Minister’s Message – July 6, 2025

Bible reading: Galatians 6:1-5.

Message.

They might be called Rectories or Vicarages, Presbyteries or Manses, sometimes even Palaces – but most churches possess them: houses for their ministers to live in and, to use a quaint legal phrase, “for the better performance of their duties”. This can be a varied blessing; some churches provide excellent property while others, possibly due to a lack of money, have let their houses become tatty and tired.

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Minister’s Message – June 8, 2025

Bible reading: Acts 2:1-11.

Message.

Cardiff has been, and still is, a city of many languages: Welsh and English, of course, but also Norman French and Old Norse, neither of which, I suspect are in use today! Welsh was the predominant language from the 1300s until the city’s rapid growth during the 19th century. By the end of that century, however, only about a quarter of its citizens spoke Welsh, with Lisvane, Llanedeyrn and Creigiau as the only remaining majority Welsh-speaking communities. Today about 11% of Cardiff’s residents are fluent Welsh speakers and another 16% possess at least some level of Welsh language ability.

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Minister’s Message – May 25th, 2025

Bible reading: Acts 16:1-12.

Message.

In his poem “To a Mouse”, the Scottish poet Robert Burns is describes how the field or harvest mouse, all cosy and content in its winter nest, has its life turned upside-down when the farmer ploughs up the field and destroys its home The poem contains the famous line, which I’ll translate into English: “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and leave us nothing but grief and pain instead of promised joy” – in other words, no matter how carefully we make our plans, something totally unforeseen may come along and upset them.

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Minister’s Message – May 11, 2025

Bible reading: Acts 9:36-42.

Message.

I’m sure that we’ve all watched or read about this week’s VE Day commemorations – indeed, it’s been impossible to avoid them! Much of the media’s attention has focused on the surviving veterans from the second World War, all of them now around 100 years old (and some of them still remarkably sprightly). There has understandably been a lot of emphasis on former soldiers and airmen who fought in and above Europe, rather less on sailors; I may have missed it, but I don’t recall hearing much about men from Commonwealth and European countries who served alongside them.

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Minister’s Message – May 4, 2025

Bible reading: Acts 19:1-9.

Message.

It must have been amazing to meet the risen Christ! The Gospels and the book of Acts give us accounts of several people who had the joy of that experience: the women early on Easter morning, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, the frightened group huddled in the Upper Room, the fishermen on the lake at dawn. We may not precisely understand the nature of these appearances, but they convinced those who saw them. We are also given hints, both in John’s Gospel and Paul’s first Corinthian letter, that Jesus made other resurrection appearances, on one occasion to over 500 people. There was no doubt that the impossible had happened: Jesus had risen!

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Spring Fair – May 10th, 2025

Join us on Saturday, May 10^th at our Spring Fair from 11am to 1pm.  Selection of stalls and games including cakes, books, pocket money toys, crafts and gifts, hook- a – duck, coconut shy and lots more. Join us for a cuppa and refreshments.  All welcome.

Minister’s Message – April 27, 2025

Bible reading: John 20:19-22.

Message.

If you enjoy reading detective stories, or watch them on the television, you’ll know that many of them are “locked room mysteries”. Typically, someone isn’t seen leaving their house or coming out of their hotel room for a lengthy period of time; they miss important appointments, they don’t open the door when a visitor comes calling, nor do they answer their phone. Eventually the Police are called and, when they break down the door, they find the person lying in a pool of blood with a knife through their heart. But how were they killed? The windows are all firmly shut, there is no chimney or secret passage by which a murderer could have entered or left, the door is bolted or locked from the inside. It’s up to the detective (and us) to work out how the crime was perpetrated: the answer is often improbably ingenious!   

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Minister’s Message – Good Friday 2025

Bible reading: John 18:28-40.

Message.

Last July, Britain was horrified by the murder of three girls – Bebe King, Elsie Stancombe and Alice Aguiar – at a Taylor Swift dance workshop in Southport. A few hours after the attack, a local man posted this message on social media: “My two youngest children went to holiday club this morning in Southport for a day of fun only for a migrant to enter and fatally wound multiple children … If there’s any time to close the borders completely it’s right now! Enough is enough”. Although the message was soon deleted, it had been picked up by a number of far-right influencers and was rapidly spreading the belief that the murderer was an illegal immigrant. Within hours it had been shared over two million times, stating that the killer was from Africa and under surveillance by MI6. You all know what followed: organised violence and large-scale riots in several parts of the country. Yet that initial message – from a man whose children hadn’t actually attended the dance class because it was full – was untrue. As we now know, the murderer was Axel Rudakubana, who was born in Cardiff.

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Minister’s Message on Palm Sunday

Bible reading: Luke 19:29-40.

Message.

One of the most famous poems in the English language, familiar to generations of students, is “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. It tells of “a traveller from an antique land” who had seen “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” standing in the desert with, near them and half-sunk in the sand, “a shattered visage lies”. These are the remains of a giant statue to some long-dead ruler, once mighty but now almost forgotten. The weather-worn fragments speak powerfully of the way in which human empires almost inevitably rise and then decay.

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Minister’s Message – April 6, 2025

Bible reading: John 12:1-9.

I wonder if you recognise these gentlemen? Well, I wouldn’t have either; in fact I’d never heard of them until I started preparing this message. So let me tell you that these men – Gopichand Hinduja, Leonard Blavatnik and Simon and David Reuben, together with their families – top the current “Sunday Times” list of the richest people in Britain. They have a total net worth of something like £90bn. It was only when I got to numbers 4 and 5 on the list that I encountered people whose names were familiar: Jim Ratcliffe, who recently bought a sizeable chunk of Manchester United football club and has grandiose plans for a new stadium, and James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner inventor; these two are worth nearly £50bn. Most of these peoples’ assets are presumably in stocks, shares and property rather than ready cash, but the figures I’ve quoted are nevertheless huge and may speak of personal lifestyles which we struggle to imagine, let alone aspire to.

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