Have a go at our next caption competition (above) and win a prize of Fairtrade chocolate!

Send your entries by email to captioncompetition@churchtimes.co.uk or by post (postcards only) to:

Caption Competition
Church Times
Invicta House
108-114 Golden Lane
London EC1Y 0TG

Entries must be received by Friday 10 January.

Here is last week’s winner:

PAPA

Dress-down Friday again at the episcopal training college (Cortland Fransella)

THE Twelve Days of Christmas are not over just yet — so a festive caption competition is not out of place:

• Just like London buses, St Nicholases come along in fours (Lynda Sebbage)
• The seminar on explaining how St Nicholas morphed into Father Christmas was not very well at­­tended (Valerie Budd)
• Bishops? I’ve seen more convincing Father Christmases! (Ian Barge)
• Owing to a ‘clerical’ error (ho, ho, ho), four bishops had been booked to play Santa Claus at the Choir School Christmas Party (Mark Parry)
• The entrants for the church Christmas party fancy-dress competition showed little imagination (Mervyn Cox)
• ‘Look behind you! He’s got a mitre!’ ‘Oh no he hasn’t.’ ‘Oh yes he has!’ (Peter M Potter)

White beards do not remind readers only of Santa Claus:

• Rowan Williams look-a-like challenge — the quarter-finals (John Saxbee)
• But which was the real Rowan Williams? (Richard Martin)
• Every­one wanted to be like Archbishop Rowan (Clare Griffiths).

Since the picture was first pub­lished straight after polling day, we can allow some political entries:

• Whisper to leader: there is trouble in your constituencies, voters think you wise men are spending too long away on the star journey (Phillip Rice)
• After the election result, the party leader had asked his MPs to come in dis­guise (Richard Hough)
• Four candidates for the Labour leader­­ship (Janet Stockton)

Some other entries that we enjoyed:

• Having forgotten to invite the Orthodox to the ecumenical con­ference, the Archbishop’s team tried to cover up and bluff it out (George Frost)
• One in four bishops just can’t get the staff nowadays (Francis Berryman)
• Bishops croziering up together in the vestry? (Chris Coupe)
• Not wearing trainers was not some­thing the youth group would contemplate (Vicky Lund­berg)
• I declare this meeting of the Church of England Evangelical Council officially open (Andrew Greenhough)

Also:

• You don’t think that memo about the correct dress for new MPs at the State Open­ing could be a hoax? (Ray Morris)
• OK, then — whose bright idea was it to have the consecration on Christmas Day? (Peter Bacon);
• Crooked Santa (Andrew Craig)
• It may have been foolish to combine an episcopal conference with Messy Church (Patrick Irwin)
• St Nicholas x4 marked the end of the era of austerity (Michael Foster)
• Think of us as the four corners of the Lambeth Quadrilateral (Richard Crockett)
• Word of the new miracle hair restorer had spread rapidly throughout the episcopate (Stephen Disley)
• The line-up for ‘The best bearded St Nicholas’ competition looked more like a bunch of latter-day Meth­uselahs (Lesley Cope).

As ever, the winner receives Fair­­trade chocolate, courtesy of Divine Chocolate: www.divinechocolate.com.