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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Minister’s Message – March 30, 2025

I wonder if you’ve heard the term “helicopter parenting”? It’s used to describe an over-protective style of looking after one’s children which is marked by high levels of involvement and control. This type of parenting is driven by adults who fear that their child might come to harm or fail to flourish; however it can actually be harmful and lead to the child failing to develop the ability to make decisions, depending on its parents for solving any problems that it encounters, or simply becoming anxious about life in general.

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Minister’s Message – February 16, 2025

Bible reading: Psalm 1.

Just before 9 o’clock on the evening of February 6^th last year, a passenger train hit two trees which had fallen across the track near Thetford in Norfolk. It was a dark night and there was no way that the driver could have seen the trees. The train was travelling at over 80mph and came off the rails; fortunately it wasn’t badly damaged and just one of the 32 people on board suffered a minor injury. The two trees and the train were quickly removed so that the line could re-open; the investigation into what had happened took several months.

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Minister’s Message – February 9, 2025

Bible reading: Luke 5:1-11.

We enjoyed belting out the songs in our Sunday afternoon boys’ Bible class: “On the victory side”, “Marching beneath the banner”, “When the road is rough and steep”, “In my heart there rings a melody” and “The Lord hath need of me” among many others, all accompanied by the piano. Many of them were militaristic in a way we’d frown on today; they were also quite old-fashioned, even by the standards of the mid-1960s. Little did we know it, but “Youth Praise”, guitars and a Christian musical revolution were lurking just around the corner.

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Minister’s Message – January 19, 2025

Bible reading: 1 Corinthians 12:12-27.

It seems to be widely accepted that there are 78 different organs in the human body. The most vital are considered to be the skin (which we probably don’t think of as an organ), the brain, heart, kidneys, liver, pancreas, stomach, small and large intestines, and lungs (I’m not sure why they are so far down the list as I’d have thought they were essential!). The picture becomes less clear once we start to zoom in a bit closer: do we count our kidneys and lungs, for example, as one organ or two; and what about the bones which, in our list, have all been lumped together? And, of course, if we were to focus in to the microscopic level we’d see the complexities of the various structures and cells which, when put together, form our bodies. Truly, to echo the writer of Psalm 134, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”!

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Carol Service – Minister’s Message

The carol “O little town of Bethlehem” – it’s technically a hymn – is one which most of us know by heart. We love the picture, probably enhanced by years of Christmas cards, that it brings to our minds: the picture of a sleeping town with stars (possibly The Star!) in the sky, and a pinpoint of light spilling from the door of the stable. The atmosphere – just as in “Silent Night” – is one of stillness, tranquillity and calm; God is in his heaven and Bethlehem, indeed the whole world, is at peace.

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Minister’s Message – December 1, 2024

Bible reading: Jeremiah 33:1-9, 14-16.

Message.

This, of course, was no ordinary tree. It had been planted in the late 1800s by the landowner John Clayton. It was a favourite of both walkers and photographers. It had featured in the film “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” although it was many miles from Sherwood Forest. It was the setting for marriage proposals, sentimental moments and the scattering of ashes. And in 2016 the Woodland Trust named it “English Tree of the Year”. You might say that this tree was iconic – and now it was gone. People felt bewildered and bereaved as they contemplated the loss of an old friend: how could anyone have perpetrated such a senseless act? The Police and the National Trust began investigations and two men accused of committing it are due to stand trial this week. I’ll return to this story later.

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