I hope you have all had a good week and that you and your family are keeping well.

The Prime Minister spoke about the ‘roadmap’ out of lockdown on Monday. The full implications of how this affects Churches, and therefore us, is still to be assessed by the national church. Like many churches across the country, we decided to suspend public worship until there were changes in the ‘stay at home’ requirements. There have been some changes but the exact details of how they will allow us to move forward is still a little unclear. I hope that the national advice will help.

I am very aware the Easter is 4 weeks away. The Worship Leaders have given it some brief thought and I know that the Choir are practicing special music for this great celebration. From Palm Sunday through to Easter Day there are some major services to plan. I suspect that we’ll end up with a mixture of special online only services and live streamed worship from the Church or the Church Car Park as we did for Christmas. Watch this space!

Our first study session on climate justice on Wednesday night was very successful. There were some very interesting comments and suggestions as to how we as a Christian community should respond. How can we reduce our use of and reliance on plastic in Church? Should we use recycled paper towels and toilet paper? Can we look again at using fairly traded and environmentally friendly products. Have a look at this website - https://uk.whogivesacrap.org/collections/all - for example.

You are very welcome to join us. Here are the joining details:-

Zoom Meeting ID: 873 0988 5456; Passcode: 011017. You can also join on the phone on either of these numbers - 0203 051 2874 or 0203 481 5237 – you will need to enter the ID and passcode when prompted, so make a note of them before you call. If you’ve mislaid the study course booklet, it is attached.

Thank you to those of you who have already contributed to our Lent appeal supporting the work of USPG, and in particular their education programme in South India. Working with the local churches, they want to provide an educational programme to help students address the environmental issues they face in their daily lives.

The suggested donation is £10. We have set up a CAF Donate page along the same lines as we did during Christmas. Please go to this link https://cafdonate.cafonline.org/15983 and fill in your details etc. It should only take you a few minutes.

Today we say goodbye to Jackie and Paul Watkins as they move to Cambridgeshire be nearer family and grandchildren in particular. They both made significant contributions to our Christian family - Churchwarden/PCC member, reading at services, helping with the Summer Fete to name but a few. We wish them God speed and every blessing in this next stage in their life.

Tomorrow’s 10.30 service is also attached. It will be led by Gill. James is leading the afternoon service of Evensong at 4.00pm. We had some difficulty with the volume of the hymns during Friday afternoon’s service. We suspect it may be something to do with Facebook thinking that we do not have the correct licences to use the recordings – we do. We had a similar problem when we first began to stream services at the beginning of the first lockdown nearly a year ago. We’ll keep an eye on it but in the meantime if you can’t hear the music for the hymns or it seems very faint, please persevere and stay with us.

With God’s blessing,

David