“A very warm welcome to you all” has, I’m sure everyone would agree, taken on quite a different meaning over most of July and August as we, and countless others across the country and the world, have “basked” in unprecedented temperatures. More recently it has been a real pleasure to welcome people “on this lovely cool and wet morning/evening”!

Later this month we will be celebrating our annual Harvest Festival, and we will be thinking about and praying for our farming community and everything they’ve had to go through over these last few months. We will give thanks for their resilience and determination, and will be praying for all those who, across our world, are being affected by climate change in its many and different manifestations. We are also thinking in this Parish, and across the whole Church of England, about the ways in which we can play our part in reducing the effects of climate change. To this end, and as part of Eco-Church, some members of the congregation attended a workshop in August about sustainability and Church flowers – a small thing perhaps but, in the words of a well known supermarket “every little helps”.

God’s world is in our hands – we are the stewards of God’s creation, and this stewardship involves responsibilities and decision making which we are all only just beginning to grapple with seriously. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow...........look at the birds of the air, who neither reap nor sow and yet are fed..........” asked Jesus of the crowds who came to listen to him on the mountainside beside the Sea of Galilee, and he asks the same of us today, 20 centuries later, as we consider our place and role and responsibilities within the natural world.

And so as we gather across the country to give thanks this month, and next, for the work of the farming community we need also to reflect on our part in God’s creation, and to exercise wise and careful stewardship in all our dealings with the natural world – for our good but especially for the good of all those who will follow us.

May God’s blessing be upon each and every one of us in this coming month.

The Revd Alec Brown.