Newsletter – November 2025

Last November, the Methodist Church published a booklet called ‘Remembrance Resource for the Methodist Church.’ Much of the material comes from Methodist Armed Forces chaplains, who share in the joys and struggles of life in the Armed Forces. As I share this reflection from Deacon Jo Critchley (RAF Chaplain), I am reminded of how war has affected my family. My maternal great-granddad was killed on February 9th 1915, whilst serving in the 1st Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment. He was 37 years old, my grandma just 5 years old. He never met his second daughter, my great Auntie Doris:

“Reminisce
Remember
Recall
Recollect
Remind"

What do these words all have in common? The prefix ‘re’. Originating from Latin, when we use ‘re’, we mean again, or even again and again. In short, repetition – another ‘re’ word.

The second Sunday in November is Remembrance Sunday. Traditionally a day where whole communities gather to recall, remember, reminisce, recollect and are reminded of conflicts and war, where men, women, children and animals lost their lives or had them significantly changed.

Some may not have directly experienced such loss. But within the military community that is different. Many members of the military have served in conflicts that have changed them; they have seen loss and destruction at close quarters.

Some of them will be able to tell of such events; others will hold these experiences so tight that they feel a physical part of them...and yet they perhaps cannot, or choose not, to speak of them.

I was recently sorting through a few things after a house move. I found a box containing my own Grandfather’s ‘Call-up Notice’ for World War 2, letters that he sent my Grandma, ration books and cap badges from his old uniform.

I wasn’t around then – even my own father hadn’t been born. As I read the letters, I found myself emotionally involved in the lives of my grandparents. I reminisced and was reminded of the world they lived through in the 1940s.

If we look carefully, we have with us the reminders of the service and sacrifice of others – poppies, war memorials, old letters, and medals – all ways to recall what our family, friends and those unknown to us have been through.

It is right to remember those who have gone before us; we do that all the time. It is appropriate to pause, to gather our thoughts, to gather as a community, to recall and be reminded of events that changed lives and communities.

We may not have a personal memory to connect us to war or conflict, just as I have absolutely no memory of my grandparents’ struggles in WW2, but we can still feel emotionally involved in the story of those who were there.

As we remember again:

Let us remember before God, and commend to his sure keeping, those who have died for their country in conflict; those whom we knew, and whose memory we treasure; and all who have lived and died in the service of humanity.

‘They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old:age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
we will remember them.
We will remember them.’

Do join us, on the 9th November at Bailgate for our Remembrance Sunday service, 10.30am.