From Seeds December 2025 – January 2026

Anyone walking past Augustine at the moment will be struck by the ‘stained glass’ panels in our windows, each reflecting different aspects of creation.

During the Season of Creationtide (1 September to 4 October), members of AUC painted the designs. They were guided (‘painting by number’) by AUC member Aubrey Bader, who created the panels. The idea, said Fiona, was to help us ‘speak to the whole world about what we feel about creation as Christians’.

The panel themes illustrate different aspects of creation. One offers an overall creation scene; Aubrey called one ‘The Elder Tree’ – a large tree with a person resting in its shade – and one reflects the church’s dandelion logo – seeds dispersed and growing around Edinburgh’s Arthur’s Seat.

Aubrey, who is a landscape architect, said she wanted to look at creation from different scales – of Augustine itself, the wider community, and creation in general. She felt it was important to include detail and depth in each panel, for example a ladybird on a leaf, within ‘the big views’.

By Lewis Reay (From Seeds December 2025 – January 2026)

Queer and Christian is a powerful and affirming perspective for those at the intersection of queer identity and Christian faith’, said the Revd Fiona Bennett.

Fiona hosted AUC’s evening with Brandan Robertson to discuss his new book, Queer and Christian: reclaiming the Bible, our faith, and our place at the table.

In the book, Brandan tells his personal story of his faith and sexuality, including his experiences of conversion practices.

At this fundraiser evening organised by Our Tribe, Brandan talked eloquently about his early experiences in church, where he was welcomed until it became clear that he didn’t conform to expected narratives of sexuality and gender. While studying at Bible college he was told to undergo conversion therapy. This did not turn him straight! Instead, he found the queer community, progressive Christianity, and came out.

His insights into biblical passages that are gender non-conforming or expose sexuality between equal consenting adults showed us that there are queer narratives to be found and unpacked in scripture. He talked about Joseph and his coat of many colours. This was a female garment, and Joseph delighted in it. Joseph’s father Jacob recognised something in Joseph that was gender non-conforming, such that Joseph’s brothers repeatedly tried to kill him. This story is one of a marginalised person becoming the hero of their own life.

In the book, Brandan also tells stories about Jonathan and David, Ruth and Naomi, and the Ethiopian Eunuch – all characters whose stories reveal a queer narrative. Finding ourselves in the pages of scripture felt like a revelation for many in the audience.

During a Q&A session, Brandon also paid tribute to the Jewish teaching and texts that laid the foundations for Jesus’ life and ministry and the establishment of the early church. Asked about a bisexual reading of the story of David and Jonathan, he agreed that from a bisexual lens this would be interesting. Another person asked whether a queer identity was a ‘thorn in the flesh’ and Brandan told us that rather it is a gift – a blessing to be celebrated as we are made in the image of God. He also spoke of the impact of Metropolitan Community Churches upon the progress of affirming and inclusive churches throughout the world.

This event was supported by a partnership of city centre churches: St Columba’s by the Castle, Greyfriars Kirk, St Giles Catherdal, Edinburgh New Town Church, Metropolitan Community Church and Augustine United Church. With over 50 tickets sold, it was a busy and engaging evening. We raised £350 for the Equality Network and Scottish Trans.

In the next issue of Seeds, Carol Joyner reviews ‘Everyday Normal’ – the Sarah Jones tour

By Siân Joyner (From Seeds December 2025 – January 2026)

At AUC’s October Church Meeting, Siȃn Joyner and Mike Holroyd spoke about disability in a faith context. They hope it will be the start of a journey towards disability justice at AUC. Here, Siȃn identifies some of the issues.

Would you like prayer for your leg?’ someone asks.

As I stand in a bus shelter, waiting for a friend for a coffee date, he wakes me from a daydream. I think about lecturing him and his two accomplices on the figurative nature of the healing stories; I think about telling them to ‘do one’. But I’m tired, and nodding seems like the path of least resistance. These three students are on a mission. They have no banner, no identity; they have randomly approached me on their way to church. They are young. They pray for healing. I thank them. They walk away. They saw the ankle-foot orthosis. And, having seen it, I guess they assumed my leg was broken, in need of healing.

Recent books, such as Amy Kenny’s My Body Is Not a Prayer Request: Disability Justice in the Church, assure me that I am not alone in this experience. Amy, a disabled academic herself, writes about ‘prayerful perpetrators’ who want to pray for bodily change in her, when in fact a cure is not wanted. She discusses the distinction between ‘cure’ and ‘healing’.

Such anecdotes speak volumes to deeply ingrained prejudices and attitudes toward disability. In sacred spaces, they point to an ableism that ‘others’ disabled people, and casts them as a metaphor for weakness, or even as a reflection of sinfulness.

So, how can we embrace a theology that celebrates disabled people as an equally valuable part of the diversity of God’s realm?

I didn’t always view disability as positive. As a small child, my father told me about how the ‘whole church’ prayed when I was born, and in hospital. My parents took me to spiritual healers to ‘maybe, make me better’. Where disabled people were to be found in the Bible stories that were read to me as I grew up, none of those people stayed disabled. They were cured, and I was not. That wasn’t fair. Throughout my childhood, the narrative that being disabled meant that there was something ‘wrong with me’ loomed loud from a pulpit that readily associated disability with sin and punishment. I was angry with a world made for two-handed, mobile people, and with a God who would render me disabled from before I was born.

But what if there was a different understanding of wholeness to be found?

It was my academic reading that first suggested that the wider Church’s teaching I had heard as a child, that disability and healing are about deficit in a person’s body or mind, was wrong – or, at least, ill-informed. The social model of disability tells us that disability isn’t about a person, so much as the place in which they find themselves. A woman may need to use a wheelchair to get around, because her legs are weaker in some way, but it is when the lift is broken, or the ramps absent, that she becomes disabled. A child may not be able to hear the spoken word. But it is when their signed language is not understood by those around them that their communication may be disabled.

Affirmative models of disability go further still, challenging the nondisabled person’s gaze on a disabled person as a lesser being, and holding out a positive collective identity for disabled people. In this frame, disabled people are to be celebrated. In this frame, disabled joy, refusing to be aligned with a narrative of pity or pain, is resistance.

With this in mind, upon returning to the Gospel stories, I sought out and heard more contemporary exegeses of the stories of disabled people in the Bible, as well as the ‘healing’ miracles. When we read the story of Zacchaeus, for example, who climbed a sycamore tree to see Jesus, we are told that because he was short in stature, he could not see through the crowd (the Gospel of Luke, 19:3). It is the crowd that disables him, not his height.

Elsewhere, at the pool at Bethesda (John’s Gospel, chapter 5), Jesus heals a disabled man, freeing him from the poverty that was associated with paralysis in biblical times. Such healings may be read as stories of social emancipation and condemnation of such roots of poverty.

What does that mean for a disability-affirming sacred space?

This theology offers me an actionable frame of reference today, to understand both my own relationship with God and with disability, and to think about ableism and disability justice more widely. From here, we can begin to think of ways of making our church community more welcoming and inclusive of disabled people. We can think about the language we sing in our spaces. What does it mean if we sing:

Gather us in, the lost and forsaken
Gather us in, the blind and the lame…

How can we challenge (and if you’re paying close attention, we have challenged, in our singing) disability as a metaphor for weakness? How do we make our spaces more accessible? Who are we remembering to include, and whose needs aren’t being met in the way that we worship and meet together at AUC?

When we, as Christians, seek to make our communities more accessible and inclusive, by changing the places, rather than the people with which we find ourselves, we begin to re-imagine the world as one where everyone is welcome, and where we undo years of systemic injustice.

Mike Holroyd and I began to unpack this at a church meeting in October. Watch this space for how you can become involved in our work towards greater disability equality at AUC.

Siân Joyner (née Jones) is a queer, neurodivergent and disabled Elder at Augustine United Church, Edinburgh.

By Revd Fiona Bennet (From Seeds December 2025 – January 2026)

The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.’ Isaiah 9:2.

The people who walked in darkness were people who had been driven from their homes and their country of Judah to live in the land of their oppressor, the superpower Babylon. From what we can tell, the captive people taken to a foreign land were not treated as slaves there but the status, quality and opportunities of many of their lives diminished.

Their homes lay open for others to take, and their homeland was a province of Babylon. They were forced to build new lives in an unfamiliar and unwelcome place. Where would they find the energy? How could they sing the Lord’s song in this strange and unwelcome land? (to quote the psalmist). The prophet Isaiah described the experience as ‘walking in darkness’.

But while in the darkness they found light; hope was born. Hope that, despite their circumstance and history, God had not abandoned them. Hope that their situation would not always be or feel so bleak. The future was still uncertain, like a newborn child full of potential, but that potential, held in God’s promise, gave people a reason to keep on living in faith.

Sadly, in our world today there are many people who know what it feels like to be driven from their homes, lives and land, and even among those who have not experienced this horror there are many other experiences in our world today of bleakness and the sense that we are walking in darkness.

Advent is the season which invites us, while in darkness, to see the light. Advent invites us to discover the Hope that God has not abandoned us and even now is working to create new life from the ashes of the old. Advent invites us to keep living in faith; trusting that the one who comes to us in Jesus is with us walking in the darkness, loves us infinitely; and, even when unseen, is always steering us towards the potential of goodness for all. Hope in the darkness.

By Alex Pedan (From Seeds October – November 2025)

Worrying about plastic pollution and climate change can give you a headache, and find you reaching for some paracetamol. But did you know that paracetamol is actually a petroleum-based product, requiring oil for its manufacture? Sair heid?

Don’t worry though. Help is on the way from a local scientist, and the friends that live inside us all.

Professor Stephen Wallace’s lab at the University of Edinburgh has discovered that bacteria can be genetically re-jigged to make our favourite analgesic. Also, they can be made to clean up plastic waste at the same time.

The bacteria in question, E. coli, are the ones that are found everywhere, including inside our guts, helping us digest food and generally stay healthy. Over the last four billion years or so they’ve been happily doing their usual thing of growing – dividing – dying – repeat, using a grab bag of chemicals available to them in the natural environment.

However, if you take them into the lab and block some of their genes, they become unable to use their usual building blocks.

Unfazed by this insult, if you give them the breakdown products of waste plastic, they can use those instead.

This was the first breakthrough of Professor Wallace’s lab. Their second was to hunt for certain genes in soil bacteria and fungi. If they put these into their plastic-busting E. coli, they could get them to make paracetamol. So, they now have a micro machine to clear up our plastic mess and make something useful from it. Hurrah.

It’ll take quite a while for this to be scaled up to replace the traditional manufacturing process, but hopefully less than four billion years!

For more info…
‘Scientists use bacteria to turn plastic waste into paracetamol’

By Lewis Reay (From Seeds October – November 2025)

On the weekend of 11-13 July, 28 trans and non-binary Christian activists from all over Europe met in Zurich, Switzerland, to worship together and explore the theme of Trans Joy.

People came from all over Europe, including from Sweden, Finland, Norway, Switzerland and Latvia, sharing stories of the lives of trans and non-binary in their respective countries.

There were four of us from the Metropolitan Christian Church (MCC): Kuisma Savisalo and Ipa Kivinen from Finland, Lewis Reay and the Revd Elder Maxwell Reay from Scotland. Sharing with others the inclusive and affirmative experiences that we have had as part of MCC was a moving experience.

We realised that there was much that we had in common. Both in relation to the struggles that trans and non-binary people face across Europe and the worsening human rights record of many countries. The withdrawal of gender-affirming care for young trans and non-binary people was a common experience.

There were workshops, space for creative activities, panel discussions to learn from one another’s experiences, and worship. There was time for lament and time to express trans joy and gender euphoria.

Kuisma Savisalo from Elävä vesi MCC (Living Water MCC), Helsinki in Finland, said, ‘To meet people who face the same problems in life and share the same joy as us was precious … Getting to know young people from all over Europe was interesting.’

Maxwell Reay, from Our Tribe at Augustine United Church, reflected on the impact of MCC. He said, ‘It is clear we have had great influence in encouraging other denominations to become more inclusive but there is still a place for us, with lots more to do’.

Creating hope in difficult times is so important to give trans and non-binary people the strength to carry on and live authentic lives. Coming home to our bodies and finding trans joy is a wonderful experience. Meeting other trans and non-binary Christian activists was a deeply spiritual experience and friendships were forged. We all hope that this will be the first of many such gatherings.

Trans Joy was organised by the European Forum of LGBTI+ Christian Groups in partnership with Reformierte Kirche Zürich, with the support of LGBTIQ Fachstelle of the Reformed Church of Zürich, Transblessing (Sweden) and Sybils (UK), and funding from the Dutch Government.

A Prayer for Trans Joy

Loving Creator, Holy One, we celebrate your Love and the joy that this brings.
We are beautiful, made in Your marvellous image.
Brothers, sisters and siblings – all our chosen family, a family made by You.
A place to share love and comfort, to laugh and to cry out.
A place to celebrate our joy and a place to mourn as well.
Safety is in Your unchangeable Love, more and deeper than we can know.
Acceptance is a glorious place where hatred falls away, replaced by wholeness.
Risen One, You bring us the joy of new life – renewed and remade.
This is our trans joy in You.
Thank You, for Your boundless Love.
Thank You, for our trans siblings.
We live in the name of the Creating One, the Life-giver and the breath of Spirit.

By Revd Fiona Bennet (From Seeds October – November 2025)

Earlier this year, I read a very inspiring book by Robin Wall Kimmerer called The Serviceberry: an economy of gifts and abundance.*

Robin is a botanist. She looks at the life of the serviceberry (a bush with fruit that can be eaten by animals and people) and asks what economic model it reveals to us.

The bush produces abundant sweet ripe berries, to entice other creatures to eat so that they will then spread its seed. The bush does not eat the sweet berries for its own nourishment, it is nourished by the soil, rain and sun. It receives its nourishment freely and gives its fruit freely in the cycle of living.

It does not claim to own its fruit, nor does it hoard back its fruit for a ‘rainy day’; it lives in an economy of reciprocity where it freely receives what it needs to live, and protects its species for a ‘rainy day’ by investing its fruit in the stomachs of others. No one has told it that economies are based on the principle of scarcity and individual protection.

The economy of the serviceberry and the planet is reciprocal, creating its own culture of balance and respect. It is an economy which invests its profits in its neighbour’s ‘stomach’, and trusts and protects not individual wealth but collective abundance.

How egotistical we humans are to think we can own what the earth freely gives.

How deceptive and stupid we are to trick ourselves into hoarding selfishly out of fear, when the planet offers us life abundantly and models for us the wisdom of reciprocity.

How fortunate we are to be alive within the reciprocal economy of life, which, despite how it may feel at times, is shaped, energised and sustained by forces and wisdom greater than humanity.

How blessed we are when we recognise and live reciprocally, with gratitude and respect.

In the words of the Revd Kathy Galloway, who sadly died recently:

Oh, the life of the world is a promise of blessing, in the rain that renews, in the heat of the sun; in the heart that confesses and the act that expresses all things and all people are one. Oh, the life of the world is the breath of our being, it is fragile and precious and offers a choice; shall we share the earth wisely, can we touch the earth gently, will we listen to earth’s silenced voice?

* The Serviceberry is published by Penguin. A very good summary of it was published in Emergence

We’re delighted to have Paradise Green back with us, transforming our city centre church into 5 (yes, 5!) venues.

You can explore the shows on offer using these links:

Paradise In Augustine’s – George IV Bridge

Spaces:

• The Sanctuary
• The Studio
• The Snug

Link: https://tickets.edfringe.com/venues/paradise-in-augustines

Paradise In The Vault – Merchant Street*

Spaces:

• The Vault
• The Annexe

Link: https://tickets.edfringe.com/venues/paradise-in-the-vault

*To access Paradise in the Vault from the main entrance of AUC: cross over George IV Bridge, walk past Greyfriars Bobby and down Candlemaker Row and go under George IV Bridge (Merchant Street). This will take you to the Pend where you can access Paradise in the Vault spaces.

Services during the Fringe

We also have one alteration to our usual worship pattern this month:

Sunday 24th – we’re off on our annual pilgrimage with our TLC Partners Greyfriars Kirk and St Columba’s by the Castle. There will be no worship in the building on this day or online.

All other Sunday services will run as planned during the Fringe.

Please note: the Sanctuary has now been transformed into a theatre, so if you’ve not been to church in-person or joined us online either through Zoom or YouTube during Fringe before, prepare yourself for it to look quite different! And do bear with us if there are any teething problems or snags.

From Seeds August – September 2025

Do faith and theatre not mix? Oliver Cromwell thought so. Theatre, he said, was a very bad thing. (Or are we doing him an injustice? Discuss!)

Whatever Oliver thought, this year’s Edinburgh International Festival invites audiences to reflect on the theme ‘The Truth We Seek’.

This somewhat echoes the New Testament Gospel of John: ‘And you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.’ If nothing else, the theme is a striking lens through which both the Festival and the Fringe might explore faith, belief, and spiritual resilience.

If that’s your interest, and you’re in Edinburgh this August, here’s a few options. Others are available.

We’ve already mentioned the Festival of Sacred Art (see page 3 of Seeds August – September 2025), but opening the International Festival is Sir John Tavener’s monumental eight-hour choral masterpiece The Veil of the Temple, in only its second-ever UK performance. It draws on sacred texts from multiple world religions and is performed by over 250 singers in five languages. Those who know it say the result is more than a concert – it’s a shared act of contemplation, echoing the timelessness of spiritual ritual. (‘Complementary tea, coffee and biscuits will be available throughout the performance…’)

Meanwhile, at the Fringe (where the typical show time is just one hour) the search for deeper truths takes less demanding forms. Pilgrim of Hope is a one-man show from writer-performer Stephen Callaghan, who asks: Where does one find hope today? ‘A funny, poignant fable about life, death, air-fryers and one man’s search for hope.’

Very different will be A Period of Faith, Angela King’s onewoman play about how belief sustains through trauma. Framed by the experience of PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder), it’s an account of finding strength in faith while navigating chronic illness and emotional hardship.

One of the strongest hubs for faith-related performance this year is Palmerston Place Church (Venue 254), where Searchlight Theatre Company is in residence. Their programme includes stories of faithful lives: Olympic champion Eric Liddell, wartime chaplain Woodbine Willie, and the Revd W. Awdry, the cleric/train enthusiast behind Thomas the Tank Engine. C.S. Lewis questions Aslan and there’s an adaptation of his The Screwtape Letters. Meanwhile, a church minister and a shipping executive meet in Titanic: The last hero and the last coward.

Also at Palmerston Place, The Passion retells Christ’s final days from the perspectives of Peter, Mary Magdalene and a Roman centurion named Marcus, while shanties feature in tales of the first disciples in Salt and Light.

Elsewhere Fischy Music are in concert with Christian music for children, The Lost Priest is (surprisingly) about growing up Jewish in America, and – because this is the Fringe, after all – Four Door Theatre presents Sex and God.

Across these works (and these are just the tip of the cultural iceberg), artists ask what it means to believe – whether in God, beauty, or one another – in an age of uncertainty. Their approaches vary, but all echo that central question: What is the truth we seek?

From Seeds August – September 2025

In a world increasingly shaped by wildfires, floods, and record-breaking heat, Christian hope is something different from optimism.

Hope is grounded in God’s dream for the world, requiring energy and commitment even when the dream appears world-weary and tattered.

And surely it helps even faithled hope to read or hear signs of good news, however fragile, and however sceptical we might feel about what governments are or are not doing. While the climate crisis undeniably remains urgent, a few recent developments suggest some momentum building – in policy, justice, and clean energy.

In the UK, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) recently reported that since 1990, the UK has cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 50% as the economy has started, tentatively, to grow. The CCC acknowledged that more action is needed, particularly in heating and agriculture, but it confirmed that net zero by 2050 is still achievable – if government action keeps pace. It’s a reminder that targets are important, and achievable with consistent effort, innovation, and policy support.

Second, a landmark ruling from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) could reshape how climate inaction is judged under international law. The case was brought by Pacific Island nations, led by the low-lying island of Vanuatu. They argued that countries have a legal duty to prevent climate harm. The ICJ agreed. In what has been described as a David versus Goliath ruling, the ICJ affirmed that states must protect both current and future generations from environmental damage.

Lea Main-Klingst, a lawyer at ClientEarth, called the decision a breakthrough: ‘The age of producing and bankrolling fossil fuels with abandon is over. This new-found clarity will equip judges with definitive guidance that will likely shape climate cases for decades to come.’

The ruling isn’t legally binding, but its moral weight could strengthen future climate litigation and diplomatic pressure.

And finally, as the global energy transition appears to be accelerating, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said that ‘fossil fuels are running out of road’. In 2024, 92.5% of all new electricity capacity came from renewable sources, including solar, wind, and hydro.

He didn’t deny that there have been serious setbacks. In the United States, clean energy programmes have faced major cuts, and climate research has been defunded under the second Trump administration. Globally, emissions still reached new highs in 2024, revealing the gap between progress and impact.

But Guterres said, ‘Countries that cling to fossil fuels are not protecting their economies – they are sabotaging them. The fossil fuel age is flailing and failing’, and he highlighted the role of renewables in strengthening global energy security. ‘There are no price spikes for sunlight, no embargoes for wind,’ he said.

Taken together, do these developments offer cautious hope? They show that carbon cuts are possible, that legal frameworks are evolving, and that renewables are no longer aspirational but are a present-day force. At the same time, they underscore how fragile and uneven this progress remains.

The path ahead requires urgency and resolve. But in a year of mixed signals, these breakthroughs remind us that change is happening – and that a liveable future is still within reach.