War Cry 25 May 2019: selected articles

25 May 2019 • WAR CRY • FEATURE 3 PA

I N L G W O B M O E V H ER T Cricket stars look to hit rivals for six in World Cup, writes Emily Bright

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ILLIONS of cricketing fans across the globe will dive for the remote control on Thursday (30 May) to catch the start of the cricket World Cup, one of the biggest events in the sporting calendar.

Global TV audiences surpassed 1.5 billion for the last World Cup in 2015, and more than one million people packed out match venues over the course of the 44-day competition hosted by Australia and New Zealand.

Since the World Cup was established in 1975, the likes of Indian batsman Sachin Tendulkar, Australian pace bowler Glenn McGrath and West Indian all-rounder Chris Gayle have slogged their way into cricketing folklore with record-breaking performances.

This year England and Wales will host the tournament for the first time since 1999, with the final taking place at Lord’s on 14 July.

Eoin Morgan spoke of the team’s desire to ‘continuously improve’

England bowler Liam Plunkett

Whichever way pundits spin it, the World Cup will prove one of the toughest tests yet for the England side, as the players seek to defeat their rivals with pitch-perfect performances. Ranked as the top team in the world in oneday internationals, England will seek to reassert their dominance.

They will have to bowl over nine other teams, including formidable adversaries such as New Zealand, the West Indies and title holders Australia.

But first they face South Africa.

‘I think we’re in as strong a position as we could be at this stage,’ England captain Eoin Morgan told London commuter paper City AM as he looked ahead to the competition. However, he also spoke of the team’s desire to ‘continuously improve’ since the last World Cup. ‘The fact that we’ve been on this journey now for four years, and played some good cricket along the way, particularly at home, gives us more of an element of excitement,’ he said.

Whatever their chosen field, people have always driven themselves to the boundaries of their endurance to succeed, whether that be in their career, relationships or lifestyle.

Bible writer Paul shared this same desire to improve himself, with his eyes constantly fixed on his end goal – a closer relationship with God. He acknowledged that he often fell short, but he insisted that there was nothing more important than striving to know God better. He said: ‘I know that I have not yet reached that goal, but there is one thing I always do.

Forgetting the past and straining towards what is ahead, I keep trying to reach the goal and get the prize for which God called me’ (Philippians 3:13 and 14 New Century Version).

And Paul knew that when his faults and failures inevitably halted his progress, he could trust in God’s offer of forgiveness and guidance to get him back on his feet.

Sometimes, as we field all kinds of difficulties in life, we may feel far away from the lives we want to lead, and we are stumped for answers as to how to change that.

But if we turn to God and follow his directions for our lives, we can realise that the opportunities for a better life are far from over.

8 INTERVIEW • WAR CRY • 25 May 2019

All creatures Love Your Zoo Week begins today (Saturday 25 May), and Emily Bright learns how former farmer ANTHONY BUSH earned his stripes as a zoo owner

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Water buffalo Bridget trots over to him trustingly, having known him since she arrived at the zoo when she was only a month old. Ferocious male predators such as Bengal tiger Khan and African lion Masai purr like domesticated cats in his presence, rubbing themselves up against the wiry fence as he approaches.

Anthony felt that God was encouraging him and his wife Christina to start a zoo back in 1996. ‘I wondered whether it would be right to start a zoo and call it Noah’s Ark, as an excuse to talk about the

Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm

AKING life easy is the dream of many people when they approach retirement age, but not former dairy farmer Anthony Bush, who decided to open a zoo a week before his 61st birthday.

When I visit the 100-acre site set in rolling countryside near Bristol, I see how softly spoken Anthony warmly welcomes visitors, freely sharing facts about his creatures. His face lights up when he sees the animals, and he greets them like old friends.

Christian faith,’ he tells me. ‘After several months of praying about it, I became convinced that we should do it.’

Having made the decision, Anthony converted his farm into a petting zoo with lambs, llamas, wallabies and camels in 1999. The wildlife park has since expanded to include more than 100 species, including white rhinos, spectacled bears, giraffes, parrots, gibbons and lemurs.

But running the zoo has sometimes been a rocky ride, and Anthony’s Christian faith has played a vital role in shaping the way he has responded to those challenges.

In September 2012, he had the opportunity to build an elephant house,

The head of a safari park said we’d built the best elephant house in the country

Zoo owner Anthony with water buffalo Bridget

despite being told no elephants were available for zoos and that there wouldn’t be any to buy for 15 years. In addition, high rainfall had triggered a fall in visitor numbers, reducing the zoo’s profits.

Anthony was reluctant to jump into the project unless he received a clear mandate from God.

25 May 2019 • WAR CRY • INTERVIEW 9

great and small Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm

An elephant bathes in the Elephant Eden exhibit

‘I got my team leaders together and said that I wanted everyone to pray and find out if God was telling us to do this,’ he recalls. ‘I didn’t want a business plan, I didn’t want to know if they thought it was a good idea. I just wanted to listen and see if God wanted us to do it. If he did, we had to do it.’

After spending time praying about the proposal, every single team member responded with a yes.

But, during construction, zoo staff members were forced to bear a whole host of weather-related challenges.

The heavens opened and it became the wettest year since the zoo’s opening – and

then the snow came. Anthony despaired and began to wonder why he embarked on the project, but then recalled an apt story from the Bible.

‘I remembered Jesus’ disciples were sent off into the storm and they cried:

Turn to page 10

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10 INTERVIEW • WAR CRY • 25 May 2019

From page 9 “Lord, we’re about to die!” But Jesus was with them. We got a strong message from that.’

A year later, the state-of-the-art Elephant Eden centre was built and, soon after, Noah’s Ark was offered elephants at a time when they simply weren’t available to other zoos.

‘The head of a safari park in Derby said that because we’d built the best elephant house in the country, they didn’t want their elephants going anywhere else,’ a smiling Anthony recalls.

The elephant house is also environmentally friendly. It has solar

If you want to go green, you’ve got to spend the money

Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm

panels on its roof and, as do some of the other exhibits, harvests rainwater so it can be reused. Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm generates energy from biomass boilers and wind turbines, and it recycles resources and waste wherever possible.

Consequently, the zoo has won a number of awards for its green credentials.

When I ask if Anthony feels that Christians should take responsibility for the planet, his answer is emphatic. ‘Yes, definitely – the only thing that stops people is money.

‘But if you want to go green, you’ve got to spend the money and trust the Lord to make it up to you somehow. It’s not always a popular move, but we feel that it’s the right way to go.’

Noah’s Ark Zoo Farm acts as a testimony to Anthony’s reliance on his

A Tamworth piglet

Lions Masai and Kojo take a nap faith. He even says the birth of lion cubs Kojo and Tau, who are now nine months old, were ‘an answer to our prayers’.

He remembers: ‘Our lions were infertile for five years, and my keepers wanted to get rid of the female and get another one in. But I said: “No, let’s pray.”

‘So we prayed that God would give them fertility. A month later Arusha became fertile, and then she had the cubs.’

But the zookeepers feared that father Masai might attack his cubs. They had received reports from another zoo that a male lion had killed his cubs and then the female had killed him. But the zoo’s staff decided to let Masai meet his offspring.

‘We plucked up the courage and introduced Masai to the cubs. They walked up to him, he roared at them and they backed off. Then he

ran away and they chased him because he had a nice ball of fluff on his tail.’

The cubs lie lazily and contentedly next to each other as we talk, blissfully unaware of the life-threatening dangers they had dodged.

As we approach the tortoises, Anthony warns jokingly: ‘Don’t put your fingers into the exhibit, because they can gum you!’

The tortoises are on a breeding loan from wildlife TV presenter Nigel Marven, and two of the resident reptiles are particularly amorous – much to the dismay of their neighbours.

‘They were loudly mating last year and a llama came over to investigate. It looked deeply shocked by this terrible noise,’ Anthony remembers.

s we stroll through the zoo, Anthony A tells me that he seeks to provide expansive exhibits even if it doesn’t come

cheap.

‘We were offered sea eagles that were living in terribly confined spaces,’ he says.

‘Now they’ve got ten times the space.

Our rhinos have got two fields and we’re adding another ten acres as soon as we can.’

His enthusiasm for the animal kingdom and humankind is infectious.

‘The thing that amazes me most is that we all begin our lives as one cell,’ he says.

‘Yet from the first day of our lives we’ve got the world’s best video and audio. And as humans, we have 206 bones and 600 different muscles, all multiskilled!’

25 May 2019 • WAR CRY • INTERVIEW 11

The thing that amazes me most is that we all begin our lives as one cell

Anthony has channelled his passion for the animal kingdom into researching the Earth’s origins, and he believes that the conception of the universe points to a Creator.

‘If you look at the galaxies, it seems that they had a physical start with about 100 billion huge balls of hydrogen, which all collapsed into the right place.

‘The Bible says that on day two, God made a separation between the waters of beneath and above, so he took some of the waters of the deep and stretched it through the solar system. And that is why water is ubiquitous in the solar system.

‘Even the Sun and Moon are in just the right place. In a sense it is an irreducible complexity, and so everything has got to be there and it is there.’

Nonetheless, he says that he seeks to generate an informed discussion, not to force his ideas on others. ‘I’m not one of those people who say “this is what happens”, but instead I make a proposal,’ he explains. ‘However, people shut down or shy away from us because they’re frightened of rejecting the accepted ideas.’

In his autobiography Building Noah’s Ark, which was published in 2012, Anthony states that a goal of the zoo was to reconnect people with God through creation.

‘One of the major things that stopped people believing in God was the steady drip-feeding of television that suggested nature had arrived by itself, that God was irrelevant and probably not there,’ he writes.

‘I felt this small but persistent call to use our farm to help people discover God through nature.’

Anthony tells me that he settled on the

name of Noah’s Ark because the Bible story has universal relevance and appeal.

‘Noah’s story is known in every continent, and the basic story of one person being rescued from a worldwide disaster with his family is relatable.’

He is certainly not shy about sharing his views on faith and science. Taking pride of place in one of the exhibition rooms is a 14-foot scale model of Noah’s ark made in accordance with the measurements set out in Genesis.

Designed to generate discussion, the ark model is surrounded by boards listing scientific theories about the Flood and the Earth’s origins. In so doing, the zoo returns to its roots of helping people understand nature in the context of a Creator.

Now 20 years old, the zoo appears to be a roaring success, with more than 170,000 visitors flocking to the site each year.

I ask Anthony what is the zoo’s secret of success.

He says that the collective Christian faith of the zoo staff is essential. ‘It’s fundamental to every breath we take and every step we take.’

Bengal tiger Khan

12 INNER LIFE • WAR CRY • 25 May 2019

Prayerlink THE War Cry invites readers to send in requests for prayer, including the first names of individuals and details of their ­circumstances. Send your requests to Prayerlink, War Cry, 101 Newington Causeway, Lon­don SE1 6BN. Mark your envelope ‘Confidential’.

Becoming a Christian There is no set formula to becoming a Christian, but many people have found saying this prayer to be a helpful first step to a relationship with God Lord Jesus Christ, I am truly sorry for the things I have done wrong in my life. Please forgive me. I now turn from everything that I know is wrong.

Thank you that you died on the cross for me so that I could be forgiven and set free.

Thank you that you offer me forgiveness and the gift of your Holy Spirit.

Please come into my life by your Holy Spirit to be with me for ever.

Thank you, Lord Jesus.

Amen

Proverbs

Nigel Bovey gives chapter and verse on each book in the Scriptures

BOOK of moral instruction, A Proverbs offers philosophical insight into and wisdom on issues of its time. The

respective consequences of their attitudes and actions.

The fool is not necessarily someone who is lacking in intelligence. Rather they are the person who relies on their own insight instead of seeking the will and guidance of God.

Hebrew word for ‘wisdom’ can be translated as ‘skill for living’. The question under consideration is how to live a godly life in an ungodly world.

Attributed to King Solomon (although The writer extols other contributors are named), the book states that its purpose is to enable the reader virtues, such as prudence to gain wisdom, discipline and prudence and and neighbourliness to do what is right, just and fair (1:1–6).

Addressed to young men, the proverbs cover a wide range of everyday topics, As well as deepening a relationship with including what makes a true friend (17:17), God, the reader is encouraged to develop a what kind of wife to choose (31:10–31) social conscience. Those living in poverty and avoid (5:3–14) and how best to bring are to be helped (22:9), the unjustly conup children (22:6). There is also advice on demned are to be rescued (24:11) and the finances (11:4), generosity (3:9 and 10) and voiceless are to be given a spokesperson temperance (23:29–35).

(31:8).

In the book, wisdom is represented in The tongue, though, is to be guarded female form as something – someone – to be (18:21). Lying and flattery are to be avoided desired and pursued. The writer extols vir- (26:28), as are anger (15:1) and boasting tues, such as prudence and neighbourliness, (27:1). and warns against such vices as pride, falseThe bottom-line message is that wisdom hood and laziness. is more than the acquisition of knowledge; Wisdom is the mechanism by which it is the basis of a lifestyle that honours God. God created the universe (3:19). The key to obtaining such life-giving wisdom is to trust in, and honour, him (16:3).

The biggest challenge to the pursuit of wisdom is folly. In the King James Bible, the words ‘fool’, ‘foolishness’ rt and ‘Trust in the Lord with all your hea and ‘folly’ occur dozens of times. g’ din tan ers und lean not on your own Many proverbs compare the wise sion) Ver al tion with the fool and point out the (Proverbs 3:5 New Interna

Key verse

Extract from Why Jesus? by Nicky Gumbel published by Alpha International, 2011. Used by kind permission of Alpha International

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