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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Dear friends, This time of the year is always special for me, I always look forward to Lent, Holy Week, and Easter.  In my past life the biggest incentive was that it was the first Bank Holiday of the year, which I used to look forward to as I set out to work on dark…

Dear Friends, I think that it matters little whether you are a royalist or not, the platinum Jubilee at the beginning of June is a landmark event in all our lives.  Bearing in mind that our Queen was only 25 years old when her father died and she took the weight of being the head…

Dear Friends, The seven weeks between Easter and Pentecost always feel a bit strange to me, it is as though we remain in a kind of hiatus, but I think that a bit like the season of Lent, we have an opportunity to reflect. I remember being at a meeting once where we shared Holy…

Dear Friends, There is fresh optimism as we face Easter 2022, we are preparing to share events that have not happened for two years, and   I am waiting in eager anticipation as we journey through Lent. Looking back to Easter 2020, we were just a fortnight into the first lockdown, and we were starting to…

Dear Friends, As March gets underway, so does Lent, a time of great significance in the Christian calendar as we prepare for Easter.  I always see Shrove Tuesday as a sign of hope that the dark days of winter are now giving way to the (hopefully) much brighter days of spring and even as I…