Bramford Road Methodist church in Ipswich held our annual “Follow the Star” service on Sunday 11th December 2022. It is one of the services in the Churches calendar that I look forward to the most and during the last five years of being minister of the Church this has become one of the highlights of…
Picture from Ipswich Star 7th December 2022 We have a very colourful Anglican Church just down the road from where we live, colourful because of their splendid posters and banners. The Church makes a lovely nativity tableau each year during Advent, which I always enjoy looking at as I queue to get across a nearby…
As a little lad growing up in a village in West Yorkshire, you could roughly divide religious people into four categories, Church folk, chapel folk, Roman Catholics and “not religious at all” The vast majority of people would class themselves as “CofE” if they had to align themselves with a denomination of any kind when…
One of the problems with my line of work is that every so often, I am required to attend some kind of training, some voluntary and others mandatory. I’m not a great lover of the training course, no matter what the topic and am much happier just getting on and researching what I need, when…
Dear friends, Today is Advent Sunday and we begin our journey of preparation for the incarnation of Christ. The national Methodist Church has launched its 2022 Christmas Campaign “There is Room” which seeks to demonstrate that the Methodist Church is welcoming and inclusive. We are reminded in the Christmas story that when Mary and Joseph…
Way back in 1987 we had a holiday in north Cornwall, staying in the tiny village of Crackington Haven, we decided to travel to Bude one evening and I spotted a short cut. Travelling along a single track road we went over the brow of a hill and were faced with this sight. The photograph…
Dear friends, Karen and I had a lovely holiday last week, and while we were away we had a chance to catch up with family and friends we haven’t seen for quite a while. We had an opportunity to eat out in some of our favourite places and have trips out to some of our…
I love villages that have maintained their historical feel while finding a place in the modern world. Lavenham in Suffolk is a good example not far away from where we now live, but one of my favourite places is Dent in north Yorkshire. The village is accessed along single-track roads and can be a nightmare…
At 7:10am on Thursday 14th March 2013 we became grandparents, and I will always remember the first couple of weeks of my grandson’s life, I was besotted and had to have my daily fix of seeing him. Like most grandads I guess, I thought that my grandson was the most beautiful person who had ever…
For several years, The Great North Run was a big event in our family, and we made an annual pilgrimage during September to support family members and friends from Church as they made their way from Newcastle Upon Tyne out to South Shields. Not that I have ever even contemplating taking part, anybody who has…