It’s been a very long time since I sang Messiah as a choir boy at Ipswich School! It was no small undertaking for a school to tackle a production of such epic proportion, and I remember very many hours of rehearsal before performance day. Now, several decades on I have enjoyed revisiting Messiah in the...
Dimitri, in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, affirmed that: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted”. The widespread intuition – that God is the moral Governor of the universe – would then have no meaning. There would be no final reckoning against human sinfulness and particularly the actions of despots from Mao Zedong...
A surprising number of people, many of them young, are today asking – “Does the Christian Bible have anything helpful to say in these very troubled 21st century times?” Here is what a Christian leader and thinker called Paul said about a not dissimilar situation two thousand years ago:- “Everything that was written in the...
Predicting the future is not easy for mere human beings, so we asked Chat GPT, and it struggled too! Predicting what Christianity will look like in 150 years involves a lot of uncertainty, but based on current trends, historical shifts, and plausible future developments, we can imagine several scenarios: Decentralized & Digitally-Driven Faith Technology will...
“By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.” (Hebrews 11:3, ESV) By contrast, in our scientific education, we learn that the universe is composed of sub-atomic ‘material’ particles (generically Fermions) and force particles (generically Bosons)....
Words are powerful. As I write, international relations have been rocked, long standing alliances have been shaken by a few words spoken in a press conference, or written in a ‘group chat’! Yet we can all think of examples of empty words, words which proved to be worthless. The employee who is promised her job...
Our church was started 150 years ago! The first service was held on Saturday 16th January 1875, at 3.15pm in the afternoon. So next year is our 150th birthday and we have some special anniversary celebrations that are planned. As well as these events we are also planning an anniversary booklet which will be distributed...
There’s an awful lot of clutter around the Christmas story, a lot of it generated over the years by the church, and most of it is hard to believe! Take some of the carols: In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone, Snow had fallen, snow...
I can be a very indecisive person. I worry that I am troubling others when asking for advice and this is exactly the case when asking God for help . I wonder if He really cares about my life and all the decisions I have to make. Should I pray about this or that, really?...
When Paul writes in I Corinthians 1:24 that Jesus Christ is ‘the wisdom of God’ it is difficult, at first, to understand what he means. And that is not surprising because wisdom as a concept is not easily grasped. What is wisdom? The Bible tells us that wisdom is worth more than all the silver,...
