It costs the Church of England almost £6000 for every person it converts to Christianity, about seven times more than hoped

Kaya Burgess, The Times, 12 March

So let me get this right . . . new resource church in my Diocese is getting £750k to spend on the building & £500k for 5 members of staff whilst tomorrow I will be elbow deep in sh*t fixing our church toilet. Oh how I wish I had been called by God in an HTB church not a normal parish

Garry Roberts, Twitter, 13 March

“Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness”

Reinhold Niebuhr, quoted by Sir William Fittall in his farewell speech to the General Synod, November 2015. Sir William died last week, aged 68

No one should underestimate the power differential in the doctor-patient relationship when one is ill. We are vulnerable to influence and hypersensitive to every nuance and inference. How easy it is to be told it is in “your best interests” not to be treated when actually the subtext is that it would be in everyone else’s interests if you were dead

Lord Shinkwin, The Times, 15 March

It was . . . in the slums that [the Anglican theologian Charles] Raven was to discover what the Church was all about: “In love and glad serving, in doing good and bearing one another’s burdens, in becoming as a little child, in walking humbly with God. . . Becoming more and more of a contemplative, encountering God in the most surprising of places, he saw in the ordinary the extraordinary and not just what people were but also what they could become”

Peter Townley, The Times, 12 March

Q: Which book are you ashamed not to have read?

A: In its entirety, the Bible

Matt Goss, The Guardian Saturday Magazine, 12 March

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