• Sermon preached on 26 August 2012

    Here’s what I said this morning:

    Jesus said, This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But whoever eats this bread will live forever.

    In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

    I was trying to think how to relate to this idea of the bread of our ancestors and I remembered a childhood holiday.

    For some reason, my parents had taken my sister and I for a holiday on a farm in south-west Wales. It was a great place to have a holiday. Lots to do on the farm and lots of places to go in that lovely area.

    And I remember my father getting a notion.

    He decided, quite out of the blue that if we were on a farm, then we needed to bake our own bread. I’m not quite sure how his logic worked because the farm in question was in the business of breeding pedigree Hereford bulls. But that doesn’t matter. He decided that bread needed to be baked and bread on the table we would have.

    So we went off to an old working flour mill to buy flour because my father didn’t do things by half when he got a notion in his head.

    And back we came to bake the family loaf.

    There was kneeding. There was proving. There was shaping. There was baking. There was a wonderful rich smell. (more…)

3 responses to “So out of touch”

  1. Tim Avatar

    The *other* half of that `presbyterian model’ quote is truly barf-worthy especially given several unpleasant incidents hitting the press in the past 6 months.

    I think `Whenever there are progressive values around’ might be happening at the level of society as a whole, not just in churches, though.

  2. kelvin Avatar

    I’d rather like to think that it would be obvious to people in the various churches that no one system owns a “reflection, consultation, debate and discernment” model. Such ways of working can be found in different churches. Failures to work in such ways call also be found in different church systems.

  3. Rosemary Hannah Avatar
    Rosemary Hannah

    We are hijacked by people who scream and scream until they are sick (they can, you know) and lack the guts to say ‘Here is the bucket’. The attempt to ‘keep all the balls in the holes’ shows a total lack of any grasp of what leadership means.

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