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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.

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.

Devotions for Sunday 1st March 2026 – Lent 2

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-m6rm8-1a5b211

This week’s podcast is introduced by Lisa. Stewart reads from  John 3:1-17 and Revd Malcolm Peach reflects on the encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus. Our Hymns are STF 51 Great is Thy faithfulness, 395 Spirit of the living God fall afresh on me and 397 The Spirit lives to set us free, walk, walk in the light. Our prayers this week come from the Roots worship magazine.