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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.

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).

I Was Blind, and Now I See. Amazing. Grace!

There is a story in John’s Gospel of a man who went from blindness to sight to worship, and overturned almost everything the people around him thought they knew.
It is a careful retelling of a healing miracle, but it is so much more. It’s a slightly more unsettling, far more glorious discipleship story. It’s a story about what happens when a person who has been told all their life what they are, finally discovers who they are.
The man born blind was not simply unlucky. He was trapped. The theology of his day taught that blindness was divine judgment made visible. His poverty, his begging, his exclusion from full community life were not accidents; they were the system working exactly as designed. When Jesus is asked “who sinned, this man or his parents?” the disciples are not asking a theological puzzle. They are reading a social map, and the man born blind is at the very bottom of it.
Jesus refuses that map entirely. “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.” He will not enter a debate whose whole purpose is to justify exclusion. And then, outrageously, he spits on the ground, makes mud on the Sabbath, and uses it to heal. This is the sacred arriving not in a ritually pure space with priestly ceremony, but in an earthy, ordinary clod of mud on a street. Another picture of incarnation; heaven made local.
What follows is one of the most moving progressions in all of Scripture. Watch how the healed man names Jesus as the story unfolds: first he speaks of “the man called Jesus,” then of “a prophet,” then of “a man from God,” and finally, expelled from the synagogue and stripped of everything, he falls to worship. He did not learn his theology from a scroll or a teacher. He learned it under pressure, in the gap between his own undeniable experience and the powerful people who told him it could not have happened.
That pattern of encounter – challenge – deeper clarity – transformed life – is the shape of discipleship itself. And the man’s final testimony is one that no authority could take from him, “I was blind, and now I see.”
This week’s passages ask of us what it means to live as people of the opened eye: to see worth where the world sees burden, to name structural injustice rather than only personal failure, to let our testimony speak even when the institutions would rather it didn’t, and to be not just people who are in the light — but people who are light, whose very presence begins to illuminate what is wrong and what is possible.
The fruit of the light, Paul tells the Ephesians, is goodness, righteousness, and truth. Not vague spiritual qualities — but moving ourselves for the flourishing of others, pursuing justice in real relationships, and speaking robust, healing honesty into the darkness we have grown so accustomed to that we barely notice it anymore.
One man. No resources. No community. Just his experience and his willingness to say what happened. And his testimony has been opening eyes for twenty centuries.