Dear friends, It’s good to be back among you following our fortnight’s break in Cornwall and Devon. We last spent a holiday in the West Country in 2013 just before moving to Ipswich and it is twenty-six years since we spent a holiday in the Bude area and I had forgotten just how beautiful this…
We travelled down Woodhall Road in the Village of Calverley West Yorkshire a few years ago, passing my childhood family home, I asked my eldest daughter if she remembered my mum who died in the summer of 1992 when my daughter was just two years old. I was really surprised to by her reply, she…
Dear Friends, The current trend in a lot of Circuits around the Connexion, indeed in a lot of Churches of all denominations is one of pessimism, with aging congregations, depleting numbers, and financially starved Churches, meaning that across the land Churches are fighting hard, simply to keep going, knowing that the writing is on the…
Hopefully as you sit with your cuppa taking time to read this, I will be in sunny Cornwall, not far from the coast three hundred and seventy miles away in Cornwall. Hopefully, I will be sitting out in the sun, but knowing my luck with holidays, it will be pouring with rain! I love holiday,…
I was walking out of a supermarket a few years ago with my two young daughters, both under ten at the time, I would guess, when a woman thrust a collecting tin in front of me and shook it in an intimidating way, she uttered some words about a local children’s charity, which I didn’t…
Dear friends, The Rev Timothy Dudley-Smith is one of our most prolific twentieth century hymn writers with around four hundred hymns to his name. I was looking at one of his hymns, number 684 in Singing the Faith which begins “Here on the threshold of a new beginning” and in it he reawakens the Spirit…
Firstly, I apologize for the grainy nature of the picture, it comes from the 1917 edition of Highways and Hedges, the book of the National Children’s Home in its day. The governess in the picture is my granny, my maternal grandmother, who was the granddaughter of a Methodist Local Preacher, and her great grandfather was…
We got married in September 1985 and moved into our first home together, we bought our first ever three-piece suite from a famous northern upholstery company, in their sale with the one and only opportunity to have the thing for one year and not pay a penny and then pay the balance off, interest free!…
It is twenty-two years ago this Autumn that I first started on the journey that would lead me into working as a minister of Religion. The process began with me attending an interview at a Church in Huddersfield, one of the tasks that I had been given to undertake, was to read a book and…
Dear Friends, I am wading my way through the four and a half hours of the BBC’s coverage of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Pageant first shown live on Sunday 5th June, marking the final of four days of national and commonwealth celebration with an audience of over a billion people worldwide. Days like this make…