I offer you my warm and sincere greetings at the start of 2025. I hope that, alongside all that is involved in the annual celebration of our Saviour’s birth, Christmas has provided you with some opportunity for rest and refreshment. 

Over the course of the first four centuries of the Church’s life, ‘orthodox’ teachers of the faith were clear that since God created human life, only God could save human life, and that only by assuming human flesh himself could God save humanity. There was seen to be an intimate connection between the person and nature of Christ and the reality of human salvation.

There are, of course, many other ways of conceiving of who Jesus is. In the first centuries after Christ, it was common for people to think Jesus was a spiritual being who only appeared to be human, or that he was an angelic being of some kind. In our own time, it is common for people to see Jesus mainly as a great religious prophet or a moral exemplar. 

It was to put proper limits around what could be understood as properly ‘Christian’ beliefs about Christ that ecumenical councils of bishops from across the Christian world – from India to Great Britain - meeting in Nicaea in 325 and again in Constantinople in 381 agreed on the text we call the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, or the Nicene Creed for short. The specific issue at stake was whether Christ existed eternally and is fully divine (as favoured by Alexander of Alexandria and Athanasius), or whether he was a created being (as favoured by Arius). The agreement on Athanasian orthodoxy has since been a defining feature of Christian belief, in both the Eastern and the Western Church, for the last 1700 years.  

The year 2025, the 1700th anniversary of Nicaea, therefore, provides us with the opportunity for a year-long celebration of the message of Christmas! There will be no better year to reflect deeply on the verse from ‘O Come all ye faithful’ - which is, of course, an extract from the Nicene Creed. Or to wonder, again, with St. Athanasius, about ‘Why did God become man?’ In 2025 we will as a diocese, along with much of the global church, be commemorating Nicaea 1700. 

To help us with this, I would like to commend various ideas and resources which can be found on our website. 

Trinity Sunday marks a particular highpoint in the Christian year. My predecessor, Bishop Geoffrey Rowell, wrote a fine modern hymn to the Trinity: ‘Light of light, Love’s radiant Glory, blessed Trinity adored! Well of life, our shaping story, source of beauty, life outpoured!’ I would love that this hymn is sung widely, and recorded widely, across the diocese on Trinity Sunday 2025. 

I reassure you of my prayers for you. Please join me in praying for suffragan bishop-elect Andrew Norman as he concludes his work in Leeds diocese and prepares to move to Brussels. Andrew will be consecrated in Canterbury Cathedral at 11:00a.m. on Thursday February 27th and installed in Gibraltar Cathedral at 11:00a.m. on Sunday March 2nd.  More details will be published on the diocesan website soon.  

Thank you as ever for your shared service with me in the gospel of Jesus Christ. 

I wish you a richly blessed 2025.