April 2024

At this time of year, we are beckoned outside after a long, cold and often wet winter. Spring has sprung and all creation calls us to go outside, to tend to our gardens and to admire the new life around us.

The benefits to our health from time outside are well known. Growing something from a small seed to a flourishing plant or flower requires care, skill and patience which not only brings us satisfaction but also slows us down. Unlike life in the modern world, nothing in nature is instant or immediate – it will not be rushed.

In this Easter Season, our scriptures also draw us outside. On Easter morning, Mary Magdalene finds herself in a garden, outside of Jesus’s tomb, so much so that she mistakes the resurrected Christ for the gardener. There is a vast passage of time between Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden to that moment when, in a garden, Mary realises that it is the risen Christ who calls her by name. Yet now in that garden, Mary and all who throughout the ages proclaim, ‘I have seen the Lord’ are restored to God’s eternal presence.

Maybe then there is something in the Easter Season when the resurrected Christ is ‘made known’ to us that can help us as we – as the Church of today – seek to make him known. Firstly, we need to go outside: to be active in our communities, in our schools and in reaching out to all as we show them the love of God; the God who – through Jesus – calls us by name. And secondly, all of this takes time. There can be an understandable anxiety about the often low numbers of people who come to church. Yet let us never forget that it took time for the good news of Jesus Christ to spread through active discipleship – like growth in a garden, nothing of this was immediate or instant – we need to persevere. As the Declaration of Assent made by all who are being ordained or licenced to a new appointment states, our faith is one that the church is called upon to ‘proclaim afresh to each generation.’

I pray that we can do this; go outside, take time to build relationships with all around us, show to all the love, compassion and forgiveness of God and in doing so Make Jesus Known afresh, to all generations.

Bishop Stephen


March 2024

A century ago, the great journalist and Catholic provocateur G.K.Chesterton wrote a wonderful essay entitled ‘The Priest of Spring’ in which he considered the integration of the Christian seasons with the natural year – and referred to the “armies of the intellect who will fight to the end on whether Easter is to be congratulated on fitting in with the spring or the spring on fitting in with Easter”.


February 2024

It won’t have escaped many of us that this year, Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day. This may feel like an uncomfortable union.

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November 2023

Praying for the People God Knows We Need. This autumn it has been a joy to institute and licence a record number of clergy to new posts and as well as being the beginning of new ministry for individuals, communities and parishes, these services represent the culmination of months of careful work.

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December 2023

In my former parish, there were various experiments we made to make the most of the unique atmosphere of preparation and excitement accompanying Advent.

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October 2023

October is one of those months when the leaves begin to change and fall, and somewhat comical excuses come into conversations about why things don’t work. Leaves on the line may well be a technical problem for the railways, but we all know it also means, somewhat ironically, why is it somethings just don’t work as they should. 

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September 2023

Harvest, in the agricultural sense, is well past. All is safely (or soggily) gathered in and the appealing blocks of barley and hay baling our landscape into a pop-up sculpture park have all but disappeared. The Church’s Harvest celebrations

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July 2023

I write this at the end of no mow May, and during a week when we are remembering to care for God’s acre, so I am thinking about all those who serve in many ways tending our churchyards and enabling them to be places where God’s creation and God’s presence can be experienced. Thank you.


June 2023

One year ago, I became your bishop with that great service in the cathedral. It has been the fastest year in many ways, with changes coming at us all with a post-pandemic pace that has somewhat stunned us all.


May 2023

How does one crown a king? After much rehearsal and with a steady hand, I suspect – and bated breath around the globe in that solemn moment...


April 2023

I wonder whether we can remember how we were feeling 3 years ago as we approached Easter?  Lockdown feels a long time ago, however I was reminded through an article read recently that we have all experienced a major trauma in our lives which we have somehow lived through.

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