All Saints Margaret Street.

I would like to ask all parishioners and friends of All Saints to keep our PCC in your prayers over the next few weeks as we prepare for a very important away day on Saturday 24th July. I ask you to pray that God will send his Holy Spirit to inspire and guide us as we seek to listen to his voice and start making plans for action in for the years ahead.

It strikes me it is always a worthwhile exercise for a PCC to come together at the beginning of a new incumbency to identify priorities for the future and to examine what we do well as a parish and what we need to do better.

However, it is made all the more necessary this year as we have the added complication of thinking about our parish’s life as we emerge into the post COVID world and the “new normal.” We need to think about how we might negotiate our return to something that feels like what we did before but which can never be quite the same.

Some of the things we need to attend to have been clearly identified through the processes of consultation and reflection which took place in our parish during the interregnum. A clear yearning to grow and expand our Sunday congregation was one, as was a concern to be more outward looking and especially to engage with younger people better.

We need to start putting meat on the bones of some of those aspirations and think about how we might make them a reality through specific projects and focussed action. It will also be important to respond to some of the dynamics which have emerged during lockdown, such as the extraordinary explosion of interaction with a huge range of people through online worship. I hope we can develop and expand that area of our parish’s life.

The most important part of this process is listening. We need to be able to hear where God is calling us to be, risks he is asking us to take, areas he is prompting us to focus our efforts on, and the people he wants us to reach out to. The processes whereby a parish’s vision of the future emerges and becomes reality involve prayerful imagination and careful discernment as we seek to respond to God. It also involves having hearts open to his Spirit so he can guide, help, and sometimes challenge us to go places we are not used to being, or find less comfortable.

I hope that our away day might start a process which eventually will lead to a Mission Action Plan that will lay out in a helpful and realistic way how we might go about making some of our abstract aspirations a reality. In the meantime, I would love to hear from anyone who has any ideas thoughts or reflections they might want to be fed into the PCC’s discussions. It will be useful to take those to the away day. I would most of all appreciate it if you could all hold the PCC in your prayers and ask for the guidance of God’s Holy Spirit as we go about responding to his call and take council for our parish.

Fr Peter

Ministry to Young People

A clear aspiration expressed by many during the interregnum, and which found its way into our parish profile, was a wish to see our parish interact and minister to younger people better. Concern was expressed in the parish profile that the Sunday congregation has got noticeably older in recent years. It has also frequently been noted that there is little provision for young families with children at All Saints.

As our PCC begins the process of thinking how we might respond to these challenges better, I am eager to hear from younger people at All Saints’ about what their thoughts, experiences, and needs are. I am proposing a Zoom meeting for anyone who considers themselves young-ish on Wednesday 21st July at 7.00 pm (Zoom details here). (Nobody will be excluded because of age, but for the sake of argument, let us consider ‘young-ish’ to mean anyone in their early forties or below!)

I am eager to hear what our younger members would like to see more of, what they appreciate about All Saints, things they find challenging about our parish, how we could improve our ministries to younger people, and ways in which we could be a better resource for them in their own spiritual journeys through life. These ideas and thoughts can then be fed back to the PCC away day on 24th July. If anyone cannot make the Zoom meeting on 21st July, please just be in touch with me and let me know your ideas and reflections directly by email.

I hope that by listening to the needs and aspirations of our younger people, we can respond to the call that God gives us to be.

Fr Peter

Online Zoom Theology

I was very pleased to announce last week a significant addition to the theological teaching and formation on offer at All Saints’ in the form of a series of online theology teaching sessions which will begin in September. Do put these dates below in your diaries. There will be an online theological teaching session once every two months on a Tuesday evening at 7.00 pm.

Tuesday 14th September 2021 – 7.00-8.00pm
Forgetting and Remembering: does memory make us human?
Participants will be asked to watch two recently released films, The Father and Supernova, in preparation for this session. Both films, which will form the focus of our discussion, explore questions to do with dementia and human relationships. How does the Christian tradition respond to the idea of dementia? How does memory define who we are? How can contribute to debate on this topic in a way that values human life?

Tuesday 16th November 2021 – 7.00-8.00pm
Ravenna by Judith Herrin
This theology session will be led by Fr Peter Anthony and will discuss Judith Herrin’s recently published history of Ravenna. It will follow on from the study day we will be holding on the history of Ravenna which will have taken place on Friday 29th October, at which Judith will be speaking. This online session will offer an opportunity for people to discuss Prof Herrin’s book in greater detail and depth, and to mull over what we learned from the study day.

Tuesday 18th January 2022 – 7.00-8.00pm
‘Damned by our Knowledge’: English religious anxiety in Graham Greene.
‘The trouble is, he thought, we know the answers – we Catholics are damned by our knowledge.’ (The Heart of the Matter) A presentation by Fr Michael Bowie on the work of Graham Greene, drawing particularly on material from the novels, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair.

Tuesday 15th March 2022, – 7.00-8.00 pm
Looking East in Winter by Rowan Williams
This session will discuss our Holy Week preacher, Rowan Williams’ new work on Russian and Eastern theology. Described as, ‘an original and illuminating vision of a Christian world still none too familiar to Western believers and even to students of theology,’ we will explore how ‘the deep-rooted themes of Eastern Christian thought can prompt new perspectives on our contemporary crises of imagination and hope.’

Tuesday 17th May 2022, – 7.00-8.00 pm
Cathedral by Ben Hopkins
This theology session will explore novels about the building of cathedrals. We will focus on Ben Hopkins’ new historical novel, Cathedral. We will compare this with other similar works such as Golding’s The Spire, Huysmans’ La Cathédrale, and Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth. What is it about great buildings that seem to speak beyond themselves about the divine and the power of human creativity? How do churches operate as sacraments of God’s presence and why do they feel so necessary for the offering of Christian worship?

Walsingham Devotion & Monthly Requiem

Tomorrow our monthly Walsingham Devotion, in the form of the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary with intercessions, will be offered at 1130 before the noon Mass.

Tomorrow week our monthly Requiem Mass will be celebrated: please let Fr Michael have names of those you’d like remembered at that Mass.

Links for Sunday

The link for the Propers for Trinity 6 is at the top of this email.

And click here for the YouTube live stream.

Evensong and Benediction is at 6pm on Sunday. This week the music includes Byrd Short Service, Wood Hail Gladdening Light, Bortniansky O Salutaris, and Harwood Tantum ergo. This service is not live streamed.

Flowers

The flowers on Sunday have been given by Rebecca Hirst in memory of her mother, Val Hirst, whose 35th anniversary falls at this time.

If you would like to make a donation for flowers, please contact Shawn on 07988 287 663 or shawnwilbe@outlook.com or speak to Chris Self.

Prayer list

Prisoners and captives

Nazanin Zhagari-Ratcliffe, Ismaeil Maghrebinejad, Nasrin Sotoudeh
Maira Shabhaz
Rohingya Christians in Pakistan and Karen Christians in Burma

The sick

David Fettke, Joan Cooper, Vallery Tchukov, Sara Vice, Katherine Lee, Lorna Smith, Beth Klausing, Hilary Porter, Bruce Ross-Smith, Benjamin Woolf, James Shrimpton, Tony Rodger, Rachel Pereira, Fr Michael Gudgeon, Chris and Carole Radley, Fr Harry Hodgetts, Rosemary Orr, Andrew Roger, Martin Berka, Barbara Schiefer, Joan Anna SLG, Poppy Harris, Sheila Wood, Jennifer Spreckley, Sue Yesnick, Elizabeth Lyon, Rosina Sargon Eskrya, Fr Charles Cloughen, Malcolm Brown, Fr Pip Bevan, Tim Knight, Hillary Rodger, Geoff Vardy, Fr John O’Brien, Charles Hoff

Those known to us recently departed

Jim Peschek, Theresa Bahemuka, Tessa SLG, Rob Scott-Mitchell

Anniversaries of death

11th – Mabel Pearce, Laurence Olivier

12th – Wilfred Stansfield, Cyril Ward

13th – Mary Gaskell, Mina Robertson

14th – Sheila Duggan, James Wheen

15th – Richard Young, Gladys Gibbs, George Smith, Kathleen Rodger

16th – 

17th – Doris Thrift, Kathleen Wait, Bill Scott Pr

Supporting All Saints

Parish Giving Scheme

You can set up a regular donation to All Saints here.

We use the Parish Giving Scheme, which allows contributions to be anonymous and deals with Gift Aid, saving our office a lot of time. You can read about how the scheme works here.

Donations for general church purposes

To give by BACS please use the following details, advising the Administrator to collect Gift Aid:

PCC All Saints (Charity no. 1132895)
Sort Code 60-09-15
A/C 04559452

Parish Legacy Policy

We are always delighted to hear from anyone who wants to support us with a donation. Our PCC Legacy Policy encourages people to leave bequests specifically to one of our two related charities to be used for purposes of lasting value (rather than day to day costs):

All Saints Choir & Music Trust (Charity # 802994)

or The All Saints Foundation (Charity # 273390).