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Thoughts From The Cottage Dear Friends The Christmas decorations are up in the street. Shops have their Christmas displays and adverts. Cards and presents have been bought. Christmas Dinner has been planned. The church has prepared its Christmas programme. Everything is in order. We have done it so often that we do not stop to…

Thoughts From The Cottage Dear Friends In the new year we will be starting to use the Life Explored course so I thought I would tell you about it now so we can all begin to pray for it. Life Explored is a seven session series featuring a combination of short films – shot around…

Thoughts From The Cottage Dear Friends We had a wonderful Church Anniversary celebrating our 160 years with worship led by Kevin Watson, URC National Moderator and Moderator of Yorkshire Synod. His sermons were truly inspirational and spoken from the heart. I was also encouraged by my all too brief private conversations with him. All in…

Thoughts From The Cottage Dear Friends This Autumn we continue to use Holy Habits as the basis of most of our preaching in worship. Some find it easy to adopt habits, others find it difficult. A sportsman in any field adopts habits of training, diet, fitness and the like all of which combine to create…

Thoughts From The Cottage Dear Friends Two years ago, in July 2015, we agreed unanimously to revitalise the Beacon Church Centre, recognising that that would inevitably mean changes to our life and a greater commitment from us all. We willingly and happily committed ourselves to the task. Since then there has been some good progress.…

Thoughts From The Cottage Dear Friends What a month it has been. How should we as Christians view and react to what has been going on? There have been the dreadful attacks in London and Manchester and the fire tragedy in London. The United Kingdom general election saw the biggest swing to Labour since 1944,…

Thoughts From The Cottage Dear Friends Nearly two years ago twenty-one of us met in the Concourse on a Sunday evening to discuss the future of the church. The group unanimously agreed to revitalise the church recognising that would require more commitment, more effort and changes to what we do and how we do it.…

Thoughts From The Cottage Dear Friends On 23rd April we inducted four new Elders and recognised Bob Sawyer’s fifty years as Deacon & Elder. During the service we shared, once again, in the ‘Statement of the Nature, Faith & Order of the United Reformed Church’. It is a joy to do this because it reminds…

Thoughts From The Cottage Dear Friends The Revd John Proctor, General Secretary of the United Reformed Church, offers the following Easter reflection:       Everyone loves an Easter egg. Doing things with eggs is part of the season – cream and chocolate, hard-boiled and decorated, hidden and hunted down. There is a reason we…

Thoughts From The Cottage Dear Friends We have heard a lot about mission, outreach and sharing our faith recently and that is very positive. We need to become a place where it is natural to talk about these things and equally natural to share with each other what God is doing in our lives. However…