A ministry of presence

The recently-elected Leader of the Iona Community, the Rev Peter McDonald, is the subject of this month’s profile. With strong family links with both the Community and politics, he believes the Church should engage with politics to shape the Scotland of the future.

"I have always felt that the Church must play an active part in politics. After all, politics touches all of our lives very directly and the Church needs to be part of the shaping of these policies," he says.

Light in the darkness

The stark reality of Christmas in an impoverished Zimbabwe is recalled by the Rev John Miller, now retired from Castlemilk East Parish Church in Glasgow.

In a moving analysis examining how the Christmas message remains relevant today, Dr Miller, who spent two Christmases in Zimbabwe with his wife, Mary who was working with children and adolescents living with HIV/AIDS, wrote:

"Every morning at 7.30am the nurses ending their nightshift would meet in one of the wards together with the nurses starting the dayshift. There would be hymns and prayers and a reading from the Bible. Anything from 20 to 40 voices would sing the songs of faith with patients joining in as they were able. But as day by day Christmas drew near everyone knew that there would be no Christmas presents, no new clothes, no roast chicken, no special dinners. As one of the nurses remarked to me: ‘This year Christmas is only in the heart.’ "

Too harshly judged?

In the first of a new series, the Rev James Martin considers figures in the Bible who receive a ‘bad press’, focussing this month on the innkeeper in the Nativity.

He argues that the innkeeper could not have known that he was turning away the mother of the Son of God and that he had little choice, given that his inn was full and the hour was late when a heavily pregnant Mary and Joseph sought shelter.

"How many of us, finding ourselves in that innkeeper’s situation, would have acted any differently than he did? Why then should we judge him harshly?"

• Full story at the Church of Scotland.

• Filed under Africa, Christmas, Church of Scotland, Media, Scottish Christian News Monitor.