One of my criticisms about the twenty-first century is that we seem to believe that it is honourable to fill every minute of every day with work. I keep hearing people bragging about how hard they work, and I guess that I am guilty of doing the same myself. If I am being honest, I…
Just on the off chance that you think that the above picture is of Karen and I on our recent holiday in Cornwall, relaxing in the sunshine, I’m sorry to disappoint you, although the sea was that lovely turquoise colour and the sun shone most of the time, and we spent a lot of time…
Dear friends, I have questioned for a long time the value of Church notices and newsletters and have heard people say over and over again “nobody ever reads them” and I have wondered what the point was in writing them if that were the case. In the beginning, when I first started preaching, you were…
I have decided over the years that I must have a warped sense of humour. We came to East Anglia in 2004 for a family holiday and stayed in Great Yarmouth and while we were out and about in the countryside, I spotted a sign like the one above at the side of the road,…
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…