I’ve come to believe that atheists are right! Without God, when we die that’s it, life comes to an end. If God is the source of all life, then without him there can be nothing more than the life we experience in this world. Without God life is short and at its end, we die….

People often imagine that God is ‘up there’, above us, and beyond our reach. He is untouched by our actions and unmoved by our concerns. This God looks down on the earth and decides how things should be. He speaks through commands, writes rules and gives his favour to the people he thinks merit it…

Pain and suffering are words used to describe the very worst aspects of our human experience. They are the things that hurt us and cause us grief. When we are in pain or see people close to us suffering, our experience of life alters as does our mood and feelings from positive to negative, from…

Often, it is just one note that signals the start of the season. We recognise, in an instant, the opening chord of the 80’s Christmas hit or the first bar from the soundtrack of our favourite festive film and our Christmas present connects with Christmases past. I love the music and the looking back. I…

We all have a Christmas soundtrack. Maybe it’s Carols learned while at school, or singing along to Slade, Wham or the Darkness. The gospel writers, Matthew and Luke, also had a soundtrack in mind when they wrote their accounts of Jesus’ birth, and just as our Christmas season comes to life when we start to…

The children of Israel lived for 40 years in the wilderness. That is a long time! We call the journey this ancient people took from slavery in Egypt through this wilderness to the land that God promised The Exodus. A journey that should have taken only weeks, ended up taking years. Why did it take…

Tonight our home will be filled again with the hum of conversation and the clink of coffee cups. Something new is starting. God is moving and I am not sure what will happen next. God has always been at work in these northern Yorkshire Dales. After all, he is the one who created this land…

“What day is it today?” is often the first question on our mind when we wake and get out of bed, drowsy or disorientated, needing to reset our connection with reality and routine. When we know what day it is, we know what we are meant to be doing. It can only be one day…

Farmed fields, even those sown with mixed crops, sustain only a few species of plants and animals compared to their wild equivalent. Our heather-capped moors similarly support a shorter list of living things than the mixed forests that once covered these hills. Equally, the Biblical vision for the church was always for a community where…

If the idea of rewilding our countryside evokes emotive images, both positive and negative, with many of us who live and work in and around these Dales, then the notion of rewilding the church of the Dales is equally likely to elicit emotional responses. If you like to imagine how things might be in the…