• Sermon – The Proud Young Man

    I was preaching today for the first time in about six weeks and had a lot of fun doing so. You can hear what I had to say here or read it below.

    There is something terribly tricky about young men who get excited about religion.

    I remember a number of years ago. I was training to be ordained and was doing an internship in a congregation in Edinburgh in Scotland. Like very many Episcopalians, I did not grow up as an Anglican. I’d come from a background in the Salvation Army and been through many different types of congregation on my journey. I’d been baptist and non-denominational. I’d been just about everything as I searched for the truth.

    And finally, I found what I was looking for in the Scottish Episcopal Church. There I found a church which in which beauty mattered, holiness mattered, worship mattered. It was a church which could cope with the radical theology that had excited me at college and it was a church that had the exotica of every liturgical practise of the ages.

    You know how it is.
    (more…)

3 responses to “5 things about exams that matter more than results”

  1. Matthew Pemble Avatar
    Matthew Pemble

    The important thing isn’t the results themselves, but whether you can carry on and do what you wanted to do, whether or not you need to take a little detour on the road. I was lucky and didn’t. Many people aren’t as fortunate.

    My heart goes out to all those older kids / young adults who are looking at their SMS or results sheet and think their life is in ruins. Really, it isn’t.

    1. Beth Routledge Avatar

      In the end, that little detour on the road is sometimes the thing that makes the journey better and prettier and more fun.

      I’ve been where those kids are today. It’s not the end of the world. It feels like it, but it’s really not.

  2. Imogen Vibert Avatar
    Imogen Vibert

    Lovely words of wisdom! As a school chaplain I’ll be in for A level & GCSE results days in England soon…think I might just print a few copies of this off to take with me. 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Previous Posts

  • Upcoming Books

    I had a look through the up-coming religious books o­n Amazon to see whether there was anything that I was likely to want to review.  There is a depressing swathe of Kabbalah books o­n their way, presumably cashing in o­n the Madonna nonsense.Continuum are also about to publish a new edition of Barth's Church Dogmatics,…

  • Reviewing

    I’m sent copies of books to review from time to time – they get published in the Episcopalian newspaper. Today someone sent a copy of the bible. It is very tempting to write a review as though neither I nor any reader had read it before at all. However, I think that there are things…

  • Lammas

    Seriously considered buying a bread-machine to celebrate Lammastide on Sunday.

  • Alex Salmond

    How come Alex Salmond is standing for the leadership of the SNP? When I went on holiday, it was a catfight between Nicola Sturgeon and Rosanna Cunningham. How strange it would be if another political party elected a leader from the past. Talking of politics, my mother told me last night that there should be…