The Magazine, April 2005 (Section 1)

Magazine Production Team
Deadline for May magazine: 15th April

Team News

Annual Meetings
April is the time for Annual Meetings and I hope that each person on the Electoral Roll will attend the meetings. The PCC sent out a letter to a number of people who we were unsure about remaining on the roll and the annual report will show a reduction in the numbers. We only made one mistake in writing to an established member of the congregation – I think they have forgiven us!

Church Annual Meetings
These are on Sunday 3rd April when local matters are decided, and the Annual Parish Meeting is on Wednesday 6th April in the Langley Hall. At that meeting, we shall review the year and do some ‘blue sky thinking’ about the future. The clergy are preparing a presentation for reflection along with the presentation to be made a week later at a Deanery pastoral committee meeting. At its meeting in March the PCC approved the accounts but noted that the Bracknell Team still has increases of 20% in share allocation whilst other parishes have decreases of 11%. The Deanery meeting this month will address anomalies and look at how we might also increase our own giving. We are delighted to learn that the Chancellor has extended zero rating for church buildings but it does mean that we shall have to get on with the listing of Holy Trinity Church.

St. Paul’s
In the light of the ongoing conversations about St Paul’s, the Bishop will be meeting the stipendiary clergy this month to look at the options concerning Harmans Water and Crown Wood.

A big Thank You
At the APM we shall say thank you to Graham Dives for all his work as Church Warden these last six years. Graham’s contribution to our parish cannot be overestimated. Both in the public arena and behind the scenes he has been a tower of strength to so many and not least myself. His counsel, wisdom and insight have been of the highest calibre and he undertaken all his duties with so much patience and no little humour.

The Langley Centre
The Langley Centre is not forgotten and there are meetings in April to take forward the negotiations. So much depends on the time scale of the town centre development and at present there is no end in sight for the beginning! (Winston Churchill would understand that!)

Deanery Event
On May 15th there is Deanery event at Ranelagh School which means there will be no morning services, except an 8am at Holy Trinity. It is Pentecost and Bishop Stephen will be joining the Deanery for the morning. Details will be published later but the programme so far is:
 

Fair Trade Sunday
On 10th April is Fair Trade Sunday and we shall be marking that day in all our services in the parish

Parish Office
The Parish Office is closed during the week beginning Monday 18 April. Please contact Mark Ackford on 452608 for any parish matters.

Confirmation Sunday
June 12th is Confirmation Sunday and I am hoping that a number of adults will take the opportunity of being presented to the Bishop for confirmation. Please call me to talk about it if you are interested.

David

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News from Holy Trinity

Annual Meeting
Our annual meeting is on Sunday 3 April and follows a said Holy Communion Service at 10am. We shall need to elect a PCC member and I would welcome nominations please.

Civic Service
On May 22nd the Bracknell Town Council is celebrating fifty years and I have invited them for a Civic Service at Holy Trinity. There will be a dedication of a new mayoral chain of office during the service. At the same time, the Bracknell Rotary Club is celebrating one hundred years of Rotary international and they too would like to come along, so we have decided to make the service at 11.00am and have a said Holy Communion service at 10am instead. The Church of England used to do this a long time ago and no doubt some of you will remember those days.

Mark’s Ordination
Mark Ackford is being ordained priest on Sunday 26th June. We hope that a good number of people will be going to Reading to support Mark.
Can people let me know if they want a coach or would rather go separately in cars? Mark will celebrate his first communion Sunday July 3rd and afterwards there will be picnic lunch/BBQ in the Rectory Garden – hope you can all come!

David

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News from St Andrew's

Annual Church Meeting
The Annual Church Meeting takes place at 10.30am 3rd April. We do hope to see a good number of people supporting the meeting, to reflect over the last 12 months at St. Andrew's and to contribute thoughts and ideas for the future. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the people of St. Andrew's who contribute to the life of Christian witness within the Priestwood community.

Heating System
We have been enjoying the warmth of the church since the new boiler has been fitted and as St. Andrew's is used a lot by the Team a good number of
people are benefiting. To pay for the work that has been done we have a group of people led by Nicki, Sue, Joyce, Susan and Malcolm who have all
started the process of organising events.

Nicki has taken on the responsibility of running the 100 Club which will be starting in the near future. The stake will be £25 per year and monthly prizes will be drawn during coffee following the Sunday Morning Eucharist each month.

We will also welcome back to St. Andrew's the very popular Patrick Sheen Singers who are a Welsh ladies choir. They are singing a variety of songs on the 9th April at St. Andrew's church starting at 7pm. The cost of the concert will be £3.

Colin and Maggie Garton have offered to arrange a hymn singing afternoon at St. Andrew's on the 3rd July. You will be able to choose your favourite hymn and we will sing it. We hope that people will sponsor the hymn singing and share in the cream tea that will follow.

Finally a big thank you to Meryl, Gillian and family who have donated the money given in memory of their mother Betty to St. Andrew's. Thank you for
this generous offering.

Pilgrimage to Walsingham
The pilgrimage is fully booked with twenty-five people heading to Walsingham. In the next few weeks we will be needing to collect the deposits so that we can send and confirm our numbers to Walsingham. Thank you to Brenda Mullins for
organising this pilgrimage for us.

Models of Ministry Course
at St. Andrew's on Monday 11th April we will be sharing the third of our talks and discussion on the model of the church as Communion. This third session will focus on the ministry of lay people and the ministry that we are all called to through our baptism and confirmation. The session begins at 7pm with the talk, then we break for a fish and chip supper and share in discussion and we finish with the Eucharist.

Male Voice Choir
The Port Talbot Male voice choir will be singing at St. Andrew's on the 23rd April in aid of Save the Children. For more details on this please contact Sue Divall and Margaret Clark.

Parish Outing
Details of the Parish outing to Worcester Cathedral on the 25th June can be found in Len Barrett's publicity in this magazine. we do hope that a good number from the Bracknell team will support the day.

Thank you
Thank you to the good number of people that have supported the Lent services of The Stations of the Cross. Also those who have shared with the Bracknell Methodists and URC in the ‘Voices from the South’ course. As I write this St. Andrew's news I am looking forward to sharing with you all the Holy Week services.
 
Fr Jeremy

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News from St Paul's

Easter
Easter at St Paul’s includes a lot of sharing but as we are a shared church we do try to live up to our name.

Parade Services
Our parade services last week meant a HUGE sharing as over 100 people attended the Anglican parade service and over 200 attended the URC service. This is manageable at St Paul’s, with two services we can get over 300 people into our little church, it is just when the two sets of people meet in the vestibule that things get a bit dodgy…!

The parade service went really well for the Anglicans, Mark Ackford very ably led the service and even though this was his first encounter with the Uniformed Organisations who come to St Paul’s, he didn’t look too shell shocked afterwards!

One of the really good parts of our parade services is the way Ncompass, the URC music group, lead the singing. They were really on song this month and the singing was just great. Simon, the lead singer, does the best rendition of ‘We are marching in the light of God’, and they really raised the rafters at the end of the service.

‘You should have seen Mark’, someone said to me afterwards, ‘He was practically dancing on the stage’!

Easter Services
A small group met to plan our Easter Services as well and we have agreed to share our Maundy Thursday service and our Good Friday morning prayers, worship service and lunch. It should be a really special time, made all the more poignant for the fact that this is Peter Flint’s (the URC minister) last Easter with us. He is going to be much missed and every service we share with him feels all the more precious.

Tidy Up
Another sharing was our annual tidy up day. Where does the rubbish come from? Not just outside the church, where rubbish from the three take away shops in Harmans Water Square certainly adds to the mess in our car park, but also inside the church.

No matter how we try to keep the church tidy our tidy up day usually means bags of rubbish outside and frequent trips to the recycling centre handily placed just by the church.

Fair Trade
We have also shared a new emphasis on Fair Trade, especially during ‘Fair Trade’ fortnight where Julie McLaren displayed the widest range of Fair Trade goods during our Coffee and Cake Saturday morning. We sample mango, bananas as well as chocolate, biscuits and treats.

Service Books
Finally we have something new at St Paul’s – our new service books. We now have colour coded services! Why not come and share a service with us and give the new service books a go?

Catherine

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Parish Register

Please remember them all in your prayers

Baptisms

We welcome into the God's family

Holy Trinity
Kelly Marie Reid

St Andrew's
Chloe Holzman
Sophie Holzman
Louie James Holzman

St Paul’s
Jack Stephen Andrew Moore

Funerals

We commit to God's care

Holy Trinity

Winifred Gray (Win)	Aged 98
Anne Bates	Aged 92
Ronald Hewetson (Ron)	Aged 76
Anne Capelin (Barbara)	Aged 75
Annie Kimpton (Ann)	Aged 66

St Andrew's

Maud Sarney	Aged 100
Thomas Wilkins (Tom)	Aged 92
George Cort	Aged 89
May Carey (Maisie)	Aged 81

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April Diary

This can be found in For your Diary...

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April Prayer Diary

This can be found in Prayer Diary

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Taizé Meditation

These meditations are meant as a way of seeking God in silence and prayer in the midst of our daily life. During the course of a day, take a moment to read the Bible Passage with this short commentary and reflect on the questions which follow.

Isaiah 40:25-31
The anonymous prophet who spoke during Israel’s exile in Babylon announced to his compatriots that they would return to their homeland, but his hearers no longer had the courage to believe him. Their morale was broken. A nation in exile was considered doomed to disappear. Did not this situation mean that God no longer had compassion on his faithful or, worse still, that he showed himself to be powerless in the face of events?
To the physical exhaustion was thus added a profound weariness of faith. And it was up to the prophet to pull the people out of this paralysis by showing them a new way of looking at God. Lift up your eyes and look at the sky with all the movements of the stars (the Babylonians were good at astronomy). Who is behind this great array, behind the extreme complexity of these movements? You should not regard your God in a too-human manner; conceive his wisdom like that of a human brain or his strength as an energy which will inevitably be depleted.

If God is God, he must of necessity be beyond anything you can imagine. If today the human sciences have made lots of ways of representing God outdated and if because of this many people have trouble believing, for your part look beyond these ruins, for the true God can only be other than what is said of him. His strength is fundamentally different from any deployment of human power; his intelligence has resources we cannot even imagine.
In our current exhaustion which is not only due to our rhythm of life but which certainly also comes from the trouble we have in believing, the anonymous prophet would wish us to acquire a fresh way of looking at God, the astonishment of people who admit they have not yet understood who God is. It is not a matter of forcing ourselves to believe, but rather of letting the eyes of our heart be illuminated (Ephesians 1:18), so that something of the eternal newness of God can be reflected in them.

Does this text enlighten us in our present difficulties of discouragement and fatigue?

Although the prophet struggles against all forms of passivity, he does not preach unbridled activism. What does he want us to attain?

In a time like ours when God seems to be absent, how can the freshness of faith be renewed in those who believe?

Further information on Taizé can be obtained from the Community's website.

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