In 2018 the Royal Air Force celebrates its 100th birthday. Up and down the country there are links between churches and former airfields but standing in a quiet church now it is hard to imagine the bustle and noise that was once such big part of the lives of these buildings…

In a recent BBC Radio Scotland broadcast, Martin Palmer of the Alliance for Religions and Conservation commented that ‘Every major religion has seen an increase in pilgrims of between 200 and 400% in the last 20 years.’ Pilgrimage in Scotland is recreating long distance walking routes that connect churches and other holy sites associated with historic shrines, bringing new life to rural communities whose local services and amenities have either disappeared or need to be sustained.

Commemorating the centenary of the end of the Great War in rural communities

Annual services of Remembrance are often significant occasions in rural communities. As our nation marks the centenary of the end of the First World War, we wanted to find out how rural churches were marking this significant anniversary…

They shall grow not 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.

These famous lines, from the middle of Laurence Binyon’s poem For the Fallen forms the Exhortation within many services of Remembrance and is familiar, I imagine, to most of us. In many ways, these lines encapsulate what we think of as ‘remembrance’: the dead are crystallised in some sort of eternal fallen flower of youthfulness. There is a nostalgia there, with sunrises, sunsets and the memory of loss. The poem reminds us of the need to remember those who died in war; a sacrifice for all of us who enjoy freedom and peace. The rest of the poem sets the dead of war in a universe of eternal stars; heroes who proudly went to battle singing songs and whose lives are glorified in death.

Abi is 17-years-old and has an Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnosis. When her family relocated from Dorset to Derbyshire, Abi had to move from a specialist Learning Centre into a mainstream school that was unable to adequately support her socialisation and high anxiety difficulties. Finding herself bullied and humiliated by her new peer group, Abi withdrew from formal education, her self-esteem at an all-time low, unsure of her future and without qualifications.