Bradford North Circuit

Greater works (John 14:12) I read a really good book on holiday.  It argued that we should seek more healing in our churches with the aid of the Holy Spirit.  Healing and deliverance was what Jesus did all the time, and what the early church continued to do (as Jesus had promised they should), as in the book of Acts, and for the next few hundred years.  But then from the time of Constantine such good works were discouraged and declined.  Some said that only the holiest saints were fit to do it; others that is was presump-tuous to try and copy Jesus.  Later, some claimed that miracles such as healing has ceased with the apostles; and nearer our own time many have declared that today we should know better than to believe that such supernatural things ever happened at all.  Thus, by one means or another, acts of healing and wholeness, once the lifeblood of the Christian faith, have been all but throttled – despite the occasional outbreaks of Pentecost...

We celebrated our Harvest Festival on 4 October and what an amazing service it was. Many of our community groups had decorated our windows with Harvest displays and the church was almost full, with lots of mums and tots from See and Know, mums and Brownies, and Guides. As is the way at Thackley, there was an air of flexibility about the service, with many last minute additions/deletions to accommodate various traditions, which included parading the flags, offering Harvest Gifts for CAP UK, our jam pan clatter for Water Aid and our monthly birthday box. It was a delight to have the little ones from See and Know sing one of their songs and empty their Smarties tubes of change into the clatter. What is this clatter? In the run up to Harvest, we collect jam jars of change and make a “clatter” as we pour them int...

Calverley Church was a hive of activity on the weekend of 25/27 September. It all began on Friday morning, when a group of local schoolchildren arrived to bake bread. Another group came in the afternoon – total of 57 children! As the pictures show, they really got ‘stuck in’! On Friday evening, Christian comedian, Andy Kind, had people rolling in the aisles, with his unique brand of humour. (For those who missed Andy, he is due to make another appearance in the circuit, at Baildon Church on Saturday 14 November. For tickets, see the Baildon web site). On the Saturday, local community groups were encouraged to come and display what they have to offer to the people of Calverley. A broad range of activities on offer were viewed by an excellent turn-out of people, as the photos show:- The weekend continued on Sunday with the Harvest Festival service at 10.30 am and a special Harvest Songs of Praise in the evening, featuring The Wesley Singers. The s...

St Andrew’s Church has had a new heating boiler installed during the Summer months. It is an environmentally-friendly biomass boiler. (No, I had no idea what that meant, either!) It is a boiler which burns little wooden pellets, and it is ‘green’ because the fuel is renewable. As trees are felled to make the pellets, more trees are planted, which take only a few years to grow, enabling more pellets to be produced. The source of the fuel is ‘renewable’. The boiler has only recently been commissioned, so we don’t have enough information to comment on its efficiency or how economical it is. This story is about its installation. We are using a Christian heating company from Manchester, named HeatinGlobal. They have a wealth of experience in fitting heating systems into churches of all sizes and ages. The boiler room at St Andrew’s is in the cellar, down a very narrow stone staircase. It was obvious when the boiler unit, and its related water-tank, were delivered to the chur...