January, 2010.
This month, we have a last retirement letter from the Bishop of Lincoln.
The Bishop of Lincoln: My Last Article.
If there was a competition for the corniest joke, I think it would be about the man who got accidentally shot in the backside during a pheasant shoot, and the notice on the hospital website said that he was doing well - "and there will be another bullet in later".
Bulletins have featured very prominently during my time in this Diocese. Every month I have written an article for the Diocesan Bulletin, and I am always glad to see that it finds its way into lots of parish magazines.
The subject-matter has ranged far and wide - from pieces about the da Vinci Code, J. John's "Just Ten" Mission and the Abolition (and persistence!) of slavery; to reflections on prayer, pews and the Christian beliefs of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Education has featured prominently, and so have public affairs with the environment, globalisation and the Big Society jostling with tilts at Richard Dawkins, winterval and other sad symptoms of our so-called secular society. Mike Parker's Map Addict got a mention (why settle for a two-dimensional world when with God there is always a further dimension to explore?), and so did the film Chocolat which provided a new slant on the observance of Lent. By no means least, we celebrated the steady rise in the number of people being Ordained in the Diocese, the advent of New Era and the cycle of seasons and celebrations which mark out the Church's year. But above all, I have tried to write about God in Christ and why faith, inspired by the Holy Spirit, matters more and more in a world increasingly obsessed by its own self-sufficiency. Free-range faith rather than factory-farm religion is what motivates me as a pastor, preacher and evangelist. It is this which undergirds what I have written month by month.
You are free to change because, as I have repeated so often, God loves you as you are - and loves you too much to leave you that way. That is for me the key message of Christianity, and I simply leave it with you as my last letter and, for me at least, there will not be another Bulletin later!
May God continue to establish, strengthen and settle you in the faith; Amen.