I hope you and your family are all well.
There is definitely a feeling of spring in the air. I took a few photographs of the Churchyard at the beginning of the week which you can find on our Facebook site.
This Sunday, Bishop Keith (Bishop of Birkenhead) will be saying farewell to the Diocese after 14 years with us. He has visited us on a number of occasions over the years for Confirmations. Ian (McIntyre) has contributed a photographs of one of those visits for Bp Keith’s memory book. Bp Keith has contributed to the March edition of the Diocesan Newsletter - https://d3hgrlq6yacptf.cloudfront.net/5f20800211eb6/content/pages/documents/cdn-5.pdf. Bp Keith's final service is Sunday afternoon at 3.00pm. You can watch it here:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frfGWfo2ykE
You may recall that just before the first lockdown, Myra (Fye) encouraged us to make donations to the TEARFUND toilet twinning campaign. Thanks to your contributions we have been able to twin our toilets in Church with one in Cote d’Ivoire and one in Zambia, along with a tap in Guatemala. If you want to find out more about these twinning schemes, please go to:-https://www.toilettwinning.org/
Tomorrow sees schools reopening for all children after many months of closure and disruption to their education. Please pray for the schools in our parish - Daresbury and Moore Primary Schools, and Sandymoor Ormiston Academy – their staff, children and Governors. It will be a very difficult few weeks as they settle down to a new routine and way of school life.
As the lockdown is beginning to be relaxed and with Easter only a few weeks off, we have been giving some thought to re-opening the Church on Sundays for worship and private prayer. Having discussed things with the PCC this week, I am pleased to let you know that the Chapel will be open for private prayer on Sunday afternoons from 2.00pm to 4.00pm, starting on 14<sup>th</sup> March, Mothering Sunday. The arrangements we had in place for hand sanitising and distance will apply as before.
Our first Parish Communion service will be on Palm Sunday 28<sup>th</sup> March at 10.30am. As before, we will have to limit the numbers to 30, all socially distanced. Tickets will be available through Eventbrite from this week. The service, as with all future Sunday services, will be streamed on Facebook Live. As I have said before, streaming through Facebook will be a permanent feature of our worshipping life.
Easter Day will include a Parish Communion service at 10.30am. We are still working out the details, but we hope to be able to hold it in the car park in a similar way to Carols in the Car Park at Christmas. That way we can have more attending. I hope to be able to give more details next week.
As for Holy Week, we will be holding a Maundy Thursday service on 1<sup>st</sup> April at 7.30pm. On Good Friday 10.30am there will be a service of Morning Prayer with a dramatized reading of the final hours of Jesus’s life. These will be streamed from the worship leaders’ homes on Facebook. Again, more to follow.
In the meantime, this Sunday’s 10.30am service sheet is attached. It will be led by James. I shall be leading Evensong from the Book of Common Prayer in the afternoon at 4.00pm.
I hope you have a good week.
With God’s blessing,
David