First, if you get this in time, a reminder of our wonderful Advent Carol service this evening, Saturday at 6.
|
|
|
|
|
Always a highlight – please do come along – all welcome – bring the family.
This is the opener for our lovely Advent and Christmas offering:
|
|
|
|
|
There are hundreds of postcards with this programme on them in church. Please take a bundle and deliver to your neighbours!
This week the church building has been full of music.
Monday saw the first concert by our wonderful children’s choir:
|
|
|
|
|
They made some music which one cheered because it was good music, not only because they had made a good effort.
Joe has done an amazing job of shaping them into a choir, and the group continues to grow. It meets as an after school club on Monday. Long term I hope some of them will want to come and sing in the Sunday choir too.
The concert exceeded expectations and many parents turned out and enjoyed it.
|
|
|
|
|
Later that week we had two visits from musicians from Ibstock Place School.
An early music concert on Wednesday:
|
|
|
|
|
And a carol service on Thursday:
|
|
|
|
|
How else can we make our lovely building available for good purposes in the wider community?
And how can we help those who come in to know the One who is at the heart of it all?
Then on Friday we gathered in sombre yet hopeful mood for Dorothy Crawley’s funeral.
|
|
|
|
|
Dorothy has been a prayerful presence at the heart of our church for longer than many of us have been alive. Even those who never met her – for she was housebound from the start of this decade – will have been in her prayers.
May we all lives as long and as full of faith, hope and love!
Here she is as few if any of us will have known her, a young woman fresh from the privations of being a teenager in a world at war:
|
|
|
|
|
Rest eternal grant unto her, O Lord
Let light perpetual shine upon her:
May she rest in peace and rise in glory.
This Sunday we will speak of John the Baptist. The first of his two appearances in the calendar for Advent.
Next week we consider him as the first of the evangelists. Tomorrow we think of him as the last of the prophets.
John always points away from himself to Jesus:
|
|
|
|
|
Here he is depicted by Matthias Grünewald in a detail from the Eisenheim altarpiece.
The artist places John anachronistically at the crucifixion, pointing to Jesus, and has emphasised the size of his pointing finger.
Let us point to Jesus, the living Word, in the way we ourselves live!
|
|
|
Come, thou long expected Jesus!
|
|
|
