Dear Friends
Holy Week
I don’t know how your Lenten discipline is going, but whether or not you’ve kept it up there’s another chance to deepen your relationship with God around the corner: Holy Week. All the churches have their plans in place to provide opportunities to explore the wonder and the mystery, the passion and the pain of that Rollercoaster Week: from “Hosanna” to “Crucify” in five days. Who says the Christian faith has no understanding of what it means to live in the ‘real world’: we live our faith amongst ‘real’ human beings who are just as capable of being swayed by the powers that be as ever they were in Jerusalem then. And, if we’re honest, we who seek to follow Jesus, are just as likely as the twelve he chose to fall asleep, deny him and run away. Yet Holy Week remains that point around which the truth of our faith revolves: that beyond the valley of the shadow of death we are offered life, light and love.
Good Friday
It’s exciting to be welcoming the new Bishop of Reading to the parish so soon after he takes up the post. Bishop Andrew will be at the Three Hours in St Peter’s starting at 12.00noon.
Annual Parish Meeting : Tuesday 19 April
Our annual meeting (at St John’s) will start at 7.30pm with Communion. The meeting to elect Wardens and APCM will follow when we’ll hear about the past year and our plans for the future. We’ll also elect members to the church council. Nomination forms are out now. It would be wonderful to have elections for Wardens for the churches and for the PCC places.
The Royal Wedding
As a parish initiative, Graeme has been working on plans to screen the Royal Wedding live in St Peter’s. Doors will be open at 10.00am and tickets are available from him. This is great opportunity to invite your friends and neighbours to an event (actually, to a service) in a church when they might find crossing that threshold on a Sunday morning quite hard.
Another Wedding
A local school has asked if it can stage a wedding in church as part of their celebrations of the Royal Wedding. It’s a wonderful idea which we have agreed to enthusiastically, and offered to other schools, suggesting services in churches near them. If you’d like to know more about this, or if you’d like to offer to help with this initiative, please do get in touch with me.
Church Anniversaries
St George Tylehurst celebrates 125 years on Saturday 30 April with a service at 11.00am. St Andrew Caversham celebrates it’s Centenary on Sunday 1st May with a Communion Service at 6.30pm at which the Bishop of Oxford will preside. We’re all invited to join them.
With my very best wishes,
Dan