Lord, we your church are deaf and dumb

Lord, we your church are deaf and dumb. Alan Luff* (1928-2020).  This was written in the early 1970s, when the author was vicar of Penmaenmawr, North Wales, in the Diocese of Bangor. It was written for a meeting of clergy in that Diocese, and remained unknown until it was included a decade later in the British Methodist HP. It had three stanzas. Stanza 2 begins ‘Though deaf because we will not hear/ And dumb because we fear to speak’, and stanza 3 ‘Then speak, Lord, in our deafened ear’. It is a prayer to ‘release again the stifled voice’. Although in stanza 3 it wishes to ‘make the good news clear’, the author said, inexplicably, that ‘the hymn is a prayer not so much to be able to speak...