Photo by Lukasz Szmigiel on Unsplash

Letter for November 2024

As well as our usual helpful highlights during the month of November, such as our Service to Remember and Remembrance Sunday, this month we have a visit from the Bishop of Stockport.

On Sunday 24th November, Bishop Sam is coming to St Luke’s. Bishops don’t visit that often. After three years as our Suffragan Bishop, I think it is the first time for Bishop Sam to join our Sunday morning worship. We look forward to his preaching and leadership at both the 9am and 10.30am services. He will also stay for our Bring & Share Lunch in the Church Hall from about 12 noon.

We had at one stage hoped it might be a service of Confirmation, but we didn’t find enough potential candidates. So now we plan our Confirmation Service for October 2025, and this visit is for Sam to get to know us in our usual two main morning congregations.

As Bishop of Stockport, he is one of the two assistant bishops in Chester Diocese, working under the oversight of Mark, Bishop of Chester. He was made a bishop in 2021 after several posts as a Vicar, including Lancaster and Leeds, and Cathedral Precentor in Bradford. His ministry has been mainly in the north of England.

It is not an easy time to be a bishop in the Church of England. Bishops are meant to be a focus of unity amongst Christians in the Church of England, but our archbishops (supported by many of the bishops) have chosen to misuse their powers and have become a focus of disunity. By introducing legislation which seeks to change the doctrine of marriage (while denying that is what they’re doing) and without following the proper procedures (which had been put in place to preserve proper unity), the archbishops are causing serious rifts.

Many vicars and parishes are considering how to distance themselves from this flawed decision-making and the change of doctrine which is not true to the Bible (our agreed authority as a church).

During the COVID lockdowns, for many in the C of E, it was also disappointing that one of the few things the bishops spoke up about (with a determined united voice) was their requirement for parishes to have holy communion only with a single common cup.

This was one issue that many parishes were re-evaluating in the light of the obvious reluctance of many Christian worshippers to share the same communion cup. As our general population had been trained strongly by the authorities to avoid risk of contamination, most people did not want to share the same cup as others who may be spreading Covid germs, often unknowingly.

When we at St Luke’s resumed communion services in church, after two years of disruption, our PCC was keen for there to be individual small cups of wine, in order to reassure our nervous parishioners and enable there to be the largest degree of unity while we receive bread and wine in communion. It has worked well. This tension between bishop and parish explains why there will be no wine at the communion service when Bishop Sam is with us.

Having mentioned these matters of disagreement so that you know something of the present tribulations in the C of E, and some of the particular challenges for C of E bishops, we hope that our time with Bishop Sam will be happy and encouraging for all. Sam is keen to see us worshipping in our usual style, with the prayerbook and hymnbook at 9am, and with words from the screen at 10.30am.

Come on Sunday 24th Nov. and be part of a special Sunday in the life of St Luke’s.

Yours in Christ,

Rob