On a short visit to Edinburgh many years ago, long before I lived in the city, I fell into conversation with a local who asked me:

“Where do you stay?”

I wasn’t then familiar with the Scots use of that verb “stay” and when I replied:

“The Old Waverley Hotel”.

the person with whom I was chatting looked completely baffled.

I was of course being asked where I lived, not where I was staying, and in those days the correct answer would have been Ipswich. Edinburgh was then a place I was passing through. Ipswich was my settled...

Good Shepherd Sunday 2024

125/135th Anniversaries of the Congregation 

“I was glad when I heard them say; 

“Let us go into the house of God.”     Psalm 122

I remember the first time I walked into the Church of the Good Shepherd. Immediately, I was aware that this was a holy place. That it was a building loved and cared for and more importantly one that was steeped in decades of prayer and worship. I have always believed that prayer oozes out of bricks and mortar and I still feel that today about this place. Those words from Psalm...

John 20: 19-31                                        Low Sunday

Jesus said to Thomas: “Do not doubt but believe.”

Thomas has come down through Christian history as the disciple who was unwilling to believe in the resurrection of Jesus until he had visible and tangible proof. 

There is more to Thomas than that.

We do not know where he came from, although it is likely that he came from Galilee. Nor do we know how he came to be a follower of Jesus. Nor do we...