The G46 Scouts meet on Friday evenings, in their HQ behind the Church Hall. For further details, please see the attachment below.
Our main Sunday service takes place at 10.00, and all are welcome. We follow a modern and accessible Common Worship order of service, with Junior Church for children and young people roughly every other week: for details, please see the individual listings on the 'Services and Events' page.
Family Communion for the tenth Sunday after Trinity: celebrant the Revd Tola Badejo.
First reading: Jeremiah 1. 4 - 10
Gospel: Luke 13. 10 - 17
Brunel famously said that 'Rules are for the obedience of fools and the guidance of wise men'; he meant that, while rules are necessary and helpful in any aspect of life, it is important to understand why they were created and in what circumstances a 'rule' might be set aside. The religious leaders who criticised Jesus for healing on the Sabbath were wrong on many levels: they contradicted traditional Jewish teaching about giving help on the Sabbath; they hypocritically ignored their own readiness to perform necessary tasks on that day; and, above all, they tried to use the God-given law as a weapon to catch Jesus out, emphasising its letter and completely disregarding its spirit. This contrast of letter and spirit is illustrated in the image above from the 'Ottheinreich Bible', an illuminated manuscript containing an early translation of the New Testament into German. The crippled woman kneels between Jesus and his followers on the left, all adorned with vivid haloes, and his halo-less opponents on the right. The magnificent illuminations from this manuscript are freely available online, and a link through the Library of Congress in Washington is given in 'More Info' below.
Some rules are carefully drawn up; others are more like guidelines drawn from general experience. The Old Testament reading shows God defying expectation (and in that sense breaking a kind of 'rule') by entrusting the young Jeremiah ('only a boy') with the role of prophet.
The Cub and Beaver sections of our G46 Scout Group meet on Tuesday evenings: for details, please see the attachment below. The Group's HQ is behind the Church Hall.
Lunch for seniors, all on Thursdays at 1.00 p.m. A small donation is requested.
Please contact Lesley Moody, 07903 011118.
These lunches take place every other week, at 1.00 p.m. and continue throughout the year apart from Christmas Day.
Family Communion for Harvest: celebrant the Revd Adetola Badejo.
At this service we shall collect donations for the Manna Centre, a day centre in Southwark for homeless people. Please follow the link below for a list of their main requirements. Afterwards there will be a traditional Harvest Lunch, to which all are welcome.
The image above is a detail of a very famous painting, Vincent van Gogh's 'The Sower at Sunset'. Although he turned away from the institutional church, van Gogh was a profoundly religious man who spent two years as a lay pastor in a deprived mining area of Belgium, and this experience is reflected in the way his later paintings depict not only the dignity of manual labour but also its unrelenting physical demands. 'The sower' isn't a realistic scene: the foreground shows seed being scattered on bare earth and the background a field of ripe corn, thus representing the entire cycle of seedtime and harvest. In a similar way, the painting reflects the relationship between human and superhuman agency: for grain to grow, at least in quantities that will sustain us, the sun has to shine, the rain has to fall, and men and women have to work in all weathers to make it happen.
As always, we shall reflect on other physical and metaphorical harvests: the labour of all who make and deliver the things we need, and the harvest of the spirit, in which we aspire to be both harvested and harvester.
