On 1st October, Come along to Harvest Festival and sing your favourite Harvest Hymns:
Come and celebrate the fruits of our community orchard from 10:00 until 11:00am on 1st October at St Mark’s. We have a juicer so if you would like to turn your apples into juice then bring apples that are in good condition, washed and picked from the tree along with clean two litre plastic milk cartons including the lid to put the juice in. We will be having some entertainment including apple tasting and apple-y music (and possibly dance). If that isn’t enough apply-ness there will be pancakes with apple filling to eat! Afterwards, you are welcome to stay for the 11am service if you wish.
At St Mark’s Church on 22nd October there will be a special Festival Service at 11am. By this time we should have a highly decorated church as the output of the workshops will be on display! The service will be led by Lesley Shatwell. As she is a lay minister, it won’t be a communion service. However, it will be highly unusual, if not unique, in that it will be almost entirely a sung service, including the Gospel reading and sermon! We will make sure the melodies are accessible to all – no weird phrasing or unusual cadences designed to catch the uninitiated. The Music can be found here.
We will finish with a bring and share lunch. All welcome.
At St Mark’s Church, Upper Hale there will be workshops in the morning 10 – 12:30 and the afternoon 2 – 4:30. We’re still finalising the times and contents, but there will be a come-all-ye music workshop where musicians of any standard and any instrument are welcome to come along and join in. There will also be a singing workshop, run by Veronica (Nonny) Tabbush, an experienced choir leader who has organised choirs in Aldershot and Bordon. She presently lives in the Bristol area and runs choirs there.
There will be painting and arts and crafts workshops, possibly with photography and stone masonry. We will also be re-drawing the map of Hale.
In the evening there will be a concert starting at 7pm. We’ll have a couple of pieces on Emily (the pipe organ), songs to piano accompaniment, a rock band, a choral group and a rock-a-billy/country band. There will be an interval and tea, coffee etc. half way through.
Saturday night ceilidh 7 – 10pm at St Mark’s Church, Upper Hale, GU9 0LT.
The band will be the one that plays for the annual Candlemas barn dance at St Georges, with Kris Lawrence as caller. There could also be a variable number of additional musicians, as those attending the workshop during the day will be welcome to sit in with us. We will also hopefully have a performance from the choir workshop and displays of art and photography generated during the day.
On the 10th of September, St John’s Church, Hale was the venue for the Civic Service for Farnham Town Mayor, Councillor Michael Hodge.
The service was attended by Mike’s family, friends, fellow mayors and community representatives. During the service Mike Hodge committed to serve the people of Farnham to the best of his ability during his year in office.
‘Serving others’ was the theme of the afternoon which the Reverend Hannah Moore explored in her address stating, “it is through service that we either discover our vocation or fulfil it as we stop focusing on our self and start to focus on the needs around us.”
After the formal service, Mayor Hodge said, “I would like to thank everybody who came to the civic service. My thanks also go to the Reverends Hannah Moore and Michael Hopkins, the organist, the choir and everybody else who contributed towards the success of the service.” Reverend Hannah Moore added her thanks to those of Mr Hodge commenting “it was an honour and a privilege for St John’s to host the Civic Service as it provided the Parish of Badshot Lea and Hale with another opportunity to play it’s part within the Farnham community.”
Reverend Hannah Moore will continue to serve the Mayor during his year in office as she acts as his Chaplain. When asked what this role entails she commented, “it means being available to be a listening ear for the Mayor, should he need it during the year and occasionally leading prayers at the Town Council meetings.”
After the service, canapes and refreshments were served from the Sumner Room, which was named after Bishop Charles Sumner, the former Bishop of Winchester and founder of St John’s Church.
Well, we’ve now got a snazzy logo and a title for the festival!
This is an update on where we are with the Arts and Music festival at St Mark’s. However, as I’m writing this on the last day of August, for the October magazine, it’s likely that by the time you read this we’ll have extra publicity material with more details available.
Dates: Friday 20th to Sunday 22nd October 2017.
The festival will be free. We will have buckets available for voluntary donations. Any donations on the Friday night will go towards the organ restoration fund. Any subsequent donations, after deduction of expenses, will go the parish general fund and the fabric fund, both of which need all the help they can get!
Friday
We’ll be setting up an art exhibition in the afternoon. In the evening there will be a concert starting at 7pm. We’ve sorted the acts now. We’ll have a couple of pieces on Emily (the pipe organ), songs to piano accompaniment, a rock band, a choral group and a rock-a-billy/country band. There will be an interval and tea, coffee etc. half way through.
Saturday
Workshops in the morning 10 – 12:30 and the afternoon 2 – 4:30. We’re still finalising the times and contents, but there will be a come-all-ye music workshop where musicians of any standard and any instrument are welcome to come along and join in. There will also be a singing workshop, run by Veronica (Nonny) Tabbush, an experienced choir leader who has organised choirs in Aldershot and Bordon. She presently lives in the Bristol area and runs choirs there.
There will definitely be painting and arts and crafts workshops, possibly with photography and stone masonry, but we’re still finalising the details here.
At the moment the schedule has to be finalised. Details will be available well in advance of the festival.
Saturday night ceilidh 7 – 10pm. This starts and finishes early as we have to get the church ready for services the following day. The band will be the one that plays for the annual Candlemas barn dance at St Georges, with Kris Lawrence as caller. There could also be a variable number of additional musicians, as those attending the workshop during the day will be welcome to sit in with us. We will also hopefully have a performance from the choir workshop and displays of art and photography generated during the day.
Sunday
Service 11am. By this time we should have a highly decorated church as the output of the workshops will be on display! The service will be led by Lesley Shatwell. As she is a lay minister, it won’t be a communion service. However, it will be highly unusual, if not unique, in that it will be almost entirely a sung service, including the Gospel reading and sermon! We will make sure the melodies are accessible to all – no weird phrasing or unusual cadences designed to catch the uninitiated. It’s highly likely we’ll make any unfamiliar hymns etc. available as MP3 files before the event.
We will finish with a bring and share lunch. All welcome.
Bob Shatwell
I’m going to talk both generally and personally about inclusivity today – generally because there are some general principles and personally because we all perceive our lives and faith through our own, personal eyes.
So, to start personally, about 18 months ago I had not heard of Inclusive Church. I then came across an ‘Inclusive Church’ day being held at a church near Basingstoke and included it in a news bulletin for another diocese for whom I had recently started working. There was a complaint and the reason lay in the Inclusive Church statement of belief. “We believe in Inclusive Church – church which does not discriminate, on any level, on grounds of economic power, gender, mental health, physical ability, race or sexuality. We believe in Church which welcomes and serves all people in the name of Jesus Christ; which is scripturally faithful; which seeks to proclaim the Gospel afresh for each generation; and which, in the power of the Holy Spirit, allows all people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ.”
The complaint went to the powers that be and it was upheld. No mention of Inclusive Church please. The reason was the mention of sexuality.
I felt I needed to find out more and look more deeply into what Inclusive Church did and that is one of the reasons why this sermon series has taken place and why we are thinking of joining Inclusive Church. We had Dianna Gwilliams, Dean of Guildford Cathedral and chair of trustees of Inclusive Church, to speak in the parish last month and she said that Inclusive Church encourages churches to look at who isn’t coming to the church and why. Is it because they are going elsewhere? That’s fine. We don’t want to take people from other churches. Is it because the signs are difficult to read if you have learning difficulties, is it because you are concerned that your children are too noisy, is it because you are worried you can’t put money into the collection plate, is it because you don’t feel welcome because of who you are?
Early in the series, Lesley challenged us at St Mark’s to think about times when we had felt excluded. We got into groups and I started talking about a group of people whom I knew from the local school who didn’t really want to come to church because of what I perceived to be social and economic reasons and how could we overcome this. A bit later I realised that I was talking about ‘them and us’, rather than about ‘us’. My very language – and attitude – was being exclusive. After all, we are all the body of Christ. It’s not a case of ‘us’ being a body and ‘them’ being another body. We are the body.
There are a series of books about the different groups that Inclusive Church is trying to be open to and in one of them – about poverty – it is suggested that just as if one part of your body is hurting you do not go ‘oh poor you’ but you give a yelp of pain, so if one part of the body of Christ is hurting then the whole body is affected.
So, if anyone is excluded whether unwittingly or – at times – deliberately, then the whole church is hurt. And I am not getting far with inclusion if I say ‘them’ rather than ‘us’.
So, what do we do?
We talk, we share, we listen. Again, in the book on poverty there was an example of a project – called ‘Listen Up’ – which had people acting as both interviewers and interviewees, so that they really shared and heard each other which helped everyone see things from other people’s perspectives, helped them do what Atticus Finch said in To Kill a Mockingbird: ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”
In doing this we will learn, we will be vulnerable and we will make mistakes. But we can acknowledge mistakes and move on. We can share more of our humanity if we are vulnerable.
So again, I am going to share something personal. My elder son is gay. That’s fine – and he gave me permission to speak about this, in fact saying that he wants people to know as much homophobia comes, he believes, from hiding when someone does not define themselves as straight.
He has felt, I believe, welcome in this parish, but he told me last week that he knows few gay people who wouldn’t come to church because of the prejudice, because of the damaging experiences they have had. He said that church, on the whole, does not feel like a safe place for a gay person and that having a safe space – a place where you can be yourself without fear – is vital.
What? Even in this parish? Aren’t we inclusive? Probably more so on some issues but not on others. I was really upset by the idea that many LGBT+ people would not want to come into a church, however inclusive it might be trying to be, because of past history. Maybe I should have known that. I wasn’t seeing the world through my son’s eyes, walking in his skin. What else don’t I realise? Who else feels like this? We can’t all know. I, for instance, don’t know a lot about disability or issues raised by ethnicity. I speak from my own pretty privileged background. I can only ask, we can only ask, and share and be prepared to be vulnerable. It may mean that others come forward and speak from their own experience, or feel able to come into the church, make their voices heard, become leaders.
And we will get it wrong. I may be getting some of this wrong. But I, we, will learn.
The other thing is that we can ask for forgiveness and ask for grace – God’s grace. Because this is the difference. What I have been saying in many ways could apply to a secular organisation but there is a difference. As the Inclusive Church statement of belief says: “We believe in Church which welcomes and serves all people in the name of Jesus Christ” – and Jesus Christ in his time on earth broke down barriers, was inclusive, welcomed the outsider, never cared what someone’s status was, never asked if Peter was educated or from a privileged economic background before telling him to ‘build my church’, never asked about sexuality – and, the statement continues believes in a church which, in the power of the Holy Spirit, allows all people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Jesus Christ.”
These things can be done in the power of the Holy Spirit. It takes us being open and determined – conduits of the Holy Spirit.
Stella Wiseman
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away there was a church. A nice, pretty church, St Exaltus The Great in the nice pretty village of Higher Exclusive. Look, the parishioners are gathering for their Sunday morning service. The surrounding lanes are chock-a-block as every neat and nice family wants to show off their expensive car on a Sunday morning.
But what’s this? How unpleasant! What a dreadful sight! They have to walk past a beggar (with his dirty dog on an old piece of string) who is sitting in the church gateway. How dare he, the cheek of it. “Don’t worry,” reassures Mr We’ll-have-none-of-that, the churchwarden, “I’ve called the police – they will move him along.”
Inside St Exaltus The Great, everyone is singing sweetly, “All things bright and beautiful … The rich man in his castle the poor man at the gate, God made them high and lowly, each one to their estate …”
But what’s this commotion at the door? Who’s that trying to get in? She’s upsetting Mrs Keep-that-child-quiet and Mrs Don’t-sit-there of the Welcoming Committee – well there’s a turn up for the books! A big black woman trying to get into St Exaltus The Great! Here in Higher Exclusive! We don’t see those sort of people in this village. Some of the stronger men step forward, we can’t have her disrupting our service, she’s got rainbow coloured hair, for goodness sake!
“Let me in! I know I am a sinner but I want to praise God for making me as I am, I want to come to God, I am a child of God!”
“She’s as mad as a hatter! Got no business upsetting The Welcoming Committee. Look at her in that shoddy, flimsy dress – she looks like a street-walker.”
“Wait a minute …” Mrs Nosey-parker is looking more carefully at the woman, “ … I know that one. You’d never guess that her real name is STANLEY! Yes, she was a boy when she was born.”
That’s too much for Gloria as she is now, not Stanley any more. She runs from the church in tears.
“Now vicar, where were we … oh I know, let’s share the peace.”
The next week, all the lanes are blocked with the posh cars, there’s no beggar in the gate and no sign of the dog, just a uniformed local bobby greeting the parishioners as they arrive. All seems well. But there is a stranger in church. A smartly dressed, elderly woman sitting quietly praying near the back of the church. Mrs Get-everyone-on-the-rota has already spotted her: she looks like she might be good at flower arranging. The choir sings and the vicar walks in, “Good morning and welcome one and all!”
“There was no welcome for my son last week was there.” What’s this? The smartly dressed old lady is walking down the aisle toward the vicar. She turns at the chancel step to face the congregation. “Yes, my son who was sitting with his dog at the church gate. You all pushed past him.”
“Come on, sit down now, don’t cause a scene, we want to get on with the service, we’ll talk about it afterwards …”
But the old lady was having none of it. “What about my daughter Gloria? You were very cruel to her. How do you think she felt?”
The people looked at the little old lady, clean, neat and white – how could she be the mother of the tramp at the gate and the woman who was born a man and black? Mrs Don’t -sit-there was already regretting that she had given the woman a hymn book. The vicar stepped forward, he knew his scripture, “’Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, burn incense to Baal and follow other gods you have not known, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, “We are safe”—safe to do all these detestable things?’ Jeremiah 7:9-10”
The woman smiled, “Who are the ones needing our Lord’s forgiveness and mercy? Do you remember in our reading today when the woman begs Jesus to heal her daughter and she will not take no for the final answer? I have come to your church today to remind you that all are welcome in God’s house … even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table. And we are all human beings: ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’ Just because these people are not like you, they think differently, they dress differently, they have less money than you, they may do outrageous things and scare you … are they any less the children of our same heavenly father?”
Let’s close the window onto St Exaltus The Great and come back to St Mark’s here today.
I would be ashamed to call myself Christian if I went to a church like St Exaltus The Great. This is God’s house and we are only passing through. Everyone is passing through and everyone is equally as entitled to be here as we are. We are the current custodians of our church in this community and we have the God-given task to extend God’s welcome to all.
I love St Mark’s precisely because we don’t have The Welcoming Committee of Mrs Don’t-sit-there and Mrs Keep-that-child-quiet.
Finally, let me remind you of the words we speak at each baptism: “There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism: by one Spirit we are all baptized into one body. We welcome you into the fellowship of faith; we are children of the same heavenly Father; we welcome you.”
And let us pray that all find welcome in our church today and always.
The Parish of Badshot Lea and Hale 