The Eucharist is celebrated here at St George’s Malaga every Wednesday at 11.00am. It is a short, said service lasting approximately half an hour. The service provides a welcome break and refreshment within a busy week. Do consider making this part of your regular devotion.

There is a Holy Eucharist with hymns every Sunday at 11.30am. After the service there is a time of fellowship when refreshments are served outside the church.

In this morning’s gospel Jesus has an encounter with people who shared a very particular perspective, and a perspective very different from his own. As we know throughout the gospels, he is pursued by the Jewish lawyers, Scribes and Pharisees, who are doing everything they can to try and trip him up.

And in this morning’s encounter it says they “gathered round him”, words which we could perhaps better interpret as encircling him, because the particular Greek verb used by St John was the word that they used to describe for example when an army encircles a besieged city. It was a military term.

And so the Jewish authorities encircled him, and you can imagine the group of them forming a kind of pincer movement around him. And as we hear in the gospel, they ask him, actually, a very straight-forward question: “How long are you going to keep us in suspense? Just tell us very plainly, are you the Messiah, or are you not?” And I think Jesus gives them a very straight-forward answer: “I have already told you, but you didn’t believe me. Look at the things I’ve done, all in the name of my Father. My actions speak louder than words”. But then he goes on. “The trouble is”, he says, “that you are incapable of hearing, because you are not sheep of my flock”.

Or as the very gritty, ultra-modern translation of the Bible, the ‘Word on the Streets’, has it, “You wouldn’t recognise God if he were standing in front of you.”

Every Tuesday morning at 10am, beginning on 7th October

Simply tune in on Zoom and enjoy a few moments of quiet, prayerful reflection as the week unfolds. It will last no longer than 10 minutes.

Meeting ID: 892 2955 4820 Passcode: 836488

A time to pause, pray, reflect and reconnect.

No preparation needed.

Time for conversation for those who can stay.

“….Waiting on God, learning to be passive in a way creative for your inner life, is not a question of thinking about God, but of growing in stillness. It has to do with prayer, and with music or from the simple contemplation of the world about you.” (Michael Mayne, ‘A Year Lost and Found’)

All Saints’ Day, is the day we remember all the saints and martyrs of the church, both known and unknown.

When I was a child, we worshipped each Sunday at St Albans Abbey, the church of the first British martyr. At the front of the nave above the altar was a stone rood screen, built by Abbot Thomas de la Mare, around the time of the Black Death (1349-51). It contained seven empty niches, where brightly coloured statues had once stood. But the statues were destroyed during the Reformation, and the niches left empty.

Today they are again filled with freshly coloured statues, commissioned by the Abbey from sculptor Rory Young. They depict seven martyrs, each carrying the martyr’s symbol of the palm branch. From left to right:

➡️Oscar Romero – Roman Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador, who stood up for the poor, assassinated during Mass in 1980

➡️St Alban Roe – imprisoned for a time in St Albans Abbey Gatehouse and hanged in London in 1642, having been found guilty of treason for being a Roman Catholic priest

➡️St Amphibalus – a Christian priest sheltered by St Alban, when Christianity was forbidden

➡️St Alban – The first British saint, beheaded in Roman Verulamium on the site of the Abbey in the third century AD

➡️George Tankerfield - burnt to death in 1555, in Romeland, an alley in St Albans, because as a Protestant, he refused the doctrine of transubstantiation

➡️St Elisabeth Romanova – a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and member of the Russian Royal Family and the Orthodox Church, becoming a nun and Abbess after her husband died. She was murdered by the Bolsheviks in 1918

➡️Dietrich Bonhoeffer– Lutheran pastor and theologian, sent to a Nazi concentration camp, and tried with neither witness nor defence. He was hung in April 1945.

These are the sort of people we remember on All Saints' Day. The Dean of the Cathedral writes that there are “martyrs in every age – probably more now than there have been for many years – and inspire us to be braver ourselves in standing up for what we believe.”

Click below to hear a hymn for All Saints Day.

On All Souls' Day, we remember and celebrate those that have departed this life.

This year, on Sunday 3rd November at 6.00pm, here at St George’s, there will be a special Choral Evensong for All Souls, sung by the children’s choir of Pueri Cantores directed by Antonio del Pino (from Malaga Cathedral).

The prayers appointed for that day remind us that we are joined with the Communion of Saints, those that have finished their earthly life and with whom we share the hope of resurrection from the dead.

Everlasting God, our maker and redeemer,
grant us, with all the faithful departed,
the sure benefits of your Son’s saving passion and glorious resurrection,
that, in the last day,
when you gather up all things in Christ,
we may with them enjoy the fullness of your promises;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever. Amen

Come and join us as we remember our departed loved ones, through the beautiful music of this choral service.

Click below for a hymn for All Souls' Day