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Christ Chapel at Sound Retreat Farm, Hiter Cemetery Lane, Fairdealing, KY (2026)

04/29/2026

Anglicans don't just go to Church on Sunday mornings to get a dose of God to last us for the following week. We LIVE our faith. That being said, we have three regular services in the Prayerbook, in addition to several other, special services for special days and events. But the three are Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer and Holy Communion. The first two we do every day, and Communion on Sunday mornings. Now, remember what I've said on here so many times before: Those are "rules of thumb", and can change when necessary or desirable for the congregation.
Morning Prayer, as the name suggests, is conducted first thing every morning and is composed of confession, absolution and a variety of lessons, prayers, psalms, canticles and often hymns designed to help us get the day started. It's not a pep talk, really, but it IS designed to give us the quiet confidence to go out and face the day knowing that God the Father has us in his heart and in His hands, and that whatever happens to us is in accordance with His will. Evening Prayer shares a very similar form with Morning Prayer, but it's done in the evening and the parts of it are designed not to put us to sleep, but to "detox" our minds and bodies from the stresses of the day and send us home with a quiet and clear consciousness that we have nothing to worry about as we ease into a restful and peaceful night. The third Collect of the service says it best:
"Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night, for the love of thy only son, our Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen."
Holy Communion is our weekly service of worship. For many years, Anglicans, like most Reformed Churches avoided frequent services of the Lord's supper because many protestants found it "Popish". For the past 150 years, though, the Anglicans of the world (and we ARE a worldwide Church) have been moving back towards the Eucharist as the oldest and most serious Christian worship. We do it with great seriousness of liturgy and devotion.
So anyway: it"s Wednesday afternoon. In a little less than four hours, we'll be assembling, those who can, at our Chapel in Fairdealing to Worship in Evening Prayer. Won't you join us? We'd love to meet with you and share our faith. Amen.

04/24/2026

It is Friday, the 24th of April. At Christ Chapel, we're getting ready for Sunday! Sunday will be the third Sunday after Easter, and at Christ Chapel that means we'll worship with Morning Prayer at 8:30 and Holy Communion at 10:30. Everyone is welcome at either one or both.
Friends (and strangers, for that matter) often ask us "Why do you differentiate between different forms of worship? Don't you worship the same EVERY time you gather?" Well,, no, we do not. We have a variety of worship possibilities, all contained in the Book of Common Prayer, our standard reference and our guide to follow in actually running worship. We have special forms, for instance, for baptismal services and Ash Wednesday and other things. We have three standard forms that we use for daily and weekly formal worship services. Our central service, of course, is Holy Communion. This is the standard Christian sacramental service, followed since the First Century. We know that because we have first and second Century documents telling us how they worshipped then (the writings of Justin Martyr and the didache, for instance) and we follow them as closely as we can. We also have the orders of Morning and Evening Prayer. After the Reformation, Sacramental worship fell into disrepute among many Protestants. Holy Communion was closely identified with the Roman Church's "Mass", and Reformed Christians widely tried to avoid looking "Roman". As such, the standard Sunday morning service became, among many Anglicans, as among many or most Protestant bodies, Baptist, Methodist, Church of Christ, and so forth for more than a Century, Morning Prayer with a sermon, in accordance with the teachings of John Calvin. Services conducted in the evening naturally followed the form for Evening Prayer. We still do that in "Low Church" liturgical bodies. With the mid-1800's Tractarian movement, though, both in England and in the American Church, traditional Holy Communion services were largely rehabilitated and eventually became very common in most episcopal settings.
At Christ Chapel, we worship with Holy Communion at both services on the First Sunday of each month, Morning Prayer at 8:30 and Holy Communion at 10:30 on 2nd and 4th Sundays, Morning Prayer at 8:30 on the Third Sunday and no service at 10:30 (the pastor is gone to Madisonville to bring Holy Communion to our Mission there), and Morning Prayer at both services on 5th Sundays, when there is one. We read Evening Prayer every Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. You'd be welcome to join us for any of the above. We take seriously Jesus's injunction to "go into all the world and make disciples". We are very conservative, very traditional, and very Christian.

04/11/2026

Tomorrow is the second Sunday of the month in addition to being the first Sunday after Easter. At Christ Chapel, we'll be worshipping with Morning Prayer at 8:30 and Holy Communion at 10:30. We'd sure like to see you there!

04/04/2026

It's Easter Even! Or Eve. The beginning of Easter Day on the Jewish calendar. Sunset, remember? Anyhow, at Christ Chapel and most other Liturgical churches, we're getting ready for the Easter Even service. It is, in many ways, one of the most meaningful services of the year and I love doing it.
When we can, we hold a bonfire beforehand and use that bonfire as the source of flame to light a candle with which we process to the Chapel and up to the Chancel, then use it to light the Paschal Candle, and it to re-light the altar lights, which haven't been lit since Maundy Thursday. Like other really beautiful traditional services, it is not Sacramental. Jesus didn't order us to do it, and of course He wasn't around TO do it. He was dead. Not "playing dead". Not hiding out in the tomb. He was DEAD. Sometime between sunset on Saturday and sunrise on Sunday, he returned to life. His spirit returned to the body. We don't know exactly when, but it was between sunset and sunrise. He came back to life, sat up, folded the napkin that had covered his face (see John 20:7), got up and left the tomb, never to return. That return is what we celebrate symbolically with the bringing of "new fire" to the altar.
Tonight, we won't have a bonfire. First, it's been raining all day, and second, there's still technically a no-burn order in place. So, we'll strike new fire indoors and proceed from there. We could probably light the candles with a match or a bic lighter, but the tradition is to use flint and steel, so that's what we'll do. Strike a spark, ignite a bowl of sand, use it to light a candle in an antique candle lantern that we've used for years for this, then use that candle to light the Paschal candle, and take fire from the Paschal Candle to the altar to light the altar lights. Short, meaningful and beautiful. Sort of like the rest of Anglican worship. Why not join us? You might like it! Christ Chapel at seven, this evening.

03/30/2026

It's Holy Week! It's the busiest week of the year for liturgical clergymen. But that's good, right? At Christ Chapel, we'll hold our usual Wednesday night Evening Prayer, then meet again on Thursday evening at seven for Maundy Thursday, and on Friday at noon for Good Friday. On Saturday, we'll have a "new fire" service on Easter Even, and crown it all with a sunrise service at 6:30 on Easter morning and a 10:30 Eucharist to follow. Refreshments in the Parish Hall after! Please join us for as many of those as possible. It's almost Easter!

03/11/2026

Evening Prayer at seven, this evening. Let us pray!

03/03/2026

Dr. Houman David Hammati has seen ALL of Iran and now? He writes…

🇮🇷 47 years ago, I stood at a window in Tehran as a 3-year-old boy, smelling burning tires and hearing the chants that would steal my country. I didn’t have words for what was happening. Today, I am watching smoke rise over the same city — but this time the smoke is not the end of Iran. It is, God willing, the beginning of her resurrection.

Several weeks ago I wrote in that the fever of 1979 was finally breaking. I never imagined I would wake up to see that fever confronted so directly. Israel — with the clear support of the United States — has launched a preemptive strike deep into Tehran and against the regime’s military machinery. Explosions in the capital. Military targets hit. The IRGC’s aura of invincibility, already cracked, is shattering in real time.

I do not celebrate war. No decent person does. What I celebrate — what millions of Iranians inside the country and in the diaspora have prayed for in secret for decades — is the possibility that a regime which has no right to exist may finally be forced to go.

This is the same regime that:
- Armed and cheered the October 7 massacre against Israel for no reason other than pure genocidal hatred.
- Murdered tens of thousands of its own sons and daughters who dared to walk peacefully in the streets demanding the most basic freedoms.
- Gouges out the eyes of young women for the “crime” of wearing makeup.
- Hangs teenagers from cranes for posting a tweet.
- Exports terror, poverty, and darkness to every corner it can reach including the U.S.

No nation, no people, should have to live under that. Not Israelis. Not Americans. Not Lebanese. Not Syrians. And certainly not Iranians.

I am a physician who has spent his life trying to heal bodies and a son of Iran who has spent his life mourning a stolen homeland. What we are witnessing is not aggression — it is surgery. Painful, necessary surgery to remove a tumor that has metastasized for 47 years. The tumor is the Islamic Republic that has hijacked Iran.

To the brave pilots and special operators of the Israeli Air Force and the men and women of the United States military now carrying out this mission: I pray for you with everything I have.

May God shield you from harm. May every missile find its target and every soldier return home safely to the families who love them. You are not invaders. You are the answer to the prayers of millions who have whispered “enough” in the dark since 1979. You are giving our friends the chance to breathe free air again. The entire region will owe you a peace we have not known in my lifetime.

To my fellow Iranians watching from inside the country right now, heart pounding, maybe hiding in basements or on rooftops: Hold on. The end is clearer than it has ever been. The regime’s fear is real. Their eyes — those same eyes that once stared down at us with absolute power — now show something they haven’t shown in decades: panic. The math has changed. The window of 1979 is finally closing.

To the little three-year-old boy I once was — and to every little boy and girl in Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tabriz today who hears explosions instead of lullabies: This time the sounds are not the closing of a door. They are the opening of one.

The road ahead will not be easy. Transitions never are. But the direction is unmistakable. A secular, prosperous, free Iran is no longer a dream — it is becoming an inevitability.

I have lived the stolen life so that others might not have to. Today, for the first time in 47 years, I allow myself to believe that the stealing is almost over.

Thank you, Israel. Thank you, America. The Iranian people — the real Iran — will never forget.

The fever is breaking.
The dawn of 2026 is here.
And this time, the light wins.

🇮🇷❤️🇮🇱🇺🇸

02/28/2026

It's Saturday! And believe it or not, with complete disregard to the absolute mess the media, the government and some others have made of a lot of things, the Gregorian calendar continues to work amazingly well, as it has since October, 1582. Well, there WAS a little hiccup when England adopted the Gregorian in 1752. By then, the Julian calendar had added 10 days to its calculation, and so there were those 10 days to be accounted for among Englishmen but none of those folks are still around so I think we can move forward as if the Gregorian has always been our guide, don't you? Therefore, I can say without equivocation (and only a little trepidation) that tomorrow will be Sunday. Sunday, the 1st of March, 2026. It's the Second Sunday in Lent, in the Western Church, and, as the First Sunday in March, it'll be Holy Communion at both Sunday services at Christ Chapel, 8:30 and 10:30. You're invited.

02/21/2026

Tomorrow is the first Sunday in Lent! Join us at Christ Chapel to get started on the long penitential period leading up to the wonderful epiphany of Easter! Christ Chapel , Fairdealing, 8:30 and 10:30. TOMORROW!

02/04/2026

The paved roads are clear but the Chapel road is gravel, and it is still snow and ice covered most of the way. I will be there this evening to read Evening Prayer, but you should use your own best judgement. If you have 4 WD or are pretty good at front wheel drive, fell free to join me, but if you have any doubts at all about your own vehicle or skill, stay home. Please.

Christ Chapel at Sound Retreat Farm

04/29/2026

04/24/2026

04/11/2026

04/04/2026

03/30/2026

03/11/2026

03/03/2026

02/28/2026

02/21/2026

02/04/2026

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