Ray's Blog
Saints, Spirit And Sailing The World
Those in vows from five countries gathered at Scargill House in UK's beautiful Yorkshire Dales for our annual retreat this week at a time when the world faces crises and we are tired by pandemics and cost of living fears
Scott Brennan, a respected church planter and director of church leaders,...
A Modern Mother Hilda
Yesterday was the funeral of Rev. Tania Witter. With her late husband Nick they generously purchased The Open Gate, (allowing us four years to pay for it) which facilitated world-wide Community of Aidan and Hilda members and friends who wished to touch base with our lived spirituality in a setting...
Podcasts - A Life-time's Highlights
An Orthodox church liturgy is now celebrated monthly in Berwick-Upon-Tweed, to which young people from Edinburgh and Newcastle come. Afterwards I accompanied them to lunch in the rowing clubhouse. There I met John and his sister, whose family have recently moved into the area. John had left uni with...
Dark Materials Or Unimagined Possibilities?
Vocation As Resistance – God moving through, in, before and beyond us
While Craig Roberts worked to train innovative Christian leaders in Australia and New Zealand he was called to follow the bardic way of writing full time.
He explores what takes place when Spirit-led vocation becomes a way of...
New Year Message
Brian McLaren's new book Should I Stay Christian? a guide for the doubters, the disillusioned and the disappointed is but the latest sign that a younger generation soaked in global social media, wonders whether or not to reject a Christianity that seems a prisoner of male terminology, colonial, capitalist,...
Christmas - The Most Amazing Letter I Have Received
'A LIGHT HAS SHINED ON THOSE WHO LIVED IN A LAND OF DEEPEST DARKNESS' (Isaiah 9:2)
Of all the Christmas cards and emails I have ever received a four page typed letter posted in New Zealand is the most extra-ordinary.
X's estranged friend - a friendship that had been bolstered by booze...
Build Justice In Advent
From a friend's Christmas letter: 'At no time in my life have I known such apparent chaos and desolation... I see only insuperable obstacles to human flourishing - war, conflict, violence, climate change, selfishness of unprecedented dimensions, political and economic ineptitude, commercial and technological malevolence on a grand scale...
Making New Waves For God's Kingdom
Wales - land of world cup soccer, songs and saints...
A Welsh lady who once pilgrimed to Lindisfarne sent me this poem for Christmas that recalled her visit:
'Jesus... as in my mind I stand on that distant shore near Lindisfarne your Holy Spirit flows again on me like gentle waves...
Perish Or Rise To The Challenge
I have had flu.
Dawn Martindale, my secretarial assistant can no longer travel here monthly.
My computer was hacked. I did not send out a request for anyone to send me money. I have purchased a new computer. Making everything work is very difficult. Please pray that...
All Souls
At a memorial service at Holy Trinity Berwick on Sunday 6 November for loved ones whose names were read out, Ray Simpson gave this address:
John 11: 28-36 The first reading is about Jesus’ visit to the Bethany home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Lazarus had died. Martha greets Jesus...