Gospel John 6 1-21. I have been very moved by the messages of support following my homily (and thought for the week) last weekend. Bless you. Looking at the Gospel for this week it is tempting to say that despite all the plaudits and warm wishes, I certainly can’t live up to the example of Jesus! I sometimes read the ‘job descriptions for clergy posts advertised in the Church Times. I have not yet seen one which asks for a priest who can feed five thousand or walk on wa

Gospel reading Mark 6.30-34 & 53-end. Over the weekend of the ‘Petertide’ Ordinations and Ordination anniversaries (I celebrated my 35th as a priest, Fr Paul 40, Fr Harry his 48th) the Church Times reported the plans, to be discussed by General Synod, endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, on Church Planting and a project to start 10,000 lay-led churches over the next 10 years. Lay-led is the thing these days! Almost as an aside, the proponent of this strategy, one Ca

14Then Amos answered Amaziah, “I am no prophet, nor a prophet’s son; but I am a herdsman, and a dresser of sycamore trees, 15and the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.” I sometimes struggle to make anything of the Sunday readings in terms of preaching a sermon. What on earth do we do with the story of the beheading of St. the Baptist? In fact the Roman lectionary just passes over it. I would quite like to

Readings: Ezekiel 2: 1-5, 2Cor 12: 2-10, Mark 6:1-13. Evangelism may not be a dirty word, but for many if not most ‘ordinary Christians’ especially British ones, it is a word, a concept we mostly want to avoid. Evangelism for us so often smacks of, if not standing preaching in the market square, well, wearing our heart on our sleeve, or even worse, come across as a ‘holier than thou!’ We Brits especially think of ‘Our Faith’ as a private matter, something really, to keep