October news

Notices October 2010




Pulpit Arrangements Services start at 11.0 am



Sunday 3rd October Anton Baker

Sunday 10th October Rev Franziska Herring

Sunday 17th October Ges Murray

Sunday 24th October Joan Winterbottom

Sunday 31st October Joint service with Broadway ( 11am) no service at Blakenall



You will be most welcome to join us.

Porch and Offertory



Elder Duty

Kath Phillips



Communion Servers

Ges Murray and Ian Robertson



Coffee Rota

3rd October Cynth Murray

10th October Kath Phillips

17th October Liilian Mason

24th October Chris Moorhouse

31st October at Broadway
Editor’s letter October 2010


Dear Friends

I have been lucky to have been away on holiday in September.. Celebrating Ruby wedding anniversary in Italy.

One memorable experience was the Sunday service at a monastery in the hills on Tuscany.. All in Gregorian chant…

Now back home, back to work!

Our project in Niger to provide water wells and seeds is going very well and has saved lives at a time of famine; we have sent more funds to expand this project to cover a wider area and more people.

Fund raising for Pakistan has installed water purification plants and hot food distribution with a successful fund raining event at Walsall Town Hall raising over £30000 to directly help the victims of those floods.

We also will fund more cataract operations .. Each one frees the patient from dependency on begging with their new sight giving them the ability to earn a living.

While away on that holiday ! I read again the story of William Wilberforce born in the same city of Hull as myself… such dedication to the cause of abolition of slavery… it seems amazing now that we at that time we used our fellow human beings as slaves and treated them so dreadfully. However he did not give up and as a Christian he soldiered on despite initially overwhelming odds .. I am sure we all can in our small way gain inspiration from such heroes and work against evil large and small that threatens our world.

Hope we can support the efforts of Jean and Jill to supply shoe boxes for Christmas to those who have nothing



Regards

Ian



Ian
Dear Friends,




As I write, the visit of Pope Benedict to Britain has just ended. What have you made of this visit? We’ve had anxiety over security and the cost to the taxpayer, publicity for the failings of the church and for the way a saint is made, and we’ve had tens of thousands of people coming together to worship God.

But what has it meant to us Christians in the United Reformed Church?



There was a time when the differences between the Roman Catholics and us would have come to mind over and above anything else: Priests abusing children – couldn’t happen in our church, not because we are faultless, but because we don’t have priest!



Nowadays, the process of Christian Unity is enabling us to meet with our brothers and sisters in other parts of the Church and to recognise in all areas true faith and honest attempts to follow Jesus. Nowadays, we have Christian friends everywhere; we worship together and even exchange pulpits on a regular basis. Nowadays we know that the differences stem mainly from the way we organise our church lives. John Henry Newman was reported to have converted to Roman Catholicism because he felt the need to be in a church with a clear structure and clear lines of command.



Among Roman Catholics, people who dedicate their entire lives to the service of God are set aside as priests. They become intermediaries between God and lay people and help with the church’s task of interpreting the Bible for today’s generation. As they rise in the ranks, their responsibilities of discerning the will of God and listen to the leading of the Holy Spirit increase until one man(!) per generation is deemed to be so perfect in his discernment of God’s will that his word is everybody’s command.


In the United Reformed Church, we have plenty of people who dedicate their lives to the service of God. We may yearn for some firmer leadership, but we don’t have priests. The reason for this is our Free Church interpretation of the Bible when it comes to the gospel accounts of the death of Jesus that the curtain in the temple was torn in two. We believe this means that the death of Jesus has once and for all done away with the separation between believers and God: now we all have access to God directly and no longer need priests or saints to pray for us.



In the United Reformed Church, we take the idea of the priesthood of all believers so seriously, that we have done away with any kind of hierarchy. Each and every one of us can pray to God and expect an answer. Each and every one of us can read the Bible for ourselves and, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, discern its truth for our generation. What a privilege and what a responsibility!



As we are all fallible and prone to listen to our selfish will more intently than to the leading of the Holy Spirit, we recognise that leadership of God’s Church can only be undertaken by a group of Christians who get together to discern the Spirit’s guidance. That is our Church Meeting! On becoming a church member, every single one of us has pledged to make attendance at Church Meetings as much of a priority as attendance at worship – and we need every one to be there, simply because we don’t have a Pope to tell us how to order our affairs.

God bless you all,



Franziska