The story of God’s provision, it seems, is meticulously signposted, and our Anglican tradition, with its cherished three-fold cord of scripture, tradition, and reason, is wonderfully equipped to follow the breadcrumbs from prophecy to fulfilment and finally to our parish altar.
One can sense even more so as we sit here in 2025, a deep longing for peace, a hushed expectancy in homes and churches across the land, an excitement that finds its focus in a single point in human history where a child in a manger in Bethlehem (the ‘House of Bread’) born to die, bears the weight of humanity’s sin.
Often at this time of year, we may find ourselves thinking about grace and about the disciple who betrayed Jesus, the one who is a byword for disloyalty and duplicitous two-faced behaviour — Judas.
Ultimately, that’s the problem with power – those who seek to keep it shall lose it either by their own doing or that of a wiser/stronger person but ultimately because The Lord wills it.
Season 1, Episode 1 of FROM THE PEWS with David and Shaun
The Twelve Days of Christmas is far more than a familiar seasonal refrain; it is a sophisticated mnemonic that conveys core Christian teachings through symbolic imagery. Rooted in centuries of tradition—and shaped during periods of religious tension—the carol offers a structured journey through foundational doctrines, reminding us of faith’s resilience and the enduring value of cultural memory. As modern life accelerates, its quiet wisdom invites a renewed appreciation of heritage, meaning and continuity.
We can create grand plans and schemes, and these may well be blessed by God, but equally blessed is the hour spent in conversation with a stranger in a coffee shop, with someone who is being prompted by the Spirit to seek, such rejoicing as that one sinner repents. The soul of the one, is the mission field of the many, the single grain of wheat is a worthy and blessed harvest if our scythe is but sharpened for that solitary stem. As frustrating as that may be for our human sensibilities, the acceptance and rejoicing in the toil for the Lord, where the harvest may NOT be plentiful in our particular mission field, is still to be sought and prayed for diligently. Imagine if on that glorious day a stranger whom we do not remember talking to, whom we may not remember walking alongside, comes to us and says “I am here because you were there when I needed to hear the Gospel.”. Such joy and privilege to be a part of this plan of salvation, simply as a servant leading a single person to the Lord’s table of grace.
It begins, often, not with a clamour but with a whisper. A quiet, internal notation of a task left incomplete. Perhaps it is the half-completed tax return, its forms a silent rebuke from the drawer. It might be the unopened email from a colleague, its subject line hinting at a complexity we feel ill-equipped to handle. These are not merely items on a to-do list; they are what we might call ‘open loops’. They are the circuits of our intention and responsibility that we have left unclosed, and their persistent, ghostly presence in the background of our minds exerts a far greater toll than we often care to admit. This draining effect is a tangible, psychological weight that operates with a quiet and insidious efficiency, each unresolved matter constituting a small leak in the reservoir of our mental and emotional energy. From the perspective of a Christian faith, this phenomenon speaks to a deeper, theological reality about the nature of sin, responsibility, and the God who calls us into wholeness, inviting us to consider how our spiritual vitality is sapped by that which we fail to do.
One of the great joys of reading the Bible with the mind of the Church is spotting the threads of divine gold woven through its pages. A story that begins in a garden finds its astonishing conclusion in a city-garden, and the One who spoke the first “Let there be light” is the same Lamb who is its eternal lamp.
In a world that often demands conformity, outward virtue, meekness and humility, many men find themselves trapped in a cycle of uninspiring monotony