Thank God/the universe/other people/insert your own answer here its Christmas

 How thankful are we? Some fascinating new research from Kings College London finds:

• One in five (22%) people say they feel suddenly and deeply thankful to be alive on at least a weekly basis, while another one in seven (15%) say they never experience such feelings.
• Seven in 10 (68%) people say they’ve experienced this kind of intense thankfulness at some point in their lives, including one in seven (14%) who say this is a daily occurrence for them.
• While religious belief increases people’s likelihood of feeling thankful, a clear majority of non-religious people have felt suddenly and deeply thankful, and 59% of the public do not think belief in God or a Higher Power is essential for people to feel thankful for life or existence.
• One in four (27%) people say they experience a profound feeling of awe or wonder at the universe or nature either daily (16%) or weekly (11%), compared with one in eight (12%) who say they never do. Those belonging to a religion (38%) are around twice as likely as those who do not (20%) to say such feelings occur at least weekly for them.
• One in five (22%) report a feeling of being connected to all people or living things at least every week, and three in five (58%) report ever having had such a feeling. One in four (24%) say they never experience this sense of connection.
• One in five (18%) say they feel personally guided or watched over by something or someone every week or more often. A majority (54%) of the public report feeling this way at some point in their lives, but a third (32%) say they never have.
• Just over half (53%) the public say there is some guiding purpose in life, including their own life, including four in 10 (40%) people who do not belong to a religion. Three in 10 (31%) of the public as a whole who say such a guiding purpose does not exist.
• Regardless of their religious or spiritual beliefs, most (56%) of the public as a whole say the Christmas season makes no difference to how thankful they feel for life. This compares with a third (36%) who say it makes them feel more thankful and 3% who say it makes them less thankful.

If you're one of those 14% who feels 'intense thankfulness' every day then I'm deeply envious, but then remember that 'comparison is the thief of joy', so comparing myself to people who are more thankful is a sure-fire way to become less thankful. 

I'm reading Proverbs at the moment, and this one really struck me: "The cheerful heart has a continual feast" (Prov 15:15). May your Christmas be marked by thankfulness, the living of life as a gift of love, and may the Giver guide watch over you and give you a cheerful, grateful heart this Christmas. 

Full press release and data here. 

Celebrating St Peters Church & Community Centre

 

6 years ago we built a new Community Centre wrapped around St Peters Church in Westfield, Yeovil. It's the most deprived neighbourhood in south Somerset, and no sooner had we opened the Centre than we were hit first by Covid, and then by the cost of living crisis. 

Out of all that something wonderful has happened. With God's help, and an amazing team, the Centre is providing a warm hub, community pantry, adult learning, free library, groups for all ages, and a safe welcoming space for the 100s who come through the door every week. The video gives you a flavour both of what's happening, and in Vicki's story the tremendous positive effect it is having on individual lives. 

The work here has been recognised by the Bishop of Bath and Wells choosing St Peters as the backdrop for his Christmas message this year. And there's more about the Community Centre here. 

St Peters tagline is 'love God, love Westfield'. I remember coming here 19 years ago thinking 'what can a small church do in a community with this much need?' It's wonderful to see that prayer answered in such a tangible way, with so many different people playing a key role, and knowing that they are making a difference. 

To close with the Bishops words, as I can't improve on them (and wouldn't dare try!)

That’s the invitation of Christmas. To give to Jesus, poor as we are, our hearts. Our hearts opened to others and the needs of the world around us. Jesus wants nothing more. He asks for nothing less. 

Will you give your heart to Jesus? A very happy Christmas to you all.  

Joy: to the world.

 

Tonight's sunset was a spectacular 30 minute show. I caught the last hurrah, after narrowly avoiding several lamp posts on the afternoon dog walk, looking at the sky and grinning like a fool instead of looking where I was going.

Imagine watching a sunset that lasted 24 hours. Imagine watching every sunset, from every vantage point on earth, all those colours, all that spectacular light. Imagine experiencing them all at the same time. 

Imagine watching every sunset, on every planet in the universe, from every possible vantage point, all at the same time, all the time. And multiply that by every other joy its possible to have. That is the inner life of God. Yes there is all the other stuff and all the suffering and everything else that wounds him and breaks his heart. But there is joy. 

Proverbs 8:30-31 'I was filled with delight day after day, rejoicing always in His presence, rejoicing in His whole world and delighting in humanity'. This is the summary of Jesus life before he became incarnate. Constant overflowing joy. So when he is born, it is literally 'joy to the world'. At the end of his life Jesus tells his followers that he's told them all the things he has 'so that my joy may be in you and so that your joy may be complete' (John 15). He then faces and endures torture and death 'for the joy set before him' (Hebrews 12:2)

Jesus is joy to the world. The life of a follower of Jesus is 'righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit' (Romans 14:17). Paul prays that all Christians would be filled with 'all joy and peace' and would 'rejoice, again rejoice!' (Philippians 4). The God who 'rejoices over you with singing' finds an echo in the hearts of His children. 

God is love. Jesus is joy. Psalm 23 pictures even the death-overshadowed pilgrim, in the presence of their enemies, feasting on God's overflowing goodness . Like Jesus, is it possible to be 'filled with delight day after day', rejoicing in God's presence, in God's creation, in God's people? Whether in the joy of new birth or the agony of a cross? 

R.I.P Rob Reiner

Turnip Prize 2025

 Cultural highlight of the year in Somerset, the Turnip prize, is due to be awarded next week at the New Inn, Wedmore. Given to the piece of 'artwork' which took least effort, finalists include Free Palace Stein

and Cold Play

and Only Fans

follow all the action on the competition Facebook page. 

England Ashes Teams

 The selection picture down under seems to change by the day, for both teams. Assuming no injuries, here's my completely amateur pick for the 5 tests

Perth (rapid, bouncy)

Crawley, Duckett, Pope, Root, Brook, Stokes, Smith, Atkinson, Carse, Wood, Archer, 

Or pick Jacks for Carse - on a quick bowlers wicket, what will 5 quicks do that 4 can't? And with the Aus attack depleted, it would be a good tactic to stack our batting order and keep the Aussies in the field for as long as possible. 

Brisbane (day-night, pink ball, swingy)

Crawley, Duckett, Pope, Root, Brook, Stokes, Smith, Atkinson, Wood, Archer, Bashir

I'd love to be convinced by Bashir so lets give him a spin, but Jacks would be just as good an option - he can take wickets, and would give us massive batting depth, especially if Cummins and Hazelwood are back in the attack for this test. 

Adelaide (hot, flat)

Crawley, Duckett, Pope, Root, Brook, Stokes, Smith, Atkinson, Archer, Tongue, Bashir

Tongue is expensive but gets wickets, even if it costs a few runs its better to spend as little time in the field as possible. Wood will need a rest by now, 

MCG (big boundaries, not much spin)

Crawley, Duckett, Bethell, Root, Brook, Stokes, Pope, Atkinson, Archer, Wood, Bashir

Smith flagged in his last 5 test series, give him a break and give Pope the gloves and Bethell a taste of Ashes cricket. Root and Brook are key here: in their mammoth 454 run stand last year in Pakistan, one striking feature was how much of this was run in 1s, 2s and 3s.  Brook ran 183 of his 317 runs, Root 194 of his 262. If the Aussies are really going to show their age, this is the moment for it. 

Sydney (could be spin, pace, or batsman friendly)

Crawley, Duckett, Pope, Root, Brook, Stokes, Smith, Atkinson, Carse, Archer, Bashir

If Stokes makes it through all 5 tests uninjured it will be a miracle. If Atkinson is starting to flag, swap him out for Tongue. 

Injuries will probably wreck all of this. Worst case scenario is Wood, Stokes and Archer all crocked after the first test and Root breaking a finger. If we don't win the first test, in the absence of Cummins and Hazelwood, and with all our players fit, it will be a long tour. 

In my dreams: 3-1 to England. In reality, if the England squad stay fit 2-2. If we lose Stokes, Root or Archer in the first 3 tests 3-1 Australia. 

Podcasts on Islam

 Several of my favourite podcasts have featured Islam recently:

Justin Brierleys 'Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God' has episodes on the amazing growth of the church in Iran, from 500 believers at the time of the 1979 revolution to 1m today, and on the appeal of Islam in the West and the evangelists who are trying to reach Muslims. Look for Season 2 episodes 22 & 23. 

An excellent interview on Irreverend with Dr Duane Millar, starts 26m in, on the differences between Islam and Christianity, which had some fascinating insights. I was particularly struck by the line about understanding Islam as an empire, rather than a religion, and how a 'Christian' society should engage with immigrants who bring another culture and religion with them. It's really worth a listen.

David Robertsons Quantum The Islam Special, which goes into immigration, sharia law in the UK, the Gaza protests, attacks by Islamic terrorists on Christians in Nigeria, and plenty more. Sobering.  

Historian Tom Holland on Triggernometry, on Islam, Christianity and the West.  A historian who really knows his stuff, well worth a look/listen. 

Frontrunners for the Archbishop of Canterbury

 Last time the CofE appointed a new ABofC, the virtual unknown Justin Welby was catapulted into the top job. He immediately put several key protagonists into a locked room together until they could work out a way for the church to agree to women bishops. The issue had made minimal progress for several years but Welby cracked it. 

Who are the left field candidates this time? 

Jeremy Clarkson: with Clarkson's Farm having worked through pretty much all the plants and livestock its possible to grow in the Cotswolds, it's time for a new project. Clarksons Church. With additional funding from Amazon Prime, Clarkson tries a series of crackpot schemes to make the church viable. Can JC save the church? Every now and again a churchwarden and a theological consultant turn up and roll their eyes. 

Richard Dawkins: after the resounding success of the Agnostibus, resulting in an overall fall in the number of atheists in London, Dawkins knows all about managed decline and poor PR, which are the two strongest spiritual traditions in the Church of England after Anglo-Catholicism and Reformed. 

Keir Starmer: by the time he is out of a job, the Church of England may have actually decided who the next Archbishop will be. In that respect, Starmer is a perfect match, being possibly the most indecisive politician of the 21st century. In keeping with the papal tradition of renaming the people who take on the highest office, Starmer would become Archbishop Schrodinger, capable of believing that one and the same person is both a man and a woman, or that Nigel Farage both is and is not a racist. 

Greta Thunberg: selected on the radical ticket of accelerating the CofE drive for net zero by closing all 13,000 church buildings.

Brian Blessed: chosen in part due to a mistaken assumption based on his surname, and in part because BB will be so constantly outrageous that none of the other clergy misdemeanours will ever make it into the press. Has the advantage that if the sound system in Canterbury Cathedral fails, it won't make the slightest bit of difference. 

Donald Trump: Make Anglicanism Great Again hats will be standard issue to all clergy. In a rushed compromise, they will be available in a range of liturgical colours for anglo-catholics and a 20% tariff will be imposed on churches that don't wear them. 

Fiona Bruce: After hosting Question Time for many years, she has more experience than anyone in the country of holding together a room of people who fundamentally disagree with each other. 

Robert Peston: in many respects a vicar already - poorly dressed, dishevelled, and when he speaks you're so distracted by his mannerisms and delivery that afterwards you can't remember a single thing he said. 

The Dowager Countess of Grantham: like the CofE (sometimes) a treasured national institution, irrevocably linked to the upper class, occasionally haughty, belongs to a past age, lives in an old building, and occasionally says something worth paying attention to. 

Drag v Blackface

 Blackface = white men using makeup and costume to dress up as a caricature of black men for public performance. 

Drag = men using makeup and costume to dress up as a caricature of women for public performance. 

Blackface is racist. So why isn't drag seen as sexist/misogynist?

Some perspectives on this question:

Josephine Bartosch in The Critic 

Kelly Kleiman in the Chicago-Kent Law Review (admit it, you read it all the time)

Meghan Murphy at Feminist Current

Frustratingly, most of the articles I found giving the opposite perspective are behind paywalls. This one is a brief summary.

Health, Wealth and Happiness

 Health: I have prostate cancer. Back in February I had a urine infection, which didn't fully clear up after antibiotics. Cue a PSA (prostate specific antigen test) and an uncomfortable investigation. The PSA reading was over 20 (it should be 0-3.5), and in a follow up test it was still too high. Next stop an MRI scan at the start of May, which showed up some areas the hospital wasn't happy with, so onto a prostate biopsy (next time I'll have the general anaesthetic). The results show I have prostate cancer, but in the lowest of 5 risk groups: the cancer is slow growing (if at all) and localised. 

I'm now on 'active surveillance' - PSA tests every 3 months, MRI every 12, and then something more drastic if things take a turn for the worse. There's been some headlines recently about over-treatment of prostate cancer, that many men are given treatment with serious and long lasting side effects which they don't actually need at the time. 60% of men who have their prostate removed end up with lifelong incontinence and erectile dysfunction. At the tender age of 56, I've gone for 'watch and wait'. In the meantime, my latest PSA test came back at 0.7, which just goes to show that you can still have cancer and a low PSA (either that or there's some answered prayer going on, but I won't know that until an MRI next summer). Either way: men, don't mess around, if somethings wrong downstairs then go and see your GP. 

update: turns out the 0.7 was a laboratory error, the test is invalid and I have to do it again. Watch this space!

update 2: the retest was 2.6, so still not bad. 

The news was a shock, but overall I seem to be at peace about it. A month after the diagnosis I had a weeks retreat booked in, and during that I sketched out what would be my life priorities if I had 1, 3 or 10 years to live. It was a life-giving exercise, rather than a macabre one. My life expectancy may be unaffected (Dad is 87 and still going strong), but I have more clarity over what's important, and more motivation to lose weight, stay fit, love my wife and kids and pursue God. So in a weird way its a gift. 

Wealth: A couple of weeks after the diagnosis, I was preaching on the parable of the rich fool. The guy is a hoarder, who plans to build a bigger store for all his stuff. The news of his impending death puts his focus and his decisions into perspective: he's not a success, he's an idiot. The cancer diagnosis sharpens the question of what money is for, what my money is for, or is it even 'my' money or just what I've been trusted with by God? I could max out my remaining time and money working through a bucket list, and I would deserve the same verdict as the rich fool. Or I could use the gifts well. 

Happiness: the Bible verse which has come into focus most of all in the last 3 months is Psalm 37:4 'Delight yourself in the Lord'. There is a lot of joy in the Bible, and in God, and ideally in God's people too. Back in the day I was more interested in the 2nd half of that verse 'and He will give you the desires of your heart'. I've recently discovered that it no longer interests me. Delighting in God is enough, more than enough. Brother Lawrence used to make omelettes 'for the love of God' and then dance in his kitchen, Eric Liddell said 'God made me fast, and when I run I feel His pleasure'. There are a hundred small ways every day to delight in God. At the moment it's a significant triumph if I can register and enjoy 2 or 3 of them in 24 hours, but I've got the rest of this life to practice, however long that is. 

Proud of my Flag

 The Union Jack is a 4-way blend of:

 - The St George Cross, commemorating a Christian saint from Lydda/Lod, at the time a Roman colony and now in modern day Israel, (his father was from Cappdocia in modern day Turkey). George was, probably, a Roman soldier who was martyred for his faith around the turn of the 3rd/4th century.

 - The St Andrew Cross, commemorating a young fisherman, one of the first two disciples of Jesus, instrumental in introducing his brother Peter to the Lord. The cross is a saltire, an X, as tradition has it that Andrew was crucified on a cross in this form. 

 - The St Patrick Cross, commemorating a Northerner from Britain who was captured into slavery by Irish pirates, escaped, and then returned to Ireland as a missionary and led many to Christ. 

 - The symbol of the cross, where God the Son gave his life as the ultimate act of love and sacrifice, where death was defeated, and from which everyone is invited to recognise, embrace and respond to God's love. It's what unites these 3 men from different ethnic backgrounds, eras, language groups and life experiences: a Jewish working man in an occupied land, a coloniser - a member of the occupying military, and a victim of people trafficking. 

It's a good flag to be proud of, its such a shame its become something else. 

What we don't talk about when we talk about migration

 "There's a lot of talk about this next song. Too much talk in fact." (Bono on 'Sunday Bloody Sunday'). You could say the same about immigration, which has gone from nobody wanting to talk about it, to everyone wanting to talk about it. 

But amidst all the talk, there are several facets of the debate that are getting way more airtime than others. For example: within the eye-watering levels of legal migration we currently have, why is it ok for the UK to poach trained medical staff in large numbers from countries which need them way more than we do? Why are we not training and deploying more of our own, when Medicine courses are vastly oversubscribed every year, and medic graduates often struggle to find work placements?

Here's another: Ian Paul has just published a thoughtful piece here in response to an intervention by the Archbishop of York, to which I posted the following comment:

Thankyou – there are so many angles to this question, and one which concerns me for my grandchildren is the effect of immigration on the religious mix of the UK. The combination of a high Muslim birth rate, and a high annual number of Muslim immigrants, will push the Muslim population of the UK over 10m by 2050. The last general election saw the first MPs elected on a Muslim ticket, and the government is exploring a legal definition of ‘Islamophobia’ – a term popularised in order to set Islam above challenge and criticism in Western countries.

When Islam ends up in a majority, or with significant political power within a country, it rarely ends well for Christians. 14 of the 20 worst countries for Christian persecution are Islamic states https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/ . If we sleepwalk into increased Islamic influence on government, culture and society by welcoming unsustainable numbers of Muslim immigrants – legal and illegal – who we can’t integrate, and therefore form their own subcultures, then we are storing up trouble for the future of the gospel in this country.

And for 'gospel' you could substitute other things, such as 'womens rights', 'freedom of speech', 'democracy' and most of the things which we value within our culture and ethos as a nation. Islam is, in its roots, a religion of conquest. Yes it can reform, but where Islam becomes a significant, powerful or majority grouping, it doesn't seem to do power-sharing. Is this a conversation we're afraid of having? 

Cornwall relocated to 'The North'

 The Guido Fawkes blog, which prides itself on doing a better job than the mainstream media, posted this earlier today: 

Writing this from Somerset, I was fascinated to discover that anything 'outside London' is Northern. And yes, Labour does have MPs in Dorset, Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, all of which are at least 200 miles from the borders of The Blessed Yorkshire. 

Perhaps Guido should get out more?

What3words: Holy Ghost in the Machine

 Interesting selection to identify the location of our church.

According to the late John Wimber, "faith is spelt R-I-S-K", though I'm sure Jesus doesn't mind if we call out to him when it's not an emergency.