Dear Friends, We were visiting friends in Cambridge during the recent half-term break. We hadn’t seen them for several years, but we had worked closely together on an early version of what has become the Christianity Explored course. That was about fifteen years ago. So there was the joy of catching up with old friends,
Read moreDear Friends, I should have seen it coming. I was talking with a lady I met. It wasn’t long before she found out that I was a vicar, and straight away she asked me what I thought of the protest outside St Paul’s Cathedral. I could have been prepared for that one! To my shame,
Read moreDear Friends, That is a question that has been forced upon us with the disagreements in the Anglican Communion. (The Church of England, of which we are part, is the Anglican church inEngland, while the Anglican Communion comprises the Anglican church in every countrywhere it exists). One way to answer the question is to say
Read moreDear Friends, Where was Adam, and what was he doing, while Eve was being tempted by the serpent? As far as Adam’s concerned, there’s an awkward absence and a painful silence between the final verse of Genesis 2 and verse 6 of chapter 3. Then suddenly he reappears, and we read that Eve “also gave
Read moreDear Friends, Steve Jobs, the co-founder and former CEO of Apple, was a hero to millions. He’s the man who gave us the iPod and the iPhone, not to mention Apple computers. Some just loved the way his products looked and worked. Others admired his business acumen, taking Apple briefly to be the largest corporation
Read moreDear friends, This week David Cameron said he supported plans to legalise marriage for practising homosexuals. In itself that wasn’t new. What was interesting was the way he justified it: “To anyone who has reservations, I say, Yes, it’s about equality, but it’s also about something else: commitment.” Who could possibly have...
Read moreDear Friends, You may have heard reports that the BBC intends to drop ‘BC’ and ‘AD’ for describing dates. ‘BC’, of course, stands for ‘Before Christ’ and ‘AD’ for ‘in the year of the Lord’. The plan is to adopt the terms ‘BCE’ and ‘CE’ in their place, standing for ‘Before Common Era’ and ‘Common
Read moreDear friends, If my memory is correct, I was six years old when the penny dropped, when God opened my eyes. I came to see that Jesus had given himself for me, and so I gave myself to him in response. Whether or not my memory is correct (and no doubt I didn’t put it
Read moreDear friends, That is one of the questions being debated in the wake of the recent riots sweeping Britain. On the one hand, being poor in itself does not guarantee that you will be a thief. Nor does being rich guarantee that you will not steal from others. There are just too many examples of
Read moreIt would be interesting at some point to have a sermon series of Great Bible Questions, and this would surely be one of them. It’s the question God asks Jonah when he is upset with God for not destroying the people of Nineveh. Jonah even says that, precisely because he thought God would do this,
Read more