Just writing the article for the Church Magazine that gives a flavour of where are going and what we shall be doing. We set off on Thursday 24th April, and I shall be doing my best to update the blog with pictures and reflections each day. Soooo looking forward to visiting Turkey again!
Here is the article...
My, but this Pilgrimage has been in the diary for a long time… since the Summer of 2012, at least!
I led my first Pilgrimage in 2007, following the Bishop of St. Alban’s encouragement. That pilgrimage was to the Holy Land and it was a unique and deeply spiritual experience both for the people I led, as well as for me personally. Upon our return, the people who travelled as part of the group asked where we might go to next and so off we went to Turkey and the Seven Churches of the Revelation in October 2008 – with a good handful of the lovely people from Rickmansworth. Pilgrimages are a wonderful opportunity for people to get to know one another better (alas, people get to know me – especially how I am in the mornings!)
The forthcoming eleven day Pilgrimage to Turkey will take in sites of many of the early Christian communities. We begin with three days in Istanbul, one of the great cities of the world, with a culture and geography that looks both east and west. We then visit the ruins of the seven churches mentioned at the beginning of the Book of Revelation and explore the early Christian communities through visiting places such as Ephesus, Miletus and Laodicea. If you’d like to follow our progress, I shall try to keep up a blog as we go: http://istanbulandthechurchesoftherevelation.blogspot.co.uk/
