Picture of Revd Neil Thorogood, looking very smiley

Our Minister Writes

Revd Neil Thorogood pens a regular letter to the congregation. Here is his Feb 2026 message.

This comes with my prayers and good wishes as we settle into 2026.
The coming of a new year is often a reflective moment as we look back and look forwards. I find myself doing this bit of double-vision this year with a more profound sense of the world’s fragility than at any other time I can remember. Some of you will have lived through other times of tremendous global turmoil. But, never before in my lifetime, has the whole international order seemed to be torn asunder as it now is.

Not that the previous decades have remotely been perfect. I have been blessed to live in parts of the world that have prospered and benefitted hugely from the stability we’ve enjoyed since the end of the second world war. I know that other parts of the world experienced these as decades of injustice and exploitation.

I voted against Brexit in no small part because I always saw the EU as a powerful move away from the narrow nationalism and power games that plunged Europe into war twice within a generation. I cherish the United Nations for the ways it creates conversation and collaboration across borders, even though I know UN efforts can still be ambiguous and hypocritical. I believe in the constraints placed upon governments by such things as the Geneva Conventions, the dignity enshrined in laws about refugees and human rights, the reach of the International Criminal Court and the judgements of crimes against humanity that began in the aftermath of the Holocaust. None of this made a perfect world. But, together, I think they made for a better world.

Huge parts of this global jigsaw have been taken away within the past year; their pieces maybe lost for ever. In capital after capital, in electorate after electorate, a new and harsher nationalism has taken hold and wielded power. International treaties such as those on combatting climate change are ignored or deliberately undone. A renewed ethic of ‘might is right’ sees nations imposing their will upon others by force of arms or by economic intimidation. The era of the global bully is with us. Alliances seem to count for little. History is ignored. Lessons hard won are cast aside.

It is enough to make me, and maybe you, despair. Which is a good place to do some theology!

There is a place that the Bible knows fairly little about. It is a place glimpsed at times, dreamt of, spoken of with longing, but never the main stage. This hardly-known place is the world where things are safe and secure. It is the world where lives are lived with ease and without risk or upset. It is the place of peace and gentleness which knows nothing of wars and the rumours of wars.

The Bible, instead, unfolds almost entirely in a very different place. Here, humanity is vulnerable. The tides of human hearts and the choices that are taken can frequently bring disaster. Communities and nations live uneasily together and violence is seldom far away. Creation itself can bring catastrophes in flood and famine, fire and fever. The world is a place that demands hard work and the deepest of commitments for life to flourish. Sharing is tricky, often elusive, easily replaced by greed.

This is the world the Bible knows, the place where the words of God get discovered and shared and believed. Listen to it in the Psalms, the songbook of ancient Israel:
“Therefore, let all who are faithful offer prayer to you; at a time of distress, the rush of mighty waters shall not reach them. You are a hiding-place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance.” (Psalm 32: 6-7).

Listen to it in the words of Jesus, God living amidst the challenges with us:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth. Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” (Matthew 5: 3-6).

The Bible is God’s love letter to the world, a letter that becomes flesh and blood in the baby we’ve celebrated just before turning to 2026. The living presence of the risen Christ is God at work amidst us as we seek to follow him. The Spirit is God’s breath in us to revive and encourage us we face the challenges of today and tomorrow.

There is much that disturbs and disappoints me. There is plenty to invite me to despair.

But it is hope that refuses to die. The story of God’s people rests upon hope because God never abandons us to our faults and failures. God always works to renew and to redeem, to shape something beautiful where we thought all was only chaos and disaster. The wonder is, God recruits you and me into this world-changing, despair-defying life.

Yours in the Christ who knows the risks and chooses to take our side amidst them all,

Neil