While it is yet day

Haddon Willmer

Today

  • Tenting with Jesus

    Name Jesus, Emmanuel, which means ‘God is with us’ (Matt.1.23). But how is God with us? A clue: God became flesh and pitched his tent among us (John 1.14). Tents remind us of holiday fun and festival togetherness, but it was not all sunshine for Jesus. He had ‘nowhere to lay his head’ (Luke 9.58). He tents ‘among us’ but…

  • ‘For your to-morrows these gave their to-day’: sermon for Remembrance Sunday

    Sermon preached at Moortown Baptist Church on 10th November 2024, Remembrance Sunday. The texts for the sermon are: 14 At that time David was in the stronghold, and the Philistine garrison was at Bethlehem. 15 David longed for water and said, “Oh, that someone would get me a drink of water from the well near the gate of Bethlehem!” 16 So…

  • Parents as Agents in countering Child Sexual Exploitation

    Pages 344-362 of Stepping out of the Traffick: Pausing for theological reflection on Christian Response to Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking, Edd Glenn Miles and Christa Foster Crawford with Bill Prevette. Regnum, 2024.  Introducing Pace Pace (now called Ivison Trust) is a voluntary charity in the UK which supports parents whose children are sexually exploited or…

  • Reflections on ‘Stepping out of the Traffick’

    Reflections on Stepping out of the Traffick: Pausing for theological reflection on Christian Response to Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking, edd Glenn Miles and Christa Foster Crawford with Bill Prevette, Regnum, 2024.  Published on pp27-30. The varied chapters in this book share two key characteristics. First, they want sexual exploitation to end, the exploiters to be deterred and…

  • Stepping out of the Traffick: Pausing for theological reflection on Christian Response to Sexual Exploitation and Trafficking

    Edd Glenn Miles and Christa Foster Crawford with Bill PrevetteRegnum, 2024. I am so glad to see this book come out, after ten years’ teamwork.It is very sad, and a great challenge, that a book of this sort is necessary. The contents give some idea of what it offers: I am grateful to have had…

  • Images of the City and the Shaping of Humanity 

    First published in 1989 in Theology in the City, ed. A.E. Harvey. , 32–46. You can read a 2024 introduction to this here. Faith in the City is a significant recent episode within the history of the Churches’ concerns about the ways in which people live in modern urban society and what cities make of human…

  • On Finding Faith in the City

    Sermon given to the University of Cambridge, Sunday 1 March 1987 at 11.15 a.m. You can read a 2024 introduction to this here. In its report, published fifteen months ago, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission called for action by Church and Nation to respond to Urban Priority Areas. We must let this call ring in…

  • Two articles about the ‘city’

    Two old articles about the ‘city’ – On Finding Faith in the City (1987) and Images of the City and the Shaping of Humanity (1989) – are published again today on this blog. Why bring these two old articles about the ‘city’ out of the shadows just now? The Grenfell Enquiry, or rather the Disaster itself,…

  • Don’t let the sun go down on your anger

    Riot on the streets answered by stern prosecutions and prisons over-full – will that ensure order, bring peace?  We have often been here before. Read, for example, Austin Lovegrove’s informative and entertaining book, Images of an Australian Enlightenment: The Story of Lachlan and Elizabeth Macquarie’s Treatment of the Convicts as a History Tale for Today…

  • Prayer and politics

    Praying is no substitute for politics. When we abandon living in the world, when we no longer love the earth, when we ignore the neighbour on the road, prayer is left empty, make-believe piety. We no longer walk with Jesus, Word made flesh, whatever our orthodox profession. Politics, even when it has not collapsed into…

  • Looking for the heavenly Jerusalem – on earth

    GIVEN a choice, would you live in the country or in the city? Many of our cities have declining populations because people get away if they can. We have enough hassle travelling into work in the city, we do not want to live there as well.  Why is the city so uncomfortable? It jams so…

  • Praying in our exiles 

    Sometimes people go far away, for a holiday perhaps. They find themselves alone in strange places and discover the experience is stimulating, educational even.  Millions of people are now tourists; but millions more are refugees and exiles: they find themselves alone and lonely in strange places. Theirs is a destructive experience. Being an exile means…