Featured

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.

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.

Carrying the Glory Down the Mountain

A thought from Revd Adrian Roux, you can come and listen to Adrian as he leads our worship on Sunday from 10:30am.

Peter’s instinct on the mountaintop was utterly, endearingly human. Standing in the blazing presence of a transfigured Jesus, flanked by Moses and Elijah, with the very voice of God reverberating through the cloud, Peter did what any of us would do: he tried to capture it. Build shelters. Bottle the moment. Pin-drop the location (What3Words Transfiguration//Moses//Elijah) and never leave.
We understand that impulse because we’ve felt it ourselves. A moment of prayer that cracked something open. A communion service where the bread and wine carried weight we couldn’t explain. The fierce joy of working alongside others for something that mattered. We tasted glory, and we wanted to stay.
But the Transfiguration’s real power lies in what happens next. Jesus doesn’t let them stay. He touches them, physical, present, tender, he drives out their fear and emboldens them, and then, leads them straight back down the mountain. There a father, desperate and broken, whose child is suffering and whose community has failed him. Need. Pain. The real world.
This is the rhythm of Christian discipleship: go up, encounter glory, come down, serve. The mountain moments matter profoundly, without the encounter, we are neither new, nor different, and we carry nothing. But the glory was never meant to be preserved behind glass on a summit. It was meant for hospital corridors and high streets, for food banks and front doors, for the quiet ministry of a phone call to someone who’s been missed.
Wesley understood this instinctively. He didn’t retreat into holy places. He preached in fields, built schools, pharmacies, hospitals. His last letter urged Wilberforce to keep fighting slavery. For Wesley, the encounter with God was always the beginning of engagement with the world, never the end.
And underneath it all, before any command to serve, comes grace. God’s first word over Jesus, and over every one of us, is “beloved.” Not assessed. Not performance-reviewed. Beloved. That is the glory we carry down the mountain: the unshakeable knowledge that we are loved, and the call to love the world with that same reckless, self-giving grace.
The mountain is calling. So is the valley.
Know God. Know yourself loved.
Follow Jesus.