After four years of training, Jo Patterson, a Church Related Community Work student, reflects on the experiences that she has been ‘blessed to witness’.

According to Jo, there are obvious places where people would expect to find God; a common place being ‘when we come together to worship in song, prayer and sometimes in ritual or liturgy’.

But, she asks: ‘What if we arrive carrying burdens, weighed down by grief, pain or sorrow?’

A 50-year-old partnership that celebrated an ending and marked a transition in 2011 was reignited today (Monday 11 June), at United Reformed Church House in London.

The Revd John Proctor, General Secretary of the URC, and Mr Alan Yates, Moderator of the General Assembly, met with the Rt Revd Dr Seth Agidi, Moderator of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, Ghana (EPCG), the Revd Dr Emmanuel Amey, Clerk of the EPCG General Assembly, the Revd Frank Anipa, minister of EPCG’s Milton Keynes/Luton parish, and the Revd Derrick Sena Dzandu-Hedidor, who began his ministry in the EPCG and is now Clerk of the URC’s Southern Synod, to reaffirm a longstanding relationship and sign a new partnership agreement between the two churches.

An ula throwing club and a Maori canoe bailer, brought back from the South Pacific by the Revd John Williams, a missionary with the London Missionary Society (LMS), have been sold at auction for thousands of pounds.

The items, which sold for £1,200 and £9,500 respectively, had remained in Mr Williams’ family since his death in 1839 at the hands of the indigenous population of the island of Erromango, Vanuatu. During an attempt to spread news of the Gospel, Mr Williams, along with fellow missionary James Harris, was beaten, killed, and eaten, by islanders who had been previously mistreated by the crew of a trading ship.