Human being

Through a quirk of social media, my eight year-old has become a pen friend with Susannah Bryan. 'So what?' you might say. So a lot! Susannah has opened the door for us into the world of her remarkable brother. Jonathan Bryan shot to fame this year with the publication of his book 'EYE CAN WRITE' (with rave reviews from the likes of Michael Morpurgo and Bear Grylls).

Jonathan was trapped in his own body for 8 years, unable to communicate. Now he is on a mission to change the world. 💛 @BBC pic.twitter.com/I6nBZnjiBp

— CBBC (@cbbc) February 5, 2018

Locked in?
Jonathan suffers from such extreme cerebral palsy that he is incapable of any voluntary movement or speech. Until he was 7 years old, he was unable to communicate, experiencing the lonely silence of locked-in syndrome. But his mother was sure Jonathan was trying to communicate. And she eventually found a way for him to express his thoughts, using his eyes to choose letters on a word board. What came out showed that far from being the 'vegetable' people had assumed him to be, because of his physical disabilities, Jonathan was truly a human being, as Michael Morpurgo says 'a writer of great emotional and intellectual depth...'.

Join our Holiday Bible Club, 6-9 August

This year at Holiday Club we'll join some Epic Explorers as we discover the delights of Adventure Island. We'll play great games, sing amazing songs and get creative as well as discovering who Jesus is and why he came.



Who for? Children (Reception - Year 6)
When? Mon-Thu 6-9 August 10am-12.30pm
How much? £8 for the week
Family Event: Thu 9 August 6-7.30pm

For more information and to book a place please contact us.

The best sort of rest

There are times when we're dog-tired, and the thing to do is rest - to get horizontal and catch a few zeds! But that's not the best sort of rest. We find what the best sort of rest is in the Bible. It starts with God himself:

'By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.' Genesis 2:2:

This doesn't mean God took a nap. The word 'rest' here doesn't mean 'doing nothing'. It means 'he stopped doing one thing in order to do another'. In this case, God stopped the work of creation in order to enjoy what he had made.

This idea of 'rest' on the seventh day gets written into the pattern for all human life. We see it in the law that God gave to his people Israel after he had freed them from their Egyptian slave-drivers:

'Remember the sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labour and do all your work, but the seventh day it is a sabbath to the LORD your God...' Exodus 20:8

In other words, for one day a week, the best thing they could do was to stop doing the work that normally filled their days in order to spend a whole day with the LORD, enjoying Him.

Beyond all reasonable doubt

Some people avoid the claims of Christ by calling ‘faith’ a leap in the dark. They mean that Christians don’t really know what they believe in. Other people avoid the claims of Christ by putting faith down to temperament or personality type. They say things like, ‘I wish I had your faith’, as if it was something you were born with. But Christian faith is nothing like that.

Faith in a person
True Christian faith is faith in a person. It is a personal trust in, and commitment to, Jesus Christ. And this is achieved on our part through careful investigation of who he is. The Christian is someone who has scrutinised the evidence, asked the big questions, tested what the Bible says and realised that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God.

Harvesting personal information

The lid has been blown off the way personal information can be harvested from Facebook and other social media.


Photograph: Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images

The Cambridge Analytica whistle-blower has exposed how political parties and advertisers can target us, based on our online profiles. These are the uncomfortable realities of our digital age. Strangely, it's all come to light just as the new General Data Protection Regulation is coming into effect on 25th May 2018. The law is tightening up the way companies collect and hold our personal information.