Northern Souls is back!

Well here's the thing. I read Tim Challies blog today and he convinced me that now was the time to revive my blog. Some of you will have read my old Northern Souls blog and then picked up that I briefly started a new blog called Anglican Reflections. You can still access the posts for the latter here, but I decided as a title and a strategy it was too narrow for what I would naturally write about. So I dropped it fairly quickly. Instead I decided to go back to the old plan for Northern Souls, which allowed me to write from the position of a Christian and some time church leader from the north of England and living in the north of England.

Where am I at right now?

Well I resigned as vicar of two churches in Rochdale (north east of Manchester) in the Church of England in December. I resigned because I couldn't in all conscience work in the Diocese of Manchester or in the Church of England any more. I want to write a bit more about that here, but I don't want it to be my sole topic of conversation! Why? Well we hope to have plans for the future reaching areas in Manchester (and hopefully Rochdale speicifically) in the near future.

Obviously the coronavirus outbreak, among many other very serious things, is holding up our plans somewhat, so in the meantime, I'm thinking that blogging a bit about my thinking around church, Anglicans, ministry in hard places and the like will give me a chance to work on my thinking, reflect on the situation I find myself in and maybe get a bit of feedback too.

I'll probably write a bit about more general things as well and we'll no doubt turn to talk about the weird old times we find ourselves and my observations on ministry from a slightly outside position (it's quite interesting to watch although I feel for my brother trying to deal with pastoring at the moment).

Anyway, I hope this might be a blessing to me and to some readers.

Thanks for reading.

Stephen