Letter from the Manse

I’ve decided to devote this letter to a subject that you may feel you don’t want to read about. Yet it’s a subject that none of us can avoid.  As a child, I had never heard of homosexuality.  I presume the preachers I listened to skipped over certain Bible passages – or maybe I simply wasn’t tuned in to what they were saying.  In my teens I became aware that there were people who had this strange attraction towards their own sex.  But I had never met anyone who admitted to being homosexual.  …

I’m in the process of moving my study up into the loft.  No, this isn’t an attempt to put Proverbs 25:24 into practice.  It’s simply a matter of room.  When we knew that John was on the way, we realised that we would need extra space for our growing family.  So I consulted the other office-bearers and they gave me the go-ahead for a loft conversion.  We hoped it would be finished well before John was born.  It didn’t work out quite like that.  In fact, more than …

Do you expect to be sent to prison?  For a long time, I’ve accepted the fact that I’m likely to serve a jail sentence at some point.

What for?  For preaching the Bible.  And for trying to follow what it says.

How close are we to the situation where Christians in the UK will be jailed for simply preaching the Bible?

No-one knows.  But the answer is ‘closer than most people imagine’.  Already, Bible-believing Christians could be prosecuted for breaking …

Many of us find that the best time to pray is first thing in the morning. Speaking personally, if I don’t get up early to pray, I find it almost impossible to set my heart to pray later in the day.  We know that the Lord Jesus “rose in the morning, a great while before day, and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed” (Mark 2:35).  He couldn’t face the day without spending time alone with his …

It seems that we’re constantly having to make changes these days. Most obviously there are changes in the people who attend the church. Long-established members move on and new faces appear.  Even the arrival of lots of new babies brings change to the congregation – new challenges, new strains, new opportunities.  Do we need an organised crèche?  Should we start a mother and toddler group?

There have been changes in leadership over the last couple of years and there are more on the way.  …