The pandemic hit people living on their own particularly hard. But gathering on Zoom provided a sense of community and continues to do so today. Recognising that at times I struggled to end the day well, I started to wonder if others had the same struggles - perhaps gathering via Zoom could be a positive way to draw our days to a close? And, so, Night Prayers was born just after the National Conference in 2021. 

I’ll be honest, the words “intimacy with God” haven’t always filled me with joy. I now, praise God, find myself saying, “Yes please! ‘Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you’” (Ps 73:25). Previously, my hard heart, bound up by religious pride and sexual sin, rebuffed any closeness with a seemingly judgemental God.

“My expectation in life is to be invisible, and I’m good at it.” This phrase, spoken by a fictional character, Mia Thermopolis, in the movie Princess Diaries, always stood out to me and seeming to apply to my life. I couched it with Christian language, trying to convince myself that I was trying to be humble, but the underlying prevailing thought was rooted in self-hatred. While including my sexuality, these thoughts also came from a broader comprehensive picture of my experiences.

At the beginning of 2025, my church began the journey towards becoming a single friendly church, by working with the Single Friendly Church Network (SFCN). This is a UK‐wide organisation whose aim is to encourage churches to welcome and value single people. For a while we had been working on creating a stronger feeling of family among our members. This had initially focused on families themselves, but a small number of us gradually came to see that we needed to improve our ministry to single people.

How are you feeling about Christmas this year? Are your emotions positive, negative or mixed? For some, Christmas can be an unavoidable annual reminder of the gap between how things are and how we wish they were. This can be particularly the case when it comes to our relationships, but there can also be a felt gap in connection to work, finances, living arrangements, the political situation in our homeland or in myriad other ways.

I was about 15 years old when I realised I was gay. Though I grew up in the church – my dad was a vicar – it wasn’t a topic I ever remember being addressed. My only frame of reference for what Christians thought about homosexuality was a quick mention in a Religious Studies class, where it was stated that Catholics were against gay sex, but that Protestants thought it was probably OK! Goodness knows how that summary had been arrived at, but I took it as gospel. Fine, I thought. I’m not ready to come out yet. This was the early 2000s and I didn’t know any gay people in my rural community.