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Your local Methodist/United Reformed Church meeting in South Ashford

Welcome to the online home of the United Church Cade Road, we are a Methodist and United Reformed Church operating in the South Ashford area of Ashford, Kent.

All of us have been to church for the first time, but we understand that for some people going to church can be difficult, please do feel free to join us for a service to  see what worship is about and maybe stay for refreshments afterwards. We look forward to meeting you.

She Thought He was the Gardener

(John 20v1ff)
There is a small detail in John’s Easter story that might just change everything.
Mary Magdalene is standing outside the empty tomb, weeping. She looks up. There is someone standing right in front of her. She looks straight at him, and she doesn’t see him, because she thinks he is the gardener.
She is looking at the risen Christ.
She mistakes him for any other person who she might walk past without a second thought on any other day of the year. She’s not expecting to find the life of God there. She is not expecting to find the Spirit of God working through him. She thinks he’s just the labourer.
I don’t think this is incidental. It may be the whole point.
We’ve gilded Easter in so many ways. We’ve painted it with this cosmic transcendence that leaks into the transfiguration and ascension stories. It’s not Jesus stepping out of the grave. The other gospels give us earthquakes and bodies walking out of tombs and ‘ascending to heaven on a cloud’. It is all unmistakable and impossible to overlook. We imagine the resurrection as the moment when everything shifts, magnificently, divinely, beyond all comprehension.
But that is not what John shows us. The risen Christ appears at dawn in a familiar place, and is mistaken for someone so familiar that they can be easily ignored. She thinks he’s a gardener, a labourer. No mistaking him for a king. He’s not haloed and bathed in light. Mary’s first reaction is that he’s a bit of an inconvenience, maybe even a nuisance.
This is not an accident of the story.
It may be the story’s deepest claim.
God choosing the ordinary nearness over spectacular transcendence. The incarnation was always about this.
Jesus was not someone you would particularly notice in a crowd unless you were paying close attention. He grew up in a backwater. He worked with his hands. He was poor and he moved among the poor and the labouring and the overlooked. He was not middle class. He was a vagrant. The whole of his ministry was an insistence that this is where God is to be found: not above the ordinary, but inside it; not beyond the human, but stubbornly, scandalously within it.
And the resurrection does not change that. It confirms it.
The risen Christ does not ascend to a safe detached distance, where he can be worshipped in the abstract, detached from the world he loved.
He shows up in the garden, among the working people, at the hour when the day’s work begins. The Spirit of God that raised him to life is not a Spirit of remoteness. It is a Spirit of closeness, of nearness, of engagement, of presence in the places where life is actually lived. It is the Spirit of love and joy. Easter is not the moment when God finally escapes the world. It is the moment when God’s place in the world is revealed and sealed amongst what otherwise might be called ordinary.
Mary misses him because she mistakes him for someone of no consequence, (as if they were any one of no consequence). Mary misses him because she mistakes him for someone who is only there for others’ convenience.
Yet, she recognises Jesus when he speaks her name, one word, “Mary”, and she knows. She recognises Jesus because that one word that he speaks, that voice, connects her with a spirit that has known her and loved her and graced her and connected her with God.
She doesn’t recognise him through some proof, or a theological argument. She recognises that Spirit that is carried through a voice and a name and a relationship that is grounded in peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and all the things of God. Recognition. Relationship. Being known. Being loved.
And in that “Mary” moment, how Mary sees changes. Not just how Mary sees this man in front of her, but how Mary sees everything; everything.
God is here, still, even now.
God is amongst us, still, even now.
That life is stronger than death.
If the risen Christ (God) is here in the (familiarly) ordinary and the (seemingly) mundane then everything changes. Not least the people and places where we are not looking for the risen Christ; the street cleaner, the shopkeeper, the gardener. The person on the edge of the gathering whom nobody has thought to speak to, and we’re not sure if we should trust.
God help us. We’re not looking for the risen Christ there.
We come looking for the risen Christ in places more obviously sacred, more easily labelled holy, and by the grace of the risen Christ we might.
He said her name. And she began to see the world differently; her life, the morning, the gardener standing in front of her. The resurrection did not lift Jesus out of reach. It sent him deeper into the ordinary than she had ever thought to look.
May Christ be born in you.
May the risen Christ find you.

Easter All Age Service

You’re warmly invited to join us for Easter All Age Service at United Church Cade Road on Sunday at 10:30am.
Bring family, friends, and neighbours for a joyful, inclusive celebration suitable for every age — meaningful worship, a short children’s activity, and refreshments afterwards.
All are welcome; come as you are and share the hope and joy of Easter with our community.

Love That Does Not Look Away

Woman, here is your son.’ Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.” (John 19:26–27)

The whole week has been building to this. Mary poured out everything she had. The Greeks arrived at the door seeking. Judas walked out into the night. Jesus knelt on the floor with a towel. And now we are here: outside the city walls, at a place called The Skull, and the one who has been drawing us closer all week is being stretched out between heaven and earth.

John’s account of the crucifixion is unlike the others. There is no ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ cry of desolation here. John’s Jesus is sovereign throughout. When the soldiers come to the garden, he steps forward to meet them: ‘For whom are you looking?’ When Pilate tries to intimidate him, Jesus reframes the question: ‘You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above.’ In the end he bows his head and gives up his spirit — gives it, as an act of will.

And yet. In the middle of all this sovereign dignity, there is a moment of absolute tenderness that stops the narrative in its tracks. Jesus looks down from the cross and sees his mother. He sees the disciple he loved standing beside her. And in the midst of his own dying, he makes sure she will not be left alone. ‘Woman, here is your son.’ ‘Here is your mother.’

This is the cost of drawing near, in its fullest form. All week we have been watching what happens when people get close to this kind of love. Mary poured out everything. The Greeks were welcomed. The disciples were fractured when one of them could not bear the weight. And now those who are closest are standing at the cross. They have not run. They are here.

That is itself a prophetic act. The powerful have all left. Pilate has retreated into his headquarters. The chief priests have got what they wanted and gone home. The crowds have dispersed. The disciples have scattered. But the women are here. The beloved disciple is here. Presence in the place of suffering, when everyone else has found good reasons to be elsewhere – that is one of the most demanding forms of love there is.

We live in a culture that is very good at looking away from poverty and suffering. We scroll past the images. We develop the algorithms and the sophisticated numbness that lets us function. And sometimes the church has facilitated that looking away; preaching a gospel so focused on personal salvation that it forgot the people dying outside the city walls.

John’s Gospel will not let us do that. The cross is outside the city, in the place of public shame, and Jesus is lifted up there in full view. Not hidden. Not managed. Not sanitised. And the ones who love him do not avert their eyes.

Desmond Tutu wrote that the cross is God’s way of saying: I will not abandon you in your suffering. I will go there with you. I will be found in the worst place. That is the pastoral heart of Good Friday. Whatever you are carrying, whatever cross is being pressed into your shoulders this week, you are not carrying it somewhere God has never been.

But there is also a prophetic edge here that must be spoken. The cross was an instrument of state violence. Rome used crucifixion to crush resistance and terrify subject peoples into submission. Jesus was executed as a political threat by a colonial power in collaboration with a compromised local religious establishment. That is not incidental background detail; it is the context. And if the Son of God was killed by that system, then any system that operates the same way, crushing the poor, eliminating the inconvenient, executing those who threaten the arrangement, stands under the same judgement.

Good Friday is not a day for quiet individual piety alone. It is a day that encourages us to notice state-sanctioned suffering and refuse to look away. It is the day we say: this is where our God was found. Which means this is where we must be found too. Staying. Watching. Speaking out. Refusing to leave.

The women stayed. The beloved disciple stayed. They could not stop what was happening. They could not fix it. But they did not go home. And that, that refusal to leave the one who is suffering, is sometimes the only act of love that remains. It is enough. It is everything.

Devotions for Easter Sunday 5th April 2026

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-rjn4t-1a8c8ff

This week’s podcast for Easter Sunday is introduced by Lisa. Jane reads to us from Mark 16:1-8 and Dwight Harris brings us our reflection for this week. Our Hymns are 305 ‘Low in the grave he lay’ and 313 ‘Thine be the Glory, risen, conquering Son’. We wish you all the Blessings of Easter – may you know the peace, hope and joy of the Lord in the days that lie ahead.

Love Gets on Its Knees

“So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.” (John 13:14)
He knew. John is insistent on that. Jesus knew that his hour had come. He knew that the Father had given all things into his hands. He knew that he had come from God and was going to God. In other words: he knew exactly who he was and exactly what was coming. And knowing all of that, he got up from the table, took off his outer robe, tied a towel around himself, and began to wash his disciples’ feet.
This is the act of a slave. The lowest task in the household. The disciples would have washed their own feet before a meal, but they would not have washed each other’s. Washing feet was for servant, but here is the one they call Lord and Teacher, kneeling and washing, holding feet that have walked the dusty roads of Galilee. Peter can’t stand it. ‘You will never wash my feet.’ And Jesus says: unless I do this, you have no part in me.
There is something of Peter in all of us. Something that resists receiving care; something that would rather do the serving; because to be served is to be vulnerable. To have someone kneel in front of you and hold your feet is to be seen in your dustiness, your tiredness, your ordinary humanness. And many of us find that harder than any act of heroic discipleship.
But the command that follows is not ‘allow yourselves to be washed.’ It is ‘wash one another’s feet.’ This is not a ritual of passive gratitude. It is a commission. The love Jesus demonstrates is not meant to be received and stored; it is meant to be passed on. And what he is passing on is precisely this: a love that does not rank, does not manage from above, does not lord it over others. A love that gets on its knees.
Wesley understood this. He did not preach from a safe distance. He went to the prisons and the poorhouses. He organised Methodist societies to care, practically, for one another: visiting the sick, lending without interest, clothing the naked. Holiness which does not reach the feet of our neighbours is not holiness at all.
Every system of power that maintains itself through hierarchy (think ‘saints and sinners’), through the humiliation of those at the bottom (think ‘class), through the insistence that some people’s dignity matters more than others (think ‘citizens, immigrants and refugees’) is indicted by that man on his knees with a towel. Maundy Thursday is not a gentle domestic scene. It is a manifesto for healing.
The new commandment is deceptively simple, “love one another as I have loved you”. But the ‘as I have loved you’ carries the weight of it. As I have loved you means: get on your knees. It means: the one you thought was beneath you is the one whose feet you are holding. It means: love is not a feeling you harbour privately; it is a posture you assume publicly.
Whose feet need washing in your community? Who is carrying something heavy? Who has been in the dust? Who is waiting, like Peter, to be told: you are not too ordinary, too tired, or too far from grace for love to reach you here?

The Darkness at the Table

“And it was night.” (John 13:30)
Three words. And it was night. John uses them like a full stop at the end of the world. Judas goes out into the dark, and John’s Gospel wants us to feel the weight of it. This is not just meteorological information. This is a theological statement. Something has broken. The circle is shattered.
What strikes me about this passage is the atmosphere before Judas leaves. Jesus is ‘troubled in spirit’ — the same verb used at Lazarus’ tomb, the same deep disturbance in the gut that comes when love collides with loss. He knows. And yet he stays at the table. He does not storm out. He does not pre-empt. He dips the bread and hands it to Judas. He gives bread to the one who will destroy him.
I find that devastating. It is, in miniature, the whole Gospel: love offered to the one who will not receive it. Grace extended to the one who has already made a different choice. And the table is where it happens, not the Temple, not the synagogue. The table, where you are closest to the people you trust, and so, where betrayal cuts deepest.
There is a pastoral word here for everyone who has been betrayed by someone they trusted. By a friend who turned. By a community that abandoned them. By an institution that used them. The darkness is real. John does not soften it. Jesus does not pretend it away. And if the Son of God was betrayed at his own table, then betrayal does not mean you were foolish to love. It means you loved in a world where love is not always safe. It is never foolish to love. It is godly.
But there is a prophetic word here too. Judas leaves because he has been quietly stealing from the common purse — we learned that yesterday, in the anointing story. The darkness into which he walks is not just personal. It is the darkness of a system that has learned to use the language of care while serving itself. It is the darkness of institutional betrayal, of power that names itself service while extracting its advantage.
The church has its Judases. Institutions have their Judases. Every community does. The question is not whether we will ever face that darkness; the question is whether we will keep the bread coming even so. Whether we will stay at the table. Whether, when the night falls, we will still be found in the light.
Holy Wednesday is the day the betrayal gained momentum. Sit with the darkness today. Don’t rush past it to Easter. This, too, is holy ground.

The Hour That Cannot Be Unspoken

“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” — John 12:21
They are Greeks. They have no particular claim on him. They are not part of the story as it has been told so far — not descendants of Abraham, not inheritors of the covenant, not the lost sheep of the house of Israel. They are outsiders who have wandered to the edge of the festival and asked, through intermediaries, whether they might have a few minutes of his time.
And something in Jesus shifts.
Not because their request is unusual. People have been seeking him all week. But these Greeks represent something the request of a Jewish crowd cannot quite carry: the world beyond the world he was sent to. The Gentiles. The nations. Every human being who was ever going to matter to God but had no idea they did. When Philip and Andrew bring him the message, Jesus doesn’t say ‘bring them in’ or ‘tell them to wait’. He says: the hour has come.
Their arrival is the trigger. That is what stops me every time I read this passage. It is not a military occupation, not a theological argument, not a plot by the authorities that finally forces his hand. It is a handful of Greeks who want to see him. Their desire to draw near is what pulls the hour forward. Their need is what calls the grain of wheat to fall into the ground.
And Jesus knows exactly what he is saying. Now my soul is troubled. He doesn’t pretend otherwise. This is not serene acceptance; this is a man feeling the full weight of what the next few days will cost him. He could ask the Father to save him from this hour. He considers it, and says it aloud, which is itself an act of extraordinary honesty. Then he lets it go.
What moves me is this: he lets it go not because the cross doesn’t terrify him, but because the Greeks are at the door. Because the world has turned up wanting to be loved, and he is not willing to send it away.
That is the cost of drawing near — from his side of it. Not just what it demands of us to approach him, but what it demanded of him that we did.
When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself.
All of them. Including the ones at the edges of the festival who didn’t quite belong. Including you.

Devotions for Palm Sunday 29th March 2026

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-7pt7g-1a82fdd

This Palm Sunday, Revd. Gill invites us to be in Jerusalem celebrating Passover. She reflects upon the procession of Jesus, how donkeys are very much part of the biblical narrative and how we must be “gentle” towards others. Paul Missin reads Matthew 21: 1 to 11. We are joined by Christian Music Ministry Singers and sing “Immortal Invisible”, “Ride On Ride On”, “Will You Come And Follow Me” and “O Jesus I Have Promised”.

Real Power, on a Donkey

There is something subversive about Palm Sunday. We have domesticated it into a cheerful procession of children waving branches, but the original event was nothing less than a political act of genius: a deliberate, theologically loaded, non-violent confrontation with the most powerful empire on earth.
When Jesus stopped just outside Jerusalem and borrowed a donkey, he wasn’t tired. He was making a statement that everyone in that crowd, soaked in centuries of scripture and longing, would have understood immediately. He was embodying the vision of the prophet Zechariah: a king arriving not on a war horse but on a donkey, commanding peace rather than domination. In a world where chariots and war horses were the stealth bombers of the ancient world, this was breath-taking provocation.
The crowd erupted. “Hosanna! Save us! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” And they meant every word of it, though not quite in the way Jesus intended. They were hoping for the next warrior-king, another Simon Maccabeus, someone who would drive the Romans out and restore national glory. They wanted power that looked like power. Jesus was offering them something far more radical: power that arrives on a donkey.
The Hebrew word Matthew reaches for is anach: humble, self-giving, meek. Not weak. Never weak. But utterly non-violent, utterly uninterested in domination. It is the quality that Nelson Mandela embodied when he walked out of Victor Verster Prison after twenty-seven years and chose reconciliation over revenge. The world still doesn’t know what to do with power like that.
And here is where it gets personal. Matthew is very particular about who is in that crowd welcoming Jesus. It isn’t the who’s who of Jerusalem. It is the people from the backwaters and the countryside, the poor, the marginalised and the suffering: those the Hebrew scriptures call ‘the daughters of Zion’. They know exactly who Jesus is, because they have seen him at work. They have watched him feed thousands, heal many, and restore dignity to the forgotten. They are not surprised by the donkey.
Palm Sunday leaves us with an unsettling question: do the daughters of Zion around us know that they can find Jesus among us? Do they hear from us that steadfast love endures (not as pious words but as lived reality)?
Following Jesus, means continuing to follow him when the music fades and the cloud disperses through the gates and all the way into the places where healing is needed, where change is necessary, and where people are excluded from the presence of God.
Life is stronger than death. Peace is stronger than violence. Justice outlasts greed. Light overcomes darkness. Hope outlives despair.
This is what God is doing. On a donkey.

Devotions for Sunday 22nd March 2026

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-wp59s-1a7a2f5

On this episode Dave is joined be Revd Sam Funnell as the podcast celebrates it’s 6th anniversary.  We consider the burdens that we carry particularly at this time of Lent, as we listen to the readings from Isaiah 43 and Matthew 22 read by Richard.  Our hymns on this episode are all from Singing the Faith, In Christ Alone (351), Empty, broken here I stand (420), From the Breaking of the Dawn (156) and Shine, Jesus, Shine (59).