The pandemic hit people living on their own particularly hard. But gathering on Zoom provided a sense of community and continues to do so today. Recognising that at times I struggled to end the day well, I started to wonder if others had the same struggles - perhaps gathering via Zoom could be a positive way to draw our days to a close? And, so, Night Prayers was born just after the National Conference in 2021. 

“My expectation in life is to be invisible, and I’m good at it.” This phrase, spoken by a fictional character, Mia Thermopolis, in the movie Princess Diaries, always stood out to me and seeming to apply to my life. I couched it with Christian language, trying to convince myself that I was trying to be humble, but the underlying prevailing thought was rooted in self-hatred. While including my sexuality, these thoughts also came from a broader comprehensive picture of my experiences.

I’ve had a few different jobs in my time. A call centre, a couple of shops, a supply chain manager at a theme park… and as I moved from one job to the next, the process of leaving was often the same. Sometimes (generously) there would be a leaving gift, often there would be leaving drinks or a meal out, but there would always be a card that had been passed around for colleagues to sign without me noticing.

At the beginning of 2025, my church began the journey towards becoming a single friendly church, by working with the Single Friendly Church Network (SFCN). This is a UK‐wide organisation whose aim is to encourage churches to welcome and value single people. For a while we had been working on creating a stronger feeling of family among our members. This had initially focused on families themselves, but a small number of us gradually came to see that we needed to improve our ministry to single people.

How are you feeling about Christmas this year? Are your emotions positive, negative or mixed? For some, Christmas can be an unavoidable annual reminder of the gap between how things are and how we wish they were. This can be particularly the case when it comes to our relationships, but there can also be a felt gap in connection to work, finances, living arrangements, the political situation in our homeland or in myriad other ways.

It turns out we’re all missing something - and not in a self-help cliché kind of way. According to Ed Shaw, what we’re lacking is intimacy: not just sexual intimacy, but a deep sense of connection. Shaw calls this the “intimacy deficit” and it’s something that affects everyone, Christian or not.