🇺🇦 is quietly having a very good Spring:
* modest but real battlefield advances
* About a fifth of 🇷🇺 oil export capacity knocked out
* 🇷🇺 booted from Starlink
* 🇮🇷 drone production presumably badly damaged & more of it needed for home use rather than export to 🇷🇺
* Orbán gone
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Here are all our services in the Wellsprings Benefice between Palm Sunday and Easter Day. If you're in the central part of Wiltshire, come and join us.
Holy Week starts tomorrow. It's called that because it's the holiest week of the year for Christians. If you call yourself a Christian, YOU SHOULD BE IN CHURCH FREQUENTLY OVER THE NEXT WEEK and absolutely on Easter Day, 5 April. Watching YouTube videos doesn't count! 👇 👇 👇
You can have both Churchill *and* animals on the petrol rationing coupons...
Gutted to have come so close, but I think France deserved the championship over 5 matches, to be fair. Chapeau! #6nations #FRAvENG
Why is Anglicanism's doom so often foretold? And why has it yet to come to pass? Click through to read me in The Critic on why the attempted an Anglican schism fizzled out & why a female Archbishop hasn't outraged Africa—but liberal policies on homosexuality have. thecritic.co.uk/schrodingers...
Great piece, and also worth listening to this @listentotimesradio.bsky.social follow up—@murielzagha.bsky.social explains how the Book of Common Prayer's beauty made her a Church of England churchgoer from a French secular background.
www.thetimes.com/radio/show/2... (Starts 3 hr 27 min 15 sec in).
The bombing of that girls' school was a horrific incident and I condemn it without reservation. I take it you've also been quick to condemn what Iran's government does to maim and kill its own schoolgirls? www.amnesty.org/en/documents...
I'm pleased to have another academic paper published, this one in Cambridge University Press' prestigious Ecclesiastical Law Journal. This one is open access so you can have a read: “Discovering Anglicanism – ecclesiology at Lambeth Conferences 1867–1998”. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
I'm pleased to have another academic paper published, this one in Cambridge University Press' prestigious Ecclesiastical Law Journal. This one is open access so you can have a read: “Discovering Anglicanism – ecclesiology at Lambeth Conferences 1867–1998”. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
One of my beautiful churches...
This war might well end up being a very bad idea, but a *lot* of Iranians seem delighted Trump and Netanyahu are bombing their country, which says a lot about their evil bastard of a government. If your concerned public statement doesn't mention that, you're missing something big.
I’ve decided to use this year to identify, & write about (not sure in what form yet), the 50 best village churches in #Wiltshire
This is the closest contender to home, Holy Cross in Seend, where I met its Rector today, the effervescent @therealgerrylynch.bsky.social More posts to follow from here.
Read a more considered article on 60 years of declining Catholicism in Latin America, Pentecostalism’s explosive growth, and the rise in the last decade of believers who’ve left all organised churches. gerrylynch.co.uk/2026/02/13/l... 7/7
Yet Latin America's "religiously unaffiliated" aren't European atheists. Most still believe in God and pray daily—as much as practicing Christians do here. They've rejected structures, but not faith. It's a distinctly Latin American form of secularisation. 6/7
Recently, things have changed. Since the 2010s, Catholicism still haemorrhages adherents, but Protestants are growing more slowly. Instead, growing numbers of Latin Americans are walking away from organised religion altogether. 5/7
81% of those converting to Protestantism cited a personal connection with God being a reason; 69% preferred the worship style. Pentecostals themselves would claim genuine spiritual encounter was behind these historic shifts in denomination. 4/7
The poor the liberation theologians claimed to speak for were walking out the door. "The Catholics opted for the poor; the poor opted for Pentecostalism." Neither did the turn back to the Right get them to return. 3/7
Latin America's Catholic share fell from 90% in the 1960s to 57% by 2020. These were tumultuous decades, with liberation theology’s emergence and then suppression. The Pentecostal turn that began during liberation theology's golden age got even faster after its suppression. 2/7
For fifty years, Latin America's big religious story was straightforward: Catholics were becoming Pentecostals. But recent data suggests things have changed. Catholicism continues to decline, but the recent beneficiary may not be Protestantism, but the religiously unaffiliated. 1/7
The Light came as a tiny baby who grew up to be King —of an otherworldly realm, who gave His life for His friends thus opening eternal life to wll who trust in Him. God comes to rescue us when we don’t know we need help, in ways we could never imagine. 3/3 www.gerrylynch.co.uk/2025/12/04/l...
Inside a dimly lit stone church, a statue of the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus stands in a niche on the left wall. She cradles a glowing blue glass votive lamp that glows softly. Below the statue, two white candles burn on an ornate wrought-iron stand. To the right, a purple-draped altar is visible, adorned with a white frontal cloth bearing a gold cross. Above the altar hang two colorful religious paintings in the style of early 20th-century sacred art: one depicting robed figures (likely an Annunciation scene), the other showing two women in flowing red and blue medieval-style dresses in a garden. The atmosphere is quiet, warm, and reverent, lit mainly by the flickering candles and the small lamp.
Advent is the beginning of the Church year and a time for new beginnings. The Church begins a journey that will last a year, which starts with people longing for light to come into a world that was often dark. The light indeed came, but in ways they could never have imagined. 2/3
A nighttime photograph of a tall, intricately decorated Gothic-style church spire illuminated against a deep blue-black sky. The spire rises dramatically, adorned with ornate stonework, pointed arches, and geometric patterns, tapering to a sharp point topped by a small red aircraft warning light. The dark sky is speckled with faint stars and subtle streaks of light, but especially by the constellation Orion, giving a serene and majestic atmosphere.
It seems only a few years ago that we were living at a time of optimism: of low inflation, low interest rates, and cheap travel, when the Internet was making the economy stronger and bringing people together. The mood has shifted as these material things have passed away. 1/3
Final point: Jesus cites Moses & the burning bush in arguing with the Sadducees—Moses' first encounter with God that transformed his earthly life beyond imagining. Have faith in the Resurrection, and you may find you too are transformed.
Read it all here: www.gerrylynch.co.uk/2025/11/10/w... 7/7
So too our resurrection—the same self, gloriously transformed. We are seeds. The universe, in all its glory, but the soil in which we grow. How much greater is the whole cosmos than the soil? So much greater will our resurrected existence be than our lives now. 6/7
If this sounds woo-ey, remember how we take as given metamorphosis in the physical world: from tadpole to frog & caterpillar to butterfly. They are transformed to move in new dimensions, once beyond their conception, yet remaining the individuals they always were. 5/7
Jesus tells them we’ll be transformed, something like angels, beyond the need for marriage. Our materialist age tries to reduce human beings to biorobots, collections of chemicals, controlled by electrical signals—but instinctively we know we’re also beings of soul and spirit. 4/7
Thinking they’ve shown how ridiculous He is, they ask Jesus whose wife she’ll be after resurrection. They make the same mistake many of us do—Christian Resurrection isn’t about life extension but transformation into something different, in a state where time is somehow other. 3/7
They posed a bizarre story like something straight out of a Coen Brothers plot: a woman’s husband dies soon after they marry, and his brother steps in as their laws required; then she works her way through seven brothers as they die one after the next. 2/7
If you think the idea of resurrection is absurd, you aren’t alone. It offends our scientific worldview, and even in the ancient world, the Sadducees—the smart, rationalist, high social class, scholars of Jesus’ Palestine—totally made fun of Him for believing in Resurrection. 1/7
