Yesterday, I had the privilege of officiating at the funeral of my friend and brother Alan Hulme.

At the service, the family gave a eulogy. I also offered one on behalf of the church. It wasn’t especially long, but it captured something of Alan. I thought I would reproduce it for you below:

I first met Alan about 13 years ago when I first began coming up from Manchester to preach occasionally at Bethel. He was always upstairs after church with a cup of tea, dressed in his blue tracksuit never without his blue carrier bag. I still don’t know what Alan kept in that bag!

But Alan always had time to chat. Not just in church, but he would ring me in the week and I would often go and visit him and he was never short of things to say. He’d get halfway through his stories and burst out laughing and, without fail, every conversation would end up with the Lord Jesus and very often a full walkthrough of the entire storyline of the bible. You could be talking about what you had for your tea and Alan would soon be asking all sorts of things about the bible which would always end in him talking about Jesus.

My whole family remember his kindness. He always bought Christmas presents for our kids – most memorably he bought my son a large remote control spider, which lasted less than a week because my wife is terrified of spiders and our kids terrorised her with it! When I told Alan, he burst out laughing. Alan even turned up at my house once, didn’t say he was coming, he just arrived, knocked on the door and presented me with a blue tracksuit and said, ‘I saw this on the market and thought, “Steve would look great in that!”’ And then he left without saying a further word.

But it wasn’t just to me and my family. His kindness and thoughtfulness was for everyone. He had a car that he used to ferry many folk to and from church, and he even drove me and dozens of asylum seekers across the Pennines, to Liverpool or down into Manchester for their tribunals. When you go to a tribunal, you’re locked in a windowless room all day, with nothing to do, until you’re called. But we really didn’t mind the wait so much when Alan was there to chat to!

Alan was a friend to those without friends. He frequently had people stay with him. He cared for them, helped them and supported them. He had asylum seekers in his house and various people who struggled with addictions. Maybe he was very conscious of what he’d been helped with in the past, but Alan showed the highest level of patience and concern for people who were not always easy to love. Sometimes people were not as grateful as they should have been for his kindness, often people took advantage, but nothing stopped Alan from being kind.

But it wasn’t all one way. Alan would often phone me asking for help. I had no idea when I became a pastor, that overnight I became an expert in everything. Alan would phone me asking to set up his mobile phone, to fix his TV, and quite often he’d ask my opinion on his medical problems. It didn’t matter how many times I said, ‘I’m not qualified to help; I don’t know what I’m doing’, sure enough, next week the phone would go, ‘Steve, it’s Alan. My cooker’s broken, can you come over!’ I was honoured he thought I was so competent. But even though I often couldn’t do much to help, I would still go over, we would just sit and chat, and with Alan that inevitably turned to conversation about Jesus. He just exuded a genuine love for Christ.

Alan is not in Heaven right now because he was kind; I believe he’s in Heaven because he trusted in Jesus as his saviour. But that love of Jesus flowed out of Alan and worked its way out in a deep well of kindness. If I had to sum Alan up, this verse from the Bible comes to mind: “Let us not get tired of doing good, for we shall reap at the proper time if we don’t give up”. I am absolutely convinced that Alan is now in glory, with the Jesus he loved, reaping a great reward for all his many kindnesses.