Sunday 18th January 2026
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details.
A recording of the service should be available here this afternoon.
16th January 2026
I’m writing on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s birth in 1929. A Baptist minister, his prominent part in the 1960s Civil Rights movement is honoured on this day as a federal holiday across the USA since 2000. A favourite time for me in teaching was playing to pupils a recording of MLK’s ‘I have a dream speech’ in Washington in 1963, delivered to the quarter-of-a-million who came from all over the States to advocate for ‘jobs and freedom’ for African Americans.
I like anniversaries; in church services and school assemblies I have found them very convenient pegs on which to hang meaningful thoughts. This year, we will, I hope, hear a lot more of another of my great heroes, William Tyndale, after whom our church is named, as it’s the 500th anniversary of the publishing of his translation into English of the New Testament in 1526. Banned by King Henry VIII; burned by bishops; it has come to be recognised today by the British Library as ‘the most significant printed book in the English language’.
On January 15th 1535, Henry VIII declared himself ‘head of the Church of England’, breaking from Rome. Ironically, only three years later – and two years after Tyndale’s martyrdom – an English Bible was placed in every parish church in the land at the king’s command; that translation being largely Tyndale’s wording!
On January 15th 1559, Elizabeth I, yet another of my heroes, was crowned, whose reign significantly secured Protestantism in Britain.
“Life can only be lived going forwards, but can only be understood looking backwards.”
David Bell
14th January 2026
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W. B. Yeats’ words, penned in the turmoil following the 1914-18 conflict and war in Ireland, ring tragically true today. Thanks to the go-it-alone projects of Presidents Trump and Putin (and others) with their abject disregard of the hard-won rules of international order and engagement, and many international institutions, we seem to be back in the jungle where might is right and the devil take the hindmost. Well might we say with the Psalmist, ‘If the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?’ (Ps. 11.3). Yet the Psalmist goes on to declare that God is in his holy temple and is examining humankind and their actions. Naïve?
God’s righteous purpose is not ultimately dependent on how the rules are kept or not kept. It is built into the fabric of the world as created by him. Paul states, ‘In Christ all things in heaven and on earth were created, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers – all things have been created through him and for him’ (Colossians 1.16). Those who disregard how the world is created, reflecting the togetherness of God, as though they can do what they like with it for their self-centred ambitions, will not finally succeed. They will sooner or later be up against not just the best human rules, but with the reality of God and of all peoples. An austere hope? Maybe, but certainly not despair.
Keith Clements
Sunday 11th January 2026
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details.
A recording of the service is available here.
7th January 2026
CHANGE AND CHANGELESSNESS
What a world of change we live in. I find it remarkable that to send a letter by first-class post, even a short distance, costs £1.70, whereas an email can circuit the world for practically nothing. We may well be amongst the few who still use details of TV Channels to determine what we watch, rather than search a wide spectrum of programmes on iPlayer, Netflix etc. Increasingly we receive messages from family and friends that they have given up their landline telephone in favour of a smart phone and would we therefore note their new unmemorable number.
Reverting to the world I grew up in, I note that the family did not run a car, did not have a telephone or a television, nor a refrigerator or deep freeze: peas then came in pods not in ice. A hot tub or ‘copper’ and a hand-rotated mangle were the antecedents of the washing machine and central heating had not yet warmed our sometimes chilly homes.
Today we live with dramatic changes and can anticipate living in a world where ever greater changes can be expected: driverless cars, drone deliveries, new adventures in space travel, the human mind competing with AI.
Against all that we have to set the revelation of God, in time-specific scripture and in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in a particular place at a precise time which must always be the context of our understanding of what for us must be eternal truth. How are scientific advances parts of the coming of his kingdom? And what does it mean to pray ‘give us today our daily bread’ when we have many weeks of food awaiting our attention in our freezers? Or for that matter how do we get alongside that prayer prayed by peoples living with life-threatening famine? So well might we pray ‘Deliver us from evil.’
How important that we learn to relate a world of change to the world that the changeless God has given us, and which by his grace will be renewed when history has run its course.
John Briggs
Sunday 4th January 2026
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details. The service includes communion.
A recording of the service is available here.
31st December 2025
We’ve reached the turning of the year: goodbye to 2025 and hello to 2026. TV, radio, newspapers and magazines invite us to review the year that’s departing – the past 12 months’ political headlines, major news stories, sporting events, gossip from the world of entertainment, scandals, obituaries and the like – before going on to offer their best guesses and prophecies about what we might expect in the months to come. Perhaps prompted by the casual excesses and mistakes of Christmas just gone, some folk will plan to get themselves into better order by making personal resolutions for change, by, for example, adopting mindfulness techniques, or starting a diet, or taking up a new fitness regime. Hope springs eternal, as they say!
Don’t read on if you expect some failproof wisdom from me based on my supposed many years of personal improvement! Instead, I would point you to some words of St Paul written long ago to the beleaguered church at Colossae, but still immensely valuable for us to remember in our day. ‘As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving’ (Col. 2:6-7).
I wish you all a very Happy New Year. You may already have special plans and things you’re looking forward to, or, conversely, a diary full of blank pages just waiting to be written on, but, no matter what does eventually come along in 2026, let’s hold close the resolve that we continue to live our lives in him, in Christ.
Ken Stewart
Sunday 28th December 2025
Join us in person for a Joint Service with the Whiteladies Road churches at 10.30 am.
A recording of the service is available here.
Fourth Sunday of Advent, 21st December 2025
Join us in person or online for a streaming service via Zoom at 10.30 am – check your email or contact us for the details.
A recording of the service is available here (apologies for the audio gremlins – you may notice a mystery soloist during the hymns!).
Then join us for:
Carols by Candlelight at 5.30pm
19th December 2025
BLUE CHRISTMAS 2025
There are times when you get the same message twice. I came across this from Paul Lavender, the minister of Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Northampton, the day after Sam’s sermon last Sunday. I have edited it a little for length. Many thanks to Paul.
Christmas speaks most clearly to those who feel closest to despair, because its message begins in the darkness rather than denying it.
The first Christmas did not arrive in a season of peace or prosperity. It came to a people living under oppression, uncertainty, and long silence. Into that reality, God did not send an explanation for suffering or a command to “try harder.” He sent a child. The incarnation tells us that God chose to enter human fragility from the inside. Emmanuel – “God with us” – is not a slogan of optimism but a declaration of presence.
For those struggling with despair, this matters profoundly. Despair often says, “You are alone. Your pain is unseen. Nothing will change.” Christmas contradicts that. The manger proclaims that God sees what the world overlooks. The shepherds, ignored by society, are the first witnesses. Mary, confused and afraid, is entrusted with God’s promise. Joseph, burdened and uncertain, is given just enough light for the next step. Christmas hope is not loud or triumphant; it is quiet, resilient, and near.
The child in the manger grows up to be a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. God’s answer to despair is not distance but solidarity. In Christ, God enters our suffering and carries it all the way through death – and beyond it. That is why Christmas hope is not fragile. It is anchored in God’s faithfulness, not in our circumstances or emotional strength.
For those who feel numb, exhausted, or overwhelmed, Christmas does not demand cheerfulness. It offers companionship. It promises that despair does not get the final word. Light has entered the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
Christmas hope may begin small – like a candle, like a child, like a whispered prayer – but it is real. And because God has come near, even the deepest despair is no longer empty of God’s presence. That is good news worth holding onto, especially when holding on feels hard, because God is always holding on to us.
(Nick Parsons)