I added this short video to our YouTube channel featuring the church and some of the grounds at Dunmurry built around a short passage on prayer written by Valentine David Davis. V.D. Davis trained for the ministry at Manchester College when it was still in London and James Martineau was Principal. He was one of the last links between that generation of ministers and the mid-twentieth century. His little book The Lord’s Prayer An Interpretation. Together with an Address on The Offering of Prayer was published by the Lindsey Press in 1938.

His book on prayer is full of insight. He is perhaps someone who is rather overlooked in our history. On leaving Manchester College he went to Christ Church, Nottingham as minister for a few years before moving on to the Ancient Chapel of Toxteth for eleven years. This was followed by a further ministry at Wallasey. In Merseyside he was greatly influenced by John Hamilton Thom whose devotional Services and Prayers he later edited along with a selection of J.H. Thom’s writings in a A Minister of God. Ministry in Liverpool and Wallasey was followed by eleven years as editor of The Inquirer before returning to the ministry in Bournemouth where he served for twenty years up to retirement. He made some more important contributions to devotional publishing and to history, producing A Book of Daily Strength as well as A History of Manchester College and a history of the London Domestic Mission Society. He was editor also of Hymns of Worship, first published in 1927, reprinted a number of times, then republished with a Supplement (1951), and later still republished in a revised format in 1962. Even Hymns of Faith and Freedom, published in 1991, described itself as a radical revision of Hymns of Worship. So as one of the first fruits of the collaboration that led to the new General Assembly and ‘offered, in the interest of unity and comprehension, with the prayer that it may be blessed in its ministry to the fellowship of our churches’ it proved remarkably successful.

We also uploaded to YouTube our full Easter Day service at Dunmurry recently. The full service, including hymns, prayers and readings can be seen here: