Blog

  • Silence is Golden

    Forum on Silence from St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow on Vimeo. Somehow I managed to forget to publish this video on the blog but it is worth taking a look. It came from a forum conversation that I had with the Vice Provost, Cedric Blakey the other week. The point of this was to have a…

  • The Archbishop, the gays and their sins

    One of the things that we’ve learned about Archbishop Justin Welby in recent weeks is that he gets upset about what people write about him on social media. He wrote at some length about how what gets written online is upsetting and he’d just prefer to have personal contact with him rather than sounding off…

  • Review: Orfeo ed Euridice, Scottish Opera

    This review originally appeared for Opera Britannia. Scottish Opera have managed to produce another underwhelming show that, though visually arresting, leaves one with more questions than answers. There are things to praise about Ashley Page’s directorial debut for Scottish Opera: his ballet background clearly has given him an intense sense of theatrical spectacle that was…

  • Unlikely alliances – sermon preached as farewell to Fr Chucks

    Here’s what I had to say to my Nigerian colleague Chucks who is moving away from St Mary’s to go and work down south. God be with you, Chucks – we are looking to you to sort out the Church of England. Sermon preached by Kelvin Holdsworth on 15 February 2015 from Kelvin Holdsworth on…

  • 10 Tips on How to Date a Priest

    Valentine’s Day being upon us and my being an expert witness in the matter, I feel it incumbent upon me to share my best wisdom in the small matter of how to date a priest. Firstly, accept that clergy are people, just like everyone else. I’ve met people who believed that when they were ordained,…

  • It is a justice issue, isn’t it?

    The question is this – is LGBT inclusion a justice issue or isn’t it? If we think it is a justice issue then we pray about it in church, right? Those two questions feel to me a little uncomfortable. We pray readily in churches up and down the land about justice issues – we pray…

  • Sermon for Epiphany 4

    If you look carefully at the video, you might spot the moment when I realised that I didn’t have all the pages of this sermon with me in the pulpit. Sermon preached on 1 February 2015 from Kelvin Holdsworth on Vimeo. Come out and shut up On Friday, we celebrated a commemoration in the Scottish…

  • Scottish Episcopal Church News for February 2015

    The following news can be reproduced on other websites and in church magazines. Sign up to have news like this delivered each month by email here: http://thurible.net/follow-blog/ Lent Appeals The Scottish Episcopal Church is having a co-ordinated Lent Appeal in each of its dioceses this year in aid of the Scottish Episcopal Institute. The Institute…

  • Charles, King and Martyr

    On this day, the Scottish Episcopal Church remembers Charles I – the king who was beheaded on this day in Whitehall in 1649. There’s always services organised in Scotland to remember Charles. The Scottish Episcopal Church was strongly aligned in the Jacobite cause in times gone by. I tend to remember this day not merely…

  • Sermon on BBC Radio 4

    It was great fun doing the BBC Radio 4 Sunday Worship live from St Mary’s today. There’s always a bit of an adrenalin rush about being involved with the production of 40 minutes of live radio. If you were one of the million or so who tuned in then you’ve already heard this sermon, but…