The Hearth of Mopsus

The church was full for the main service on Sunday for a baptism, which is an infrequent event as most of ours happen separately. But this w...

There was a baptism at Swanvale Halt church on Sunday, the younger daughter of a family whose older child was baptised a few years ago. She ...

It was a large and somewhat chaotic baptism, for the younger sister of a boy who I baptised five years ago: about a third of the congregatio...

Our baptisms are moderately conservative affairs. I keep the old language about 'sin, the world, and the devil' and I even do the li...

Something as simple as a jammed lock was the source of today's excitement in sweltering Swanvale Halt. I came down to begin setting up f...

Now that Il Rettore  and Mrs Rettore have retired and moved to Hornington to be next to their daughter and her family, Swanvale Halt has bec...

Some years ago I occasionally used to see Justin around Swanvale Halt. Little did I suspect, when a woman with a heavy foreign accent (Russi...

‘What do we normally do?’ I and Rick the verger ran around the church after the mid-morning service getting ready for our first baptism sinc...

Any services involving large numbers of people who aren't very used to being in churches are hard to predict; even more so when children...

A day of snow wasn't the time I would choose to venture back to church again after my enforced absence, but when I got up this morning t...

People in a moment of crisis often find their way into the church, have a tear and a conversation if I (or a colleague) happen to be there, ...

... is the mild response I find myself sometimes making when what I would prefer to say is anything but mild. A little while ago I had a mes...

A few weeks ago we had a (double) baptism as part of the main Sunday service and something about the crowd of visitors there struck me that ...

It was a busy day yesterday: as well as the usual services, two baptisms, with a total of four children and sixteen godparents. I didn...

I was terribly excited a few days ago. I went to visit a couple who'd enquired about baptising their son - not regular churchgoers but f...

I am not accustomed to posting photographs of myself on these pages, but here I am a couple of months ago with little Jocelyn at the font,...

Just before I went on holiday last week I attended an ecumenical event. Young Morgan plays the trumpet with our occasional church band, and...

I had a call from what sounded like a very young mum enquiring about having her baby baptised. She was based in Guildford. 'That's u...

I had the most astounding phone call the other day. Last Sunday I baptised a baby boy for a young couple from the parish who are very margin...

We had a derisory turnout at 8am this morning, so it was nice to have a relatively full church at 10. Then we had even more for a baptism at...