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Events have moved swiftly in the week before Christmas. After the shock of the assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey, and the murders in the Berlin Christmas market in Germany, it might seem that this violence before Christmas is especially poignant. Continue reading “Hope in the shadows of the solstice -Ankara, Berlin & Bethlehem. © Gavin Ashenden”
The thought of leaving Canterbury, spiritually or emotionally, breaks my heart. I grew up there. I spent five years in the school built around its cloisters. I sang from its tower on Ascension days. I sat for hours at the entrance to the cloisters where Thomas a Becket was struck down for refusing the demands of the secular over the sacred. I took the Eucharist there in the bowels of its undercroft before dawn in the mists of winter. I was confirmed there when the saintly prophetic Michael Ramsey was Archbishop. Continue reading “Leaving home – the future of the Christian faith in England.”
Democracy is at first sight a very frightening idea. Continue reading “Holiness lasts longer than politics-the limits of democracy. © Gavin Ashenden”
One of the great gifts of the charismatic movement was to reintroduce to the church the need and the ability to ‘test the spirits’. Those who had been involved particularly in the ministry of deliverance in both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Church, had never lost the clarity that the human pilgrimage and the integrity of the church was primarily defined by a spiritual struggle.
Continue reading “Answering heresy amongst the bishops of the Church of England. © Gavin Ashenden”
It was normal in serious Christianity that when you encountered Jesus and gave your life to him you would ask to be baptised.
In your dying to your old life and starting afresh with a new way of living and loving and being loved, you would take a new name – a Christian name. Perhaps the name of someone who had achieved great things for the kingdom of heaven. Continue reading “The Bishop of Grantham and the eroticisation of the Church of England. © Gavin Ashenden”
In the early 1980’s I became a smuggler. I smuggled bibles, history and theology books, as well as medicine, into the Soviet Union. I smuggled suitcases full of theological books into the Czeck Republic. I was helping to set up a secret seminary for the underground Catholic Church. Continue reading “Christ from the ashes of Communism. © Gavin Ashenden”