The Free Church Choirs biennial festival will be held at Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, London, on 17 October 2015. The festival is open to both choirs and individual singers. The music is all contained in the festival anthem book which is now available from the Free Church Choirs website here.

This year’s festival theme is “hope” – visit the Free Church Choirs website for more information.

If you love singing and would like to be part of a choir of some 400 voices please save the date and order your anthem book now – contact the Free Church Choirs secretary Liz Crisp, via email (elizap10@btinternet.com).  The price is £10 including P&P.

Thanks to the help of the United Reformed Church, the Christian Aid Christmas appeal was a resounding success, raising just over £3.6 million! As the UK government matched all eligible donations pound for pound, this means an additional £3 million for maternal and child health projects in Kenya, Malawi and beyond.

You can find out more about the work of Christian Aid in Kenya, and how the money you helped to raise will help save lives, in the latest URC podcast interview with Christian Aid partner, Rodney Kaleke, coordinator of the Transmara Rural Development Programme, available here.

Following the success of the 2014 Christmas appeal, the URC communications team will be partnering with Christian Aid again this year to help raise funds for community health projects in Nigeria.

Good news! Reform has launched a digital version, enabling readers to enjoy the magazine – and DIGEST – on tablets, smartphones and computers. And, as if that wasn’t exciting enough, we’re offering News Update readers the chance to subscribe to the digital edition for a reduced rate of £15 for a year. That’s adiscount of £3 from the normal price of the digital magazine, and no less than 50% off the cover price of the paper magazine. Read on to find out how to claim this offer.

The digital version of Reform is available via an app, which comes with many exciting features, as Stephen Tomkins, Reform’s editor, explains: “The digital magazine looks great, it’s easy to get around, and there’s just so much you can do with it that you can’t do with paper: You can magnify and zoom in; you can search for words; you can click on any weblink and go straight to that webpage; you can view additional video content and listen to audio clips.

Mr Tomkins added: “We’re delighted to launch the new Reform app – it’s been a long time in the planning and we’re thrilled with it.”

The Revd John Proctor, general secretary of the United Reformed Church, offers the following Easter reflection:

Everyone loves an Easter egg. Doing things with eggs is part of the season – cream and chocolate, hard-boiled and decorated, hidden and hunted down. There is a reason we make so much of eggs at Easter. They are a visible and edible reminder of the stone on Jesus’ grave. They speak of the first Easter and of what happened then.

The original stone was not quite egg-shaped. Think instead of a heavy disc, like a giant coin, able to roll from left to right, with a groove to guide its path. And Easter turns the stone, to a new position and a new angle. It turns a lot of other things too. Easter is about vindication – setting the world the right way up.