Letter read in the churches and chapels of the Diocese of Gloucester on 8 January 2012 - Audio Version is the full letter, and the text below is the shorter version.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:
At this New Year I greet you and wish you and all within our diocesan family a year in which, with all the challenges that face our society, we shall richly experience God’s blessing on our world and on our lives. Today, on this First Sunday of Epiphany, Christians celebrate the Baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan.
I want to take the opportunity to invite each one of us to reflect on our own Baptism. Whether or not you can recall the day of your Baptism, it was a unique moment in your Christian journey.
This course takes place over five sessions looking at important themes within Christian life for children aged 7–11. BOB has been written especially to help children build understanding and faith on basic Christian teaching they have already received, covering five essential themes:
What comes into your mind when you see this word heaven? Almost everyone, including young children, has something to say about heaven and most of us use the word from time to time. Commonly we use the word to describe what will happen to our loved ones or us when we die. The details of our thoughts may differ, but we are likely to think of heaven as a place of goodness and happiness. Heaven is referred to many times in the Bible, yet not in the way of popular thought. Last year Biblical scholar, Paula Gooder, wrote a book about what heaven really means in the Bible. Here are some of the matters she discusses.
In the years after Copernicus Galileo and Kepler, other astronomers developed our understanding of how the sun and planets fttted in to the vast array of stars. At first scientists realised that we were part of a large galaxy of stars, the Milky Way. Then, as the power of telescopes increased it became evident that blurry patches of light were not clouds of gas in the Milky Way but whole galaxies far beyond. The scale of the universe was mind-boggling.
