Please find the Taizé service for this week. Special thanks to June and Olivia Jasper for the chants. Please feel free to join in with them – the words are on the screen.
Worship for the Second Sunday of Easter
Welcome, we have three online services below for you to join in, plus below is the sermon from Bishop Andrew.
If you haven’t signed up for our E News, or Weekly Notices, please do so. Includes information about what is coming in the next week and the week after.
The parish now has its own YouTube channel where we are posting services, sermons, music and other videos. Please sign up to it by clicking here and then clicking on ‘Subscribe’. Then you can browse our videos to your heart’s content.
In Lesley’s sermon she asks us what changes we want to see in our world after the lockdown, see this blog and please comment there and on Facebook and Twitter to let us know what you think.
St John’s Service
St George’s Service
St Mark’s Service
Bishop’s Sermon
Discussion for a change
When we look back on 2020, what will we reflect? Will it have been a strange blip in time which will have caused some people untold grief and given some a new direction, but which most will have soon forgotten as they go back to the old ways, to the system which we knew as normal? Will we be caught up in the busyness of life and all its joys and its troubles and the pandemic be like some strange dream?
Or will something have changed?
Do we want it to change?
According to one survey, 91% of us want change.
In today’s sermon, Lesley speaks about the jolt which the disciple Thomas had when he met the risen Christ. She then quotes from speaker and author Charles Eisenstein who suggests that Covid-19 is “like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality”. He adds: “When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future”.
We have made huge changes in how we do things in this lockdown. But what do we want in the future? What do we want for society? For church? What hopes do we have which are true hopes, not just some wishful thinking?
Can we have a discussion about this?
Please do comment on this blog post and on Facebook and Twitter to let us know what you think.
Managing isolation
If you are struggling with isolation you may find these two links helpful: https://www.alonetogether.org.uk/
Picture by Noah Silliman on Unsplash.
We’re on YouTube!
The parish now has its own YouTube channel where we are posting services, sermons, music and other videos. Please sign up to it by clicking here and then clicking on ‘Subscribe’. Then you can browse our videos to your heart’s content.
We’d like to add videos of our church members doing things – singing, poetry, drama etc. If you have anything you would like to share, contact Alan, revd.alan@badshotleaandhale.org
Where is God in the suffering?
Where is God in this coronavirus pandemic? Where is God in any suffering?
These are reasonable questions. Here are two people who have been thinking about this.
In an article for unherd.com, Giles Fraser doesn’t give an answer but says that Christianity allows us to sit with the question, to weep with the question. Church, he says, “remains one of the few spaces in our culture in which we are allowed to acknowledge the existence of futile suffering without someone feeling so uncomfortable about it that they need to reassure us all that everything is going to be OK”.
And yet, that reassurance is still there in “a story that speaks of love as being ultimately greater that death, and as a triumph over even the most purposeless of human pain”.
Read the whole piece here.
For Richard Rohr, suffering may be inevitable but it is also a time when God can be trusted. On Tuesday this week (April 14), in his daily meditation published on the Centre for Action and Contemplation website, he reflected that: “Our knowledge of God is participatory. God refuses to be intellectually ‘thought’, and is only known in the passion and pain of it all, when the issues become soul-sized and worthy of us.”
Read the whole piece here.
Image by Road Trip with Raj on Unsplash.
Friday Service
Apologies if you tried to get on earlier and found a confusing service. In rushing to fix one problem I created another. This should at about 3:00 on Friday 17th.
Click on the video to join us in worship
Anxious? Need help? Citizens Advice is here
Coronavirus is causing massive challenges to many of us, including financial and those involving domestic abuse. Among those there to help is Citizens Advice Waverley.
Advisers can provide advice about a range of issues:
- Employment
- Claiming benefits
- Paying your bills
- Housing problems
- Relationship breakdowns.
Contact Citizens Advice Waverley
There is a team of more than 60 home-based advisers ready to give free, independent advice. The best ways to contact them are:
- Email – for a fast response, please complete our online form at: Citizens Advice Waverley email form
- Phone – if you need to speak with an Adviser, call the Adviceline: 0344 848 7969.
Domestic Abuse
South West Surrey Domestic Abuse Outreach Team is continuing to help during this period. Domestic abuse is any incident or pattern of incidents of controlling, coercive, threatening behaviour, violence or abuse between those aged 16 or over who are, or have been, intimate partners or family members regardless of gender or sexuality.
The team includes qualified independent Domestic Violence Advisers who provide practical advice and emotional support. They will always listen, support and believe. Call them on 01483 898884 (Mon-Fri 9-4pm) or email swr@swsda.org.uk
On-line support
There is also plenty of on-line self-help material:
- Citizens Advice Waverley website
- Facebook and Twitter
- National Citizens Advice information site: Coronavirus: What it Means for You
- Advice on the most popular topics relating to the impact of Coronavirus:
Helping the Foodbank
Farnham Foodbank is still busy and is distributing food direct to clients, thanks to furloughed drivers from a local engineering firm. If you need help, see details below.
Donations are also needed, both food and money, and you can drop donations off at Church House (the Vineyard Centre), Union Road, Farnham (opposite Gostrey Meadow) between 10am and noon on Thursdays.
Particularly needed at the moment tinned tomatoes, tinned potatoes, individual sponge puddings, sachets of powdered desserts (like Angel Delight), instant mash, tinned rice puddings, laundry detergent tablets, tinned meat (ham, spam, corned beef etc.), and they would love sun cream.
If you need help and have a paper voucher, take a photo of the paper voucher and text it to the Foodbank on 079015 81539 or email it to info@farnham.foodbank.org.uk
They will deliver a food supply to your doorstep.
If you don’t yet have a voucher, contact a Referral Agency who will discuss your situation and supply you with a Foodbank voucher, or contact the Foodbank with the details directly.
Farnham Foodbank: https://farnham.foodbank.org.uk/
Joining After-Church Coffee on a Mobile Phone or Tablet
You may be aware that we have been videoconferencing after church coffee. If you have a smart phone and would like to join us, here are the instructions. These take screen shots from a recent version of Android, but I guess iPhones work similarly (the picture above is an iPhone, so don’t worry if yours doesn’t look like that).
Microsoft Teams
Go into the Play Store (Android) or App Store (Apple).
In the bar at the top type Microsoft Teams
Click on Microsoft Teams in the list.
Your screen should say install (mine says open because it is already installed). Click on that.
When the time to join comes, click on the link in the Weekly Notices, or the invitation that has been emailed to you.
Zoom
Go into the Play Store as above.
type zoom
Pick Zoom Cloud Meetings.
Click on Install as above.
When the time to join comes, click on the link in the Weekly Notices, or the invitation that has been emailed to you.
Getting Weekly Notices
If you do not currently get the weekly notices, you can sign up here.
Photo by: Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay
The Parish of Badshot Lea and Hale 