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25/04/2026

Sunday 26th April 2026
The Third Sunday after Easter (BCP
9.00 am Holy Communion (said)
10.00 am Holy Communion (sung)

https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/15869/page/76853/view/

Amen. We use it all the time. What does it mean?
The Lectionary we use, called The Revised Common Lectionary, may have spared us some awkwardness by slicing off v 18 from the reading from 1 Peter 2 today. (Sorry, purists, but we don’t use the Book of Common Prayer Lectionary even on our BCP Sundays, as it can interrupt continuity.) Add this to what you have printed for The Epistle:
Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the forward
“Servants” is also intended to mean “slaves”. I don’t need to explain how difficult this is in 2026. It’s one thing to encourage some hardship for the sake of glory or eventual reward of some kind for all, but quite another to single out the group, as it were, ‘below-stairs’. In today’s understanding this ‘others’ them. For time this was written, that was normal. It should give us chills today.
Then we have St John in, shall we say, in poetic mode, where Jesus is both shepherd and gate. Remember the enigmatic way he spoke to Nicodemus in Chapter 3, and the woman at the well in Chapter 4. Look here at the way it’s introduced: “verily, verily” here; “truly, truly” in the version of the Bible we use on other Sundays. Both are translations of the word amen which we find used in the Old Testament and here in the New. Don’t we use amen as a word of agreement at the end of a prayer; or in agreement to what someone says in a debate? This should give us something to work on in the week, too. Fr A

Image: The Good Shepherd, by Duncan Grant
Blaise Chantry, Lincoln Cathedral

19/04/2026

10.00 am Sunday 19th April, The Third Sunday of Easter. Sung Eucharist.

https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/15869/page/76853/view/

None so blind

Can’t see the wood for the trees? How often does that happen to us? Often we are so caught up in our cares and concerns, even misplaced sense of duty or guilt, or over-thinking and second-guessing that we can’t see what is right in front of us. Goodness knows what must have been going through the minds of these two disciples. Think of Mary Magdalene, who was in such fug after she saw the empty tomb she failed to see the risen Jesus. He called her by name, and the rest we know.

The Letter of Peter reminds us that our ransom was paid, we were bought back, by Jesus’ blood. It’s all OK. As ‘the redeemed’, the Spirit will show us what we need to see, when we need to see it, just as the Spirit provides us with all the things we need in the Spirit’s time.

We will face challenges and problems, and we might draw blanks from the bag of solutions. When that happens maybe it’s a good time to re-ask the questions, mindful that Jesus is calling us all the time. Try to suspend the ‘white noise’ in our heads, so that we can hear Him.

Fr A

18/04/2026

Thanks to St John's Church Failsworth, and others, for alerting us to this. How it came to be stored with them is, for now, a mystery. It belonged to St Paul's Methodist Church, on Ten Acres Lane (1892-1948), since demolished and built over by, broadly, Limerstone Drive.
We are thrilled to have brought it home. It's very fine.

11/04/2026

The Second Sunday of Easter, April 12th
10.00 Sung Eucharist
https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/15869/page/76853/view/

Unless I see…..

To say someone is a “doubting Thomas” isn’t really fair to the apostle of that name. We use it of a sceptic or a cynic, in a negative way. It’s a phrase we use too casually sometimes. There is often a very good reason for doubt, which can be subtle and complex; not mere peevishness. Thomas’s is like that.
‘Doubting’ the Resurrection, what it is or what it means, is one challenge to faith. There are, after all, many levels on which resurrection can be understood, which always must be more than belief in the ’mere’ resuscitation of a co**se.
One of my supervisors at Cambridge liked one of my essays on the Reformations in England, and commended my for my writing style, but warned me to beware of the “tyranny of the well-turned phrase” by which he meant readers need to be careful of accepting something just because it’s elegantly written.
When it comes to ‘doubt’ what do we think of these?
“Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all, if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.” Pascal
“Faith consists in believing when it’s beyond the power of reason to believe. “ Voltaire
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.” Martin Luther King, Jr.
Fr A

05/04/2026

Happy Easter from all of us at All Saints

03/04/2026

Easter Day
10.00 am Festal Eucharist and Renewal of Baptismal Vows
https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/15869/page/76853/view/

29/03/2026

Holy Week and Easter 2026.
Look out also for a couple of poscasts on our Youtube channel using art explore the meanings and signifcance of the events of Maundy Thursday and Good Friday.

27/03/2026

Sunday 29th March, Palm Sunday
9.00 am Holy Communion (BCP) (said)
10.00 am Parish Eucharist with the Liturgy of the Palms
https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/15869/page/76853/view/

Hosanna. Save us.

The Matthean account of Jesus’s journey to and arrival in Jerusalem indicate this was well organised, and Matthew enriches it with the references to prophecy and psalmody. The excitement is ratchetted up, sentence by sentence, to fever pitch. It is plain to us who know how this week will end that the ‘models’ of ‘Messiahship’ differ between Jesus and his followers. The latter seem to expect some kind of popular revolt, maybe with some violence and fisticuffs.

At the back of our minds may well be the account in John of Jesus before Pilate where Jesus says, “My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here” (John 18.12). The struggle is moral and existential not physical, let alone para-military.

This is the tension we have to hold for the next week, through prayer and reflection, through the gestures of Maundy Thursday and the bitter pain of Good Friday. Its release, maybe even more so than in recent years, will be an explosion of joy at the end of our ride on the eternal rollercoaster.
Fr A

Catch the podcast
https://youtu.be/rvGAMHF0_1w

21/03/2026

10.00 am Sunday 22nd March, The Fifth Sunday of Lent (Passiontide begins)
https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/15869/page/76853/view/

Dem bones: hear the word of the Lord.

Without the spirit (or breath, ruach in Hebrew) of God we are nothing. God is love, but we see that God punishes even ‘His’ people for faithlessness. Here they are seen as lifeless bones in a wilderness. At other times, foreign powers –such as the Babylonians—act as foreign agents, placing ‘Israel’ in captivity until it comes to its collective sense, and God restores them. There’s that and timescale. God acts in God’s time to give us what we need, and this includes God in Jesus. It may have seemed cruel of Jesus deliberately to delay his journey to his friends in Bethany so that a more spectacular act than a ‘mere’ healing may be witnessed.
Lazarus may have been raised, but he was still bound, in contrast to the resurrection of Jesus where the burial cloths are abandoned as He leaps from the grave, and as I wrote in Wednesday’s notes this reminds us that we have work to do in removing that which binds us before we die.
The music after communion today reminds us of the gulf that exists between us and God—even in the best of times when we may think we are on message or ‘in sync’ with God’s will. We cannot see things as God sees them. (The fancy phrase for this is ‘epistemic distance.’)
However, as Paul reminds us, the more we live in the Spirit, rather than that which binds us, such as useless worry or the opinions of others, petty jealousies or even greed, the more we are liberated, un-bound and becoming the people God intends us to be. Hear the word of the Lord. Fr A

Link to the podcast: https://youtu.be/Dhsrw5KcEzM

14/03/2026

Sunday 15th March 2026, The Fourth Sunday of Lent aka Mothering Sunday (also Laetare)
10.00 am Sung Eucharist
https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/15869/page/76853/view/
If you haven;t caught it yet, the podcast which explores motherhood through the Old Testament Readings
https://youtu.be/O3Wl7TgC6Qs

Behold, thy mother.

The options for the Old Testament readings, and the options for the Gospel reading every year are not very joyous. They involve, respectively, separation and tough news. This at odds with the saccharine, commercial Mother’s Day offerings in our shops. It’s a day which many find difficult, maybe even more difficult than Christmas Day, and for more primal reasons.
Despite this, liturgically there must be celebration and joy, to augment our Eucharist of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That needs to be found for all, where it can. Of the art presented in the third Lent podcast, I was most struck by the most modern image, from 1912: a photograph of a tableau, of Hannah presenting Samuel to Eli, fulfilling a promise she made to God. Those who knew nothing of the photographer would not have picked up the message, even in a time when women were fighting for their suffrage in the first couple of decades of the last century.
The image represents agency rather than passivity. In Jochebed (the mother of the boy who was to be named Moses by Pharoah’s daughter), and Hannah, we have the placing of their first-born, in these instances, into the hands of God, using human agents. God continues to prove His being in the examples of remarkable human beings, which we all are even if we are not well-known. Today we celebrate how God is known through women who happen to be mothers. Fr A.

12/03/2026

In anticpation of Mothering Sunday, the third podcast in our Lent series. This one looks at two mothers from the Old Testament - and there's a bit of history and art appreciation in it too.
Here's the link to our YouTube page, where you can find the previous podcasts - and some from a long time ago. Remember COVID?
https://www.youtube.com/

07/03/2026

10.00 am Sung Eucharist, Sunday 8th March 2026, The Third Sunday of Lent
https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/15869/page/76853/view/

Ho, everyone who thirsts.

The image is Jacob’s Well as it looks today (well, February 2017 when the Rector was on pilgrimage in the Holy Land). This is Jacob as in ‘Jacob and sons’ (think Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat) which means this is a very ancient site indeed, and also the location of the encounter between Christ and the woman at the well.

Today the well would be described as being on the outskirts of Nablus, which, in 2017, was still a very vibrant Palestinian town, sadly more recently bedevilled with violence between the ancient Arab community and Israeli settlers. The water was very refreshing; the well is deep, drunk by pilgrims from all over the world, regardless of any doctrinal differences there may be between them and the present-day custodians of the site, the Greek Orthodox.

This place, established by Jacob, a common ancestor of the Jews and Samaritans of Jesus’s day is still a place of tension. Jesus’s wisdom and authority then as now transcends all this, as it does everywhere. It illustrates that the way forward is sometimes to follow the examples of those who are outside the restrictive ‘clicks’ of the established/official religion of the day.

Fr A

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Manchester
M401LR

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+441612191807

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https://www.achurchnearyou.com/church/15869/

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