that a holiday was something you were expected to take, and going to the Lake District seemed as good as anything. I had had a difficult six months, and was emotionally fragile.

And so I booked myself into a Guest House in Wordsworth Street, not far from the Tent, and drove south. I remember stopping in a layby on the edge of woodland shortly after leaving the M6, and noticing the stillness and freshness as rain pelted on bright green foliage. I made my way into the centre of Keswick until I came to the part of town where the litany of street names takes its place in evangelical mythology – Skiddaw Street, Blencathra Street, Helvellyn Street, Wordsworth Street.

I found my accommodation, and unpacked my stuff, including the books I’d taken to read – Jenni Calder’s new biography of Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ron Sider on Christ and violence. The Guest House was comfortable enough. They sat me at a table with the only other solitary guest, an elderly gentleman with whom I tried, mealtime by mealtime, to make polite conversation while concealing my boredom. Later in the evening, we’d watch the Moscow Olympics on the television in the lounge.

I attended many of the Convention meetings – having first walked past the stalls erected in gardens and garages of neighbouring houses by Christian merchants and organisations seeking to attract interest, and visited the archaic toilets beside the old Tent where the urinals were formed of enormous slabs of slate, strategically sloped towards the drain channel.

There was a ‘Bible reading’ (exposition) in the morning, and in the evening a long service addressed by two speakers, whose full-length sermons were separated by a hymn. Attending these events helped to fill up, and give shape to the day, but I don’t recall being encouraged or blessed by them. Rather the opposite in fact, since at the same time I felt ‘on the outside’ wondering why I couldn’t connect with God as these people seemed to, and also cautious about the inner impulse I felt to ‘go forward and commit’ at the end of the service.

I had been aware of this impulse once or twice at Ebenezer Hall, our church in Airdrie – to go forward at the end of a service and ask the speaker for help in handing myself over to God, or in accessing whatever was on offer. But I didn’t act on this, either at Ebenezer or Keswick, I think because I was half-conscious that what I was experiencing was not a genuine, God-given impulse to engage with the divine, but an obsessive pressure, the same kind of pressure I would feel to check that the electricity switches in the kitchen were all off, the front door securely locked.

And so just as I had to learn to conquer obsessiveness by bearing within me that obsessive driver without acting on it until it subsided, so I must bear within me the obsessive desire to go to the front. One day Archie and Grace Roberts from Inverness, friends of our family invited me to visit their caravan after the morning session at the Convention. I remember trying to talk of ordinary things while cradling within me rampant obsession, and suppressing the cry for help which lay just beneath the surface.

The rest of the day at Keswick, I was on my own except for the middle weekend when my parents, perhaps a little anxious about how I was coping, came down for a couple of nights and managed to get a room at the same Guest House. Otherwise, I filled my days as best I could always conscious of an innate, restless anxiety.

I visited every shop in Keswick at least once, took long walks round Derwentwater, toured the Cumberland Pencil Museum. One day I drove to Cockermouth and visited the house where William and Dorothy Wordsworth spent their childhood. Another day I went to Brockhole, the Lake District Visitor Centre on Windermere, and sat in sunshine whiling away the hours by reading the Daily Telegraph from cover to cover. I remember walking beside the River Greta in Fitz Park in Keswick in the cool of evening. I remember the day Peter Seller’s death was announced (he died on 24^th July 1980), reflecting in the park on the ultimate sadness of his life. Also walking beside the Greta I gave some thought to writing some articles for the Brethren Harvester magazine, knowing instinctively that creating something has power to heal.

I survived the fortnight. It was not all struggle. I was not in a position to draw anything positive from the Convention, but some whisper of calm crept into my soul, conveyed by the beauty of the Lakes and their surroundings.

My second visit to Keswick took place a few years later.  By this time I had moved into my own flat, and was attending Airdrie Baptist Church. I joined a group of people of various age groups from the Church who booked out a Guest House in Keswick for the first Convention week. 

I think I gave someone a life down (if you have even just mild OCD it becomes a little more difficult to lock your front door for a week when someone is sitting in your car watching you.) We stopped at Southwaite Services on the M6, meeting up with some of the others who were accompanying us, and had a coffee.  Companionship was the significant difference in this second experience of Keswick. Though I didn’t have the inner peace to feel entirely at home, I knew I was accepted.

We attended many of the Convention meetings. It was decided that some of us would each plan an afternoon activity for the whole group. When it was my turn, I had an elaborate notion that we could get ourselves to Lake Windermere, take the ferry from Bowness to Lakeside at the southern edge of the Lake (a trip which I had on one occasion made with my parents) and then explore the Lakeside to Haverthwaite Railway. But it was gently pointed out to me that this would be too expensive for some of us, and I chose something simpler.

One day we went to William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage at Grasmere. I enjoyed sharing the exhibition with someone (a remarkable young woman called Alison Hendry) who really appreciated what we were seeing. (In fact, I suspect she appreciated it rather more than I did – I recall pretending to be more interested than I actually was!)

One of the windows at our Guest House looked up towards Skiddaw (931m). A couple of our party made it to the summit and back one afternoon – an exertion too great for most of us.

At times, I felt being one of a group somewhat overwhelming. I was sharing a room with two older guys and didn’t find it easy to sleep, or to take part in intense late-night conversations. Once Alison asked me to lead a group prayer session held at the end of the day in the Guest House living room. I agreed, although I was knackered. I said the closing prayer after a fairly short time. I can’t remember if I sensed that there were more prayers to come and shut down the meeting regardless. I suspect I was simply too tired to be aware of the silent dynamic of the prayer session. In any case, Alison expressed her disappointment afterwards. And of course she was right – I should never have agreed to lead the meeting, or else should have been patient until it reached its natural conclusion.

Again, I don’t recall feeling blessed or ministered to in any way by the Convention services themselves. We bought a large post-card to send to Liam and Christine Goligher (our minister and his wife) back in Airdrie. There was space for us each to write a short message on the back. I guess I wanted to say something distinctive, but couldn’t think what. And so I wrote a line from To RB, one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ‘terrible sonnets’ – ‘I want [in the sense of lack] the one rapture of an inspiration.’  There were no raptures of inspiration that week. We drove back home. The door was still properly locked.

That week, there was probably still the old sense of longing, but by that point in part due to the help I’d received at Airdrie Baptist Church I was on the road towards wholeness, and the more whole I became, the more I realised that what I wanted I had already been given by God. To put it another way, perhaps while I longed to be spiritually zapped, all the time the gentle healing was taking place within me.

In the summer of 1987, the girl with whom I was then going out suggested at short notice that we go to the Keswick Convention for a long weekend. I parked up my car in her parents’ garage, and we headed south in her Citroen. The whole weekend – away with one other person – was magic. In the rain we went to the Tourist Information Centre at Moot Hall in Keswick, and booked two rooms for ourselves in a B&B at Portinscale, just outside Keswick.

We spent out free time eating in restaurants (I was astonished at the variety), laughing our way round the gardens at Brockhole in the rain, boating on Derwentwater. After the Convention Service on the evening of our arrival we drove down the Lake to a parking space overlooking the quiet, twilit water. My friend had a kettle to make coffee and an attachment to power it from the car battery. Much later, we drove back to Portinscale.

Again, I have no recollection of the Convention meetings, other than the fact that we sang and listened. One of the hymns was Facing a task unfinished by Bishop Frank Houghton – a call to mission, central to the Convention’s theme. It includes the following words:

Where other lords beside Thee
Hold their unhindered sway
Where forces that defied Thee
Defy Thee still today
With none to heed their crying
For life, and love, and light
Unnumbered souls are dying
And pass into the night

We bear the torch that flaming
Fell from the hands of those
Who gave their lives proclaiming
That Jesus died and rose
Ours is the same commission
The same glad message ours
Fired by the same ambition
To Thee we yield our powers

My friend said how much this hymn, and these words meant to her. I recognised their power, but they did not resonate with me as they did with her, and I regretted this.

We left Keswick about 9.30pm, and she drove us back to Airdrie, my hand near her side.

My fourth visit to Keswick was in 2002. My wife and two daughters and I spent a fortnight at a caravan park in Silloth in Cumbria. We visited Brockhole and Cockermouth, Kendal and Carlisle, seeing the world through young girls’ eyes. We competed in the bowling alley on the site, and I sat in the sunshine beside the caravan wrestling with a commentary on the biblical book of Job trying to prepare a sermon for a Sunday after our return home.

One day we went to Keswick, and explored the shops, had tea at a fish restaurant, and went to the Convention which Lorna had not attended before. Afterwards, as she was driving us back to Silloth, I called my parents on my mobile phone, still in those early days of my experience with mobiles marvelling that, on the move, I could hold a conversation with folk several hundred miles away. ‘Yes, we’re in the car. On the way back to Silloth. We’ve been to Keswick.’