A New Year Service of Prayer for Peace in 2025

Before the start of the service

On Monday 6th January, at 2.00pm, members of St David's C-in-W church and St Mary Magdalene Catholic parish came together to pray for an end to war and violence in 2025. 

Rev. Roland presided and Fr Ian offered a reflection taking this passage from Jesus' Sermon on the Mount as his starting-point:

Are we now living in the Great Apostasy? (1)

by Ray Caldwell

Is original sin no longer applicable?

Is the message of salvation from our sins through obedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ now null and void?

Do we no longer need to be born again through baptism and filled with the Holy Spirit?

Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882, portrayed as an ape in a cartoon

in The Hornet Magazine, 22nd March 1871

Assisted Suicide: a look at the issues

Recently the Catholic Union of Great Britain hosted a panel discussion on the upcoming parliamentary bill that seeks to legalise 'assisted dying' in England and Wales. The Evangelical Alliance has also been very active in presenting Christian moral arguments against the bill.  

Below are three links.

Our response to God: a reverent love

By Fr Ian

In previous posts I suggested we ask ourselves three big questions about Christian faith and spiritual life: who is God? What is he like? What, if anything, does he ask of us? 

In this post I’d like to give an answer to the third question, and I’ll start by referring to a passage from Saint Augustine’s Confessions, which ends with what is probably one of the most famous single sentences in the history of Christianity:

Conscious choice-maker: the definition of what I am

Ray Caldwell reflects on the reality of human free will, responsibility and accountability. Despite the fall of our first parents human beings are still essentially defined by our capacity to decide freely to choose good or evil, love or sin, heaven or hell.

I.

"I am an invisible spirit who chooses, chooses, chooses, all my conscious existence". This is called free-will.

God reveals himself to us (5)

by Father Ian

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4.

'It seems that many church members today lack a developed sense of God’s overwhelming holiness and divinity and majesty. Instead, their attitude is nonchalant, casual, indifferent. What this almost certainly means, unfortunately, is that they have not yet had a significant encounter with God in their lives. If they had, they would have begun to realise how inappropriate casualness, nonchalance and indifference are.'

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In a recent short book Catholic theologian Ulrich Lehner 'reintroduces Christians 

to the true God: not the polite, easygoing, divine therapist who doesn't ask much of us, but 

the Almighty God who is unpredictable, awe-inspiring, and demands our entire lives.  

(Click on the picture for the book's Amazon UK page.)

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