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Christmas Day Sermon 2015
It is quite a number of years since I spent Christmas with my parents. Ordination tends to give one other things to do at this time of the year than to race about the country trying to keep a family Christmas. And in any case, I rather like the Christmas I keep these days. The…
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Midnight Mass Sermon 2015
So where did you learn the Christmas story? Where did you first hear about the baby in the manger? I’ve been thinking about this a lot since a sermon that one of my colleagues preached earlier this year in which he suggested that in fact more people know about the story of Bethlehem from the…
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A Christmas Message for the LGBT+ Communities
This piece appeared first at Kaleidoscot, an online publication for Scotland’s LGBT communities. The first Christmas after I was ordained nearly 20 years ago, I happened to come down sick before Christmas. My senior colleague had to take all the services instead of us sharing them and all I could do was drag myself to…
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The Solstice is Past
Did everyone come through OK?
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12 tips to get people to come to Christmas Services
Earlier this year, I won a competition. Someone had published a new plugin for WordPress that allows you to fairly easily publish google maps with your own points of interest on them. As a way of promoting the plugin, the competition was to offer a year’s license to the top 20 people who came up…
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The next five questions the Archbishop needs to be asked
First of all, we need to give some cheers to Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. He was asked some great questions about the Usual Topic this week in an interview and he gave some great answers. The interviewer was Michael Gove and the interview appeared in the Spectator. The crucial bit is this: It…
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The #syriavote is not so simple really
Like many people in the UK, I spent much of yesterday dipping into what was happening in parliament as a long debate took place as to whether this country should engage in military action against ISIL in Syria. I once had aspirations to be an MP and that always makes me wonder which division lobby…
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World AIDS Day Forum
Here’s a video of a conversation I had with one of the members of St Mary’s last Sunday. Andy Winter was chatting to me about the way treatment and perception of HIV has changed over the years. We talked about new PrEP medicines, reducing stigma and the extraordinary news that the epidemic could be ended…
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Sermon for Advent 1 – 29 November 2015
Here’s the sermon I preached yesterday You can’t beat a good quiz on the internet. Two minutes completing a set of multiple choice questions and some computer somewhere out there gives a verdict on what kind of person you are. Thus is was that this week I followed a facebook link and found myself…
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Making Scotland’s Sex Trade Safer
The recent death of Cynthia Payne provides a helpful reminder of the two-faced attitude to prostitution that we often hold. Ms Payne managed to cultivate a populist and almost comic Carry on Whoring image. She invited the great and the good to her home in Streatham and offered sandwiches and “services” merely in exchange for…