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Ascension

The upward trajectory 2025 is a year of anniversaries. Every year apart from the very first, is, of course, but it’s 2025, not any other year. It will be, for example, 60 years ago that...

Never coming back You do hear some unexpected things in churches. I don’t mean the characteristic ambient sounds of worship-in-progress; the peculiar sonority of a silent snore; the murmurating timbre of a congregation faced with...

Annual Report 2024

Easter Vigil

The very first time Do you remember the first time? Whatever it is that is important to you, whatever it was that changed your life, even if you didn’t realise it at the time. The...

Good Friday

Response and responsibility We don’t even know we’re doing it. No we really don’t know we’re doing it. We are blithely unaware, wholly insensible, utterly oblivious. Because that’s the way we see the world, it’s...

Palm Sunday

Speaking truth to power Just keep looking straight ahead. Try to blend in. Keep quiet. Fit in. They’ll always smell fear, they’ll always jump on weakness, always punish deviance. Don’t make any demands. Don’t dream...

Lent 5

We will not turn away Reticules. Beadles. Bottle and rag shops. Spencer jackets. Workhouses. Pints of porter. Bodices, bonnets, Broughams, chariots, ostlers. No work of fiction has featured the forgoing in a hundred years or...

Lent 3

To forgive is divine Although often dismissed as an urban legend, it is in fact true the Inuit dialect spoken in the Nunavik region does indeed have 53 different words for ‘snow’ (I suspect though...

Lent 2

It can’t be that simple I’ve had some strange Christmas gifts during the twenty years of my ministry: my first Christmas as a curate saw me gifted a CD of morris dance music, set of...

Lent 1

How did that get there? Gardens, gardens… A comfort and obsession in the long years of retirement, a pain in the back of the house in earlier years. Gardens; never dull, always changing, even if...