Minister’s Message – Sunday June 27th, 2021

One of the biggest differences between men and women is the way they behave when they’re ill – that’s what Moira, my wife says, so I dare not argue! According to her, men get a little snuffle of a cold (but call it ’flu), behave as if they’re dying, take themselves off to bed with a hot toddy, and expect to be waited on hand and foot by their loving wives. Women, on the other hand, can catch both malaria and typhoid while they’re suffering from a broken arm and a severe migraine; yet they grit their teeth, get the children ready for school, do a full day’s work (complete with shopping on the way home), cook the evening meal and generally carry on as normal. Well, this picture is clearly a stereotype perpetuated by women in order to demonstrate their moral superiority over men. So it pains me to say that it might, just possibly, contain an element of truth!

Minister’s Message – Sunday June 13th, 2021

Ground Elder – otherwise known as Goutweed, English Masterwort, Bishop’s Weed or Snow-in-the-Mountain – is a plant that you really don’t want to have in your garden. True, its tender but pungent-tasting leaves are edible and were used during the Middle Ages as a spring vegetable, especially in soup. It has also been used to treat gout and arthritis, acts as a mild sedative and has a laxative effect. But ground elder, which can grow to a height of about a metre, is also a thug and a pest. For it grows from underground stems or rhizomes which spread through the soil, sucking the nutrients out of it. It spreads rapidly, crowding out other plants. And it is almost impossible to eradicate: you can try to dig it out but a new plant will grow from even the tiniest fragment of rhizome that’s left in the ground. In other words, it is a persistent and invasive species.

Minister’s Message – Sunday June 6th, 2021

“Does family come first?”   

The Christian Church generally regards families as a good thing, a foundational building block of a stable society. Indeed, some churches are keen to tell us that they “uphold family values and believe that healthy families make up a healthy Church” – although I suspect they have a very specific picture of what a family is like. There’s a Baptist church near Chicago which takes a commitment “to strengthen marriages and the family” as one of its “Core Values”. And even Pope Francis has said that one of the Church’s greatest challenges is to “defend the family from all ideological and individualistic assaults”.