About Stephen
Stephen and his wife Linda live in Kirkham and for 13 years Stephen managed the Face To Face Homelessness Charity merging it into Fylde Coast YMCA some ten years ago. As Housing Director at the YMCA, Stephen was responsible for developing various community projects including The Credit Union and Fylde Counselling Service.
Reflecting on his former appointments in East London and Newcastle-on-Tyne of working as Methodist Minister, Hospital Chaplain and part time tutor with the Urban Theology Unit in Sheffield, Stephen is clearly committed to encouraging individuals and communities to be honest about their hopes and needs and finding how faith in God can help them be met in Body, Mind and Spirit.
| Stephen is our Minister but is already known to us and well known on the Fylde Coast having lived and worked in Fylde for 18 years and prior to that he was a Minister in Blackpool. |
Stephen's Message
Following the American election results reminded me how people have different perspectives of reality. We speak of truth as being a reality. We speak of normal as being an agreed standard and if we stray beyond such values we become abnormal and even a deviant. Yet sometimes hindsight gives us a different perspective.
Political commentators and psychologists will continue to analyse the 2020 American Presidential elections, but I was taken by one commentator who commented how it was accepted one of the candidates ‘was immature with the truth’.
When I was a little boy, my Mum would ask how the biscuit barrel had mysteriously emptied. I, with an innocent look and conviction, would reply “It wasn’t me!” but knowing differently. In that great chapter about love, Paul wrote “When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”
Despite Covid we marked Remembrance Sunday commemorating heroes and heroines who left home as boys and girls and came home mature men and women. Martin Niemoller, a German clergyman, at first supported Hitler’s rise to power and then opposed him and spent eight years in Dachau Concentration Camp. He wrote of his changing perspectives in a poetic form oft quoted on memorials where he urges people to take a stand before it is too late and we pay an even greater price.
Now is not a time for childishness but maturity!
Political commentators and psychologists will continue to analyse the 2020 American Presidential elections, but I was taken by one commentator who commented how it was accepted one of the candidates ‘was immature with the truth’.
When I was a little boy, my Mum would ask how the biscuit barrel had mysteriously emptied. I, with an innocent look and conviction, would reply “It wasn’t me!” but knowing differently. In that great chapter about love, Paul wrote “When I was a child I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.”
Despite Covid we marked Remembrance Sunday commemorating heroes and heroines who left home as boys and girls and came home mature men and women. Martin Niemoller, a German clergyman, at first supported Hitler’s rise to power and then opposed him and spent eight years in Dachau Concentration Camp. He wrote of his changing perspectives in a poetic form oft quoted on memorials where he urges people to take a stand before it is too late and we pay an even greater price.
Now is not a time for childishness but maturity!
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