A congregation has gathered for a service outside days after its church was severely damaged by a fire.Firefighters worked overnight after a blaze broke out at All Saints Church in Mudeford, Christchurch, at about 20:10 BST on Thursday. "The church building burnt down... but not the church," Canon Gary Philbrick said. "The people are the church."Dorset and Wiltshire Fire Service told the BBC earlier that the fire is believed to have started accidentally.Seventy firefighters were sent to the scene during the blaze and remained at the site until 03:30 BST the following morning.Speaking to those gathered on the village green, the Right Reverend Debbie Sellin, Acting Bishop of Winchester, said: "Around the diocese people are praying for you. You have the support of the diocese around you.""I share your sadness," she added. "I'm here today because I want to stand with you in what you have experienced and in what will continue to be your journey."Speaking after the service, parishioner Jane Crabb said: "Although we had a tragedy on Thursday there's this coming together of people. They want to support each other. "People who have been very unwell of late have made the effort to come here. We just want to communally hug and hold and to be here and to look after each other."
Our joint parish Holy Communion service tomorrow is at St Mary and All Saints' Church, Dunsfold at 10am. We hope you will join us but if you're away or housebound you can take part in the service by clicking on the following Zoom link:https://us02web.zoom.us/j/5253921788?pwd=MC9kNmpldmFrRSsrV1pkc1k5aU1vZz09
Canon Roy Woodhams, rector of St Nicolas, Cranleigh and our Area Dean, will give an organ recital at 4pm on Sunday (July 17th), accompanied by his daughter Martha. Canon Roy will play some organ classics while Martha will sing a selection of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams and his friends as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the great composer’s birth. Tickets are £15 for adults (children under 15 - £7.50) including post concert refreshments. You can pay on the door or if you prefer to order your tickets in advance please contact: Sheila Jones - 200204 - or sheilajones4@btinternet.com Brenda Jenner- 200379 -brenda@peartreegreen.com Anne Eve - 208497 - or grannybud@gmail.com Colin Swait - 425380 - or colin.swait@btineternet.com
LIMITING Universal Credit payments to cover just two children was wrong and should be ended, the Bishop of Durham, the Rt Revd Paul Butler, told the House of Lords last Friday.Introducing the Second Reading of his Bill to abolish the restriction, he said that the policy contradicted the belief that every child should be treated equally. “This policy is the biggest driver of the increase in child poverty,” he said. “Families’ falling into difficulty are discovering that the social-security system is not supporting their whole family as they expected, where they are a larger family. The third child is ignored, and thus the whole family suffers.”Work by the Benefit Changes and Larger Families project had concluded that the two-child limit’s main outcome was to drive financial hardship and often destitution. “This is unacceptable. It is enough reason for the policy to be scrapped,” the Bishop said.While the Government saw it as a money-saving exercise, research had found that children who had experienced poverty were less likely to pay tax, less likely to have high-paid jobs, and more likely to need support from public services. “The truth is that this policy will likely increase the long-term cost to the public purse,” Bishop Butler said.“More important are the unquantifiable impacts: the suffering of living in an overcrowded home, or not being able to join in with costly school activities and the shame that sometimes accompanies that.”Exemptions did not account for the disproportional impact on people of ethnic-minority and faith backgrounds. “Some faith groups are penalised because, for them, contraception and termination are simply not valid options,” he said.A survey by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service had found that 57 per cent of expectant mothers who were aware of the two-child limit said that it was important in deciding whether to continue the pregnancy. “The fact that some women could feel pressured by a government policy to terminate a pregnancy that they may have otherwise wanted seems abhorrent,” the Bishop said.“It is clear to me that this policy is ineffective, devastating in impact, and essentially immoral in character. It is a policy which is defended on terms that do not add up. It should be embarrassing that the price paid for its fallacies are our children.”His call for an impact report on the policy was rejected by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Work and Pensions, Baroness Stedman-Scott, who said that the Government believed that the most sustainable way to lift children out of poverty was by supporting parents into work and progressing in it, wherever possible.“This requires a balanced system that provides strong work incentives and support for those who need it, but also ensures a sense of fairness to the taxpayer and to the many working families who do not see their incomes rise when they have more children. We judge that the policy to support a maximum of two children is a proportionate way to achieve these objectives,” she said.Concluding the debate, the Bishop said: “We are seeing an increase in child poverty, yet there seems to be a lack of willingness to address that where it is growing. I accept that some action is being taken, but it is not stopping some getting poorer and poorer, and some becoming in danger of falling into destitution.”
