Greetings to you at the end of this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity! Most years we mark this week with a service or some kind of gathering with the Lutheran, Mennonite and Roman Catholic churches on The Spui and Singel. This year, of course, we cannot do that but I draw your attention again to the prayer, below, that all 4 churches used in their worship last Sunday and will use again this Sunday.

Greetings to you once again and I hope this finds you well in the continued constraints of COVID-19. Due to the continuing danger churches are now being strongly urged not to have any ‘live’ singing at all in their services, and this means that this coming Sunday we will not be able to have the usual small group of singers to lead us. We may possibly have to make do with just the words of hymns on the screen and music accompaniment – if so, it simply means that you will all have to sing louder at home!

Greetings to you once again and I hope this finds you well.

This week we find ourselves in the season of the Christian year known as ‘Epiphany’ – a word which means ‘unveiling’ or ‘revealing’. The idea is that the passages of Scripture that we follow in this time reveal something of the truth of who the baby born in Bethlehem is. This Sunday the Gospel reading (which we will not be considering) describes the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist in the River Jordan.

Greetings to you in this first pastoral letter of 2021. I do hope that despite the restraints and limitations of COVID you managed to have a good Christmas.

In many of the greetings and messages I have received over the Christmas period people have commented that 2020 was a terrible year and expressed the hope that 2021 will be better.