The Independent's leading article the day the Synod completed its business is alive to the dynamic of the Gospel message and the contradictions of Christianity in a way that some within the household struggle to see, and importantly it is more than just critique. It is a proposal for an alternative path.

How do we handle scriptural passages about the goodness of creation and nature stilled by the power of God in a world that produces the Haiti earthquake? Simon Barrow looks at storms stilled and storms unstilled in the light of Christ.

Many churches struggle to make their services more inclusive, but we need to be prepared for radical thinking if we truly want to address the problem. We are unlikely to make much progress as long as services appear as performances and we define worship by what happens on a Sunday morning.

The bishops' highly publicised defence of discrimination in the Equality bill damages the image of the church, says Savi Hensman. Their political victory in the House of Lords this week is a moral and spiritual defeat.

For British politics, the defining moment of the last decade was on 15 February 2003, when over a million people marched through London to oppose the invasion of Iraq. But the war went ahead despite public opposition. This striking image illustrates two key aspects of the last decade – a government pursuing a thoroughly militaristic agenda, and a public resistant to going along with it.

Modern political discourse often denies the centrality of wealth and poverty to the concerns it addresses, says Simon Barrow. It is in denial. But so are Christians when they fail to see the centrality of wealth and poverty to the biblical narrative and to the Gospel vision.

New Year is a chronological convenience and the Gregorian division of times and seasons is by no means universal, says Jill Segger. But that doesn't mean that it should be passed up as an opportunity for real change.