{"id":70581,"date":"2013-11-19T14:06:00","date_gmt":"2013-11-19T14:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/christmas-power-bind-together-richly-diverse-society\/"},"modified":"2013-11-19T14:06:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-19T14:06:00","slug":"christmas-power-bind-together-richly-diverse-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/christmas-power-bind-together-richly-diverse-society\/","title":{"rendered":"Christmas still has the power to bind together our richly diverse society"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Most Rev David Chillingworth, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld &amp; Dunblane and Primus of The Scottish Episcopal Church says:<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWishing one another a Happy Christmas is of course a conventional greeting for the time of year.\u00a0 But Christmas opens the door on a world of hope and possibility in a way which still has power to bind together our richly diverse society.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a time for family &#8211; as a fairly new grandparent, I\u2019m enjoying the rediscovery of childhood innocence and delight.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Christmas is also a time when we rediscover care and compassion in a world which is often callously indifferent to human suffering and indignity.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The fact that faith is at the centre and expresses it through carols and nativity plays gives our churches an opportunity of welcoming a rich variety of people who may not connect with Church at other times.\u00a0 That\u2019s an opportunity for building the relationships which are at the heart of our mission.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWherever you are this Christmas\u2026 may you find it to be a time of peace and of celebration of the Hope that this season brings.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Follow Bishop David on his blog <a title=\"'thinking aloud' - blog by Bishop David Chillingworth\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bishopdavid.net\/\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>\u2018thinking aloud\u2019<\/strong><\/a> \u00a0and on Twitter @bloggingbishop<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Most Rev David Chillingworth, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld &amp; Dunblane and Primus of The Scottish Episcopal Church says: \u201cWishing one another a Happy Christmas is of course a conventional greeting for the time of year.\u00a0 But Christmas opens the door on a world of hope and possibility in a way which still has [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5028,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hillside.work\/sec\/staging\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}