Reverend Ann's Letter

July 2026 

A few months ago, I was in a conversation with a clergy colleague, lamenting some of the shortcomings of the Church of England  when they put their cup of coffee down and said, Why are we all still church people? I was taken aback but it’s not a bad question given what we had just been discussing. Why in the world  would we still be showing up for, of all things, church?

In the past I would have offered a theological argument or a suitable defence of the institution.

But this time, my answer came out, Because I am in need of help. Perhaps now more than ever. I need help to pray, help to forgive (myself and also others), help to remember that there is a bigger, truer story than the one I am being sold every day in the media and on the internet.

I am, as the gospel song goes, standing in the need of prayer. And I assume I am not alone in that.

I now think that whole “I’m a Christian because I am in need of help and Lord to whom shall we go you have the words of eternal life” might be the most truthful thing I know about my faith.

However, as a society we seem ashamed of needing help so we have invented an entire genre of literature called self-help. The very name is the tell, isn’t it? Needing help is fine, as long as it comes from you. But needing it from somewhere else? …from God, from community, from mercy you did not earn and cannot possibly pay back?

Just as a reminder, “God helps those who help themselves” is not found in the Bible. Yet “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” actually is.

So I am still here, in part because I have met, in the Gospels, a God who apparently has a special fondness for the ritually unclean and the morally injured and the deeply wounded.

And that - that sweet thing that happens when the Scripture is read out loud, when the psalms and hymns are sung, when the Gospel is spoken over us, when we confess how limited we are and hear how limitless God is, when we open empty hands for a piece of bread and a blessing —

What shall we call this, but help.

And needing help, needing forgiveness, needing consolation, hope and healing because you cannot muster these up in sufficient quantity for yourself …is not a failure in the Christian life, it’s actually the whole design.

Which means that while some will try and tell you that to be in “right relationship with God” is to make yourself so well that you are never in need of healing waters. But the right relationship between God, the giver of all good things, the font of every blessing and us – is for God to offer provision and for us to be the receivers of God’s gifts and mercies.

There’s an old hymn from the 1700’s, that I found – it goes like this:

Beside the gospel pool Appointed for the poor,

From time to time my helpless soul, Has waited for a cure.

But whither can I go? There is no other pool,

Where streams of sov’reign virtue flow, To make a sinner whole.

Why am I still Christian? Because for me There is no other pool.

And over the blaring sirens of meritocracy, and underneath the dull hum of electronic distractions, in moments of quiet, there is a still, small voice saying, daughter, son, child …

I was hoping it was you.

That’s the voice at the Gospel pool. That’s the physician who came not for the well but for the sick. That’s the one who looks out at us, we who cannot manufacture our own forgiveness, our own hope, our own healing — and is, apparently, just delighted to be asked. 

Go well.

Ann