I Have Checked My Watch During the Missions Slot at Church. The Man Who Spent Twenty Five Years Filling That Slot Died on Saturday, and the Thing He Was Trying to Close Was the Distance Between His Chair and Mine.
He spent twenty five years carrying what he had seen back into rooms like the one I was sitting in, checking my watch.
There is a slot in the service for it. Usually after the notices and before the last hymn. Someone comes who has been somewhere, and there are photographs, and the photographs are of people whose names we are told once and do not retain. I have sat through that slot more times than I can count. I have also checked my watch during it.
Eddie Lyle spent his life filling that slot. He joined Open Doors UK and Ireland in 2005 and gave the charity more than two decades, as chief executive, then president, then as a consultant for Open Doors International. For more than twenty five years he travelled to the places where following Jesus costs the most. Premier Christian News names two of them: secret house churches in Vietnam, refugee camps in northern Nigeria. Then he came home and stood in rooms like the one I was sitting in and described what he had seen to people who had not seen it.
He died on Saturday, September 19, in Oxford, after complications from heart surgery. He was 73. He is survived by his wife Christine and their son Adam.
The statement Open Doors put out on Monday contains one line I have not been able to set down. It says he spoke often of Christians who share our faith but not our freedoms, and that he made it his life's work to close the distance between the two. I have been turning that over since, because I think I have been misreading which side of the distance the problem is on.
