Archive | August, 2021

This week, I caught a programme on BBC1 about a community event in Mid-Ulster, in Northern Ireland. It charted the efforts on the gay (LGBTQ+) community to organise a Gay Pride march. Gay Pride marches are something I normally associate with cities, not rural areas such as Mid-Ulster. An extra consideration here is that Mid-Ulster […]

Back in the early 1980s, I was an avid attender of the cinema. Some of the most powerful films of that period came from America as it reflected on the legacy of Vietnam and Cambodia. One I especially remember was “The Killing Fields”, the story of how an American journalist struggled to get his Cambodian […]

Friday the 13th proved to be very lucky for the August winners of the 100 Club. Dave was invited to make the draw and to the surprise of everyone present managed to pull his very own number, 67, out of the bag to claim the top prize of £60! Peter (11) and Julie (1) both […]

A few weeks ago, I pontificated about wearing face masks. I said I would continue to wear them in public places, to protect those around me. As luck would have it, this appeared last week in the Bridgnorth Journal, as “Prayer for the week”. Anyone who read that and then saw me on Sunday evening, […]

This week, the late Dr Abbas Khan has featured in the news. Dr Khan was a UK surgeon who went to Syria in 2012 to treat victims of the civil war. There he was arrested and died in custody. He was perhaps, a kind of a martyr, losing his life whilst saving others. However, the […]

There is a danger that any church can become so obsessed with its own existence and a narrow focus on “saving souls”, that it forgets Jesus’s teaching on loving others; the parable of the Good Samaritan is there to remind us we need to look outwards to serve and be served. At Billingsley, we try […]