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Good Morning The expulsion of Bury Football Club from the football league has been devastating for those who saw it as one of the binding forces in the local community. Their stadium is just a few miles from their extremely wealthy neighbours Manchester City and Manchester United. A number of interviews on this programme this week have pointed to the growing injustices involving the top layer of English football and the grass roots. I wonder if a few months’ wages of just one of many Premier League players would be ample to have kept Bury going for a year? And so what’s now to be done to save many comparable clubs on the brink of collapse? Phil Neville, Manager of the England Women’s national team, who has close family connections with Bury believes that the town’s heart has been ripped out. It’s now up to the people of Bury, he said, to put the heart back into a town that relied heavily on its football club. Meanwhile, lifelong Bury fan Phil Collins writing in The Times poses a legitimate question: in a town like Bury in our own day “what else entices 4000 people regularly to come together”? And he has a point. Many of us like going to one off gigs, plays or concerts. For a short time we share an experience with others. But it’s a much bigger thing to follow a sport’s club with the same group of people, in all weathers, who look out for each other and experience a camaraderie, without which their lives are all the more empty? It’s a deeply spiritual bond between club and supporters. The Christian tradition is absolutely rooted in the shared experience. In the Old Testament it is when people gather together that inspiration results, often in dramatic ways. And by the time of the books of the New Testament it is in the gathering, sharing and mutual support one to another that the churches grow and people are inspired. Fellowship, it’s called. Or neighbourliness. Being one with others. Without such inspiration, people are diminished – particularly when it is removed from them suddenly? The story of the collapse of Bury FC is a modern day parable of how important it is to do everything we can to protect those institutions, clubs and organisations which are increasingly under threat, and with them, that unique sense of what it means to believe and belong in a society of increasing isolation.