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As we look ahead once again to the cosy annual prospect of our Carol Services, cribs, decorated trees and Midnight Eucharists, everything seems like just a normal Christmas, with even the winter snow making one of its rare appearances. But indeed, there is nothing normal about Christmas this year.

The recent consecrations of three new bishops for England and Scotland/Europe and a forthcoming one for Wales mark the coming of age of the first serious effort to rebuild orthodox Anglicanism in the UK.

The difference between republics and constitutional monarchies has become startlingly obvious in the weeks following the death of our beloved Queen ... With King Charles III upon the throne, it seems that we cannot expect to see Elizabeth’s unequivocal Christian convictions so prominently on display. 

The Lambeth Conference of bishops from across the Anglican world is over for yet another ten years.  The large number of red chimeres present may have made an impressive group photograph, but the sea of smiling faces could not hide the fact that the bishops of three African provinces were missing, including those from Nigeria, the largest by far of the world’s Anglican provinces. 

Right back in the earliest days of history the human race decided to show God and each other how clever they were.  They decided to construct a tower which would reach high up into the sky.  God saw what they had done and why they had done it.  He decided to confuse them as He rightly concluded that nothing would ever be impossible for the human race to achieve if He allowed them to get away with it.  The city remained unfinished.

Things look bleak for our country and our world as the Summer months lie ahead.  Many chickens are coming home to roost – the profligate spending of borrowed money by all the major economies , the ruptures to trade caused by the particularly long covid epidemic in China and of course, the war in Ukraine, surely one of the vilest and most disgusting episodes in recent history.  But underlying all this is the wholesale abandonment of the Christian faith in the West.

The situation of the Anglican Communion grows more parlous each day. We now hear that a decision to uphold traditional Christian moral teaching proposed by the Archdiocese of Sydney and passed by both clergy and laity in the Australian National Synod was blocked by the House of Bishops.

At this Easter season this huge catalogue of human catastrophe drives us once again to ask what is the focus of our Christian Faith...

The current tragedy now unfolding in Ukraine and in its adjacent countries has rightly dominated news coverage everywhere since February. The deliberate destruction of the maternity hospital in Mariupol has plumbed new depths of evil ...