Sea Sunday is the day each year when churches worldwide come together to pray for seafarers, and to support Mission to Seafarers’ ministry to them.

For Sea Sunday 2026, the theme is ‘Harbours of Hope: The Church Alongside Seafarers’, inspired by Matthew 25. This theme celebrates the local church as a place of welcome, refuge, and hope — a community offering both spiritual and practical safety to those who work at sea. It invites congregations to reflect on how they can stand alongside seafarers through prayer, hospitality, generosity, and justice. https://www.missiontoseafarers.org

The Bible contains many links between seeds and spiritual growth. The parable of the sower is the most famous. A person may hear or experience something of God which has the potential to germinate into a life of following Him, resulting in the fruit of others coming to know God too. But things can happen that snatch that seed away, killing it before it has finished germinating, or choking its growth.

What about the knowledge of God that gets trampled, churned too deep in the mire of life to develop into faith? Buried seeds don’t always die. They can lie dormant, inactive until the earth is turned over. The chance of that moment of connecting with something divine may seem infinitesimally small, but it’s not zero. The seed may be incredibly tough, just waiting for a chance to grow.

It took a long time for the disciples to understand the full implications of Jesus’ teaching: it took many of them three years or more. They could have been discouraged, but Jesus was not.

June brings Fathers’ Day – this year on the 21st June. Our Christian faith teaches us to look at God as ‘Father’ - we address Him as such in the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer, and it was Jesus’ custom to talk to God as ‘Father’. Maybe, taking into account those who have had a very mixed experience, or a bad experience of fathers, we should qualify what we say of God and call Him ‘the Good Father’, or ‘our Good Father’.

I think of the picture Jesus paints in the parable of the Prodigal Son; the father on the look-out for his wayward son day after day, and when he sees him in the distance runs all the way to him to embrace him. Now in Jesus’ time, in that culture, fathers did NOT run, least of all to welcome returning no-goods who had wasted half the father’s fortune. Fathers were people of dignity. Jesus has turned that on its head. We can be sure that a welcome awaits us; we turn to God, or return to God, and find that He’s already half-way towards us, coming at speed to embrace us.

By Rev Roy Shaw in ‘Parish Pump’.

pollybrown@mottramparish.org.uk

for earlier editions of the magazine

printable versions of the magazine

to contribute to the magazine