The Welland-Fosse Benefice: Prayers and Notices.

 Sunday 24th January 2021:  Epiphany III

 

• Please remember in your prayers those who are sick: Janette Saunders, Sandie Parsons, Jane Williams and Will Beattie.
• Please pray for the souls of Sheila Saunders, Victor Coster, Sheila Ervin and Audrey Simpson, all of whom have died recently.
• Today, the Zoom Service will be at 11am.
• Zoom Morning Prayer continues on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 8.30 am., given that the pandemic still rages around us. Compline is on a Thursday at 6pm. If you would like an invitation, contact Sally Smith.
• ‘Just the Job’ – an entertainment for our 5 parishes. Starts on Zoom, 7pm on Monday 15 February and fortnightly thereafter. Watch this space!
• All our churches are open for private prayer at particular times:
  MORCOTT: Sundays from 10am to 3pm
  BARROWDEN: Every day from 10am to 3pm
  SOUTH LUFFENHAM: Every day from 10am to 4pm
  TIXOVER anytime by request at Manor Farm 
  DUDDINGTON Every day from 10am to 4pm

MORCOTT

The parish magazine will return in a different format. An A4 newsletter will be uploaded to the village website (https://morcott.wordpress.com) which can be read online or downloaded to print at home. For older residents who are not online, the Church team will print off a copy and deliver by hand. 

 

MEDITATION: Unity – at what price?

 

This is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It always falls to encompass The Feast of The Conversion of St. Paul which occurs on Monday 25^th. It is almost universally overlooked in the countryside as differences are usually absorbed by the only church which is usually Anglican.  It is pretty well ignored in multi-cultural areas also where the priority is human unity which was often very fragile. 

 

Some folk think in very narrow terms where unity is concerned: unity of political groupings or the Tennis Club with the Bowls Club.  These are important but pale into insignificance when we start to talk about the unity of races or nations.  Here is high calibre stuff! Was my northern bishop wrong to scoff at the idea that Muslims were our God –given brothers and sisters?  I think so.

 

Nevertheless, the Conversion of St. Paul is worth a second glance.  Here was a man hell-bent on destroying as much as he could of the infant Christian church. His name was Saul. He was a highly educated Jew and ferocious with it.  [He would compare well with the cynical scoffers who inhabit our comment pages in the media]. However, events started to make Saul reflect. He gleefully stood by to see Stephen stoned to death (Acts 8.1) – the first Christian martyr. The way that man went to his death, forgiving his enemies, suggested that there was much more to this Christian faith than was suggested by a band of ex-fisher ragamuffins. Saul was consumed by a vision of Christ on the road to Damascus. It was a physical, emotional and spiritual encounter which left him temporarily blind.  The local Christians were wary of befriending him but that is what they did.  The history of the spread of Christianity from that moment onwards took a powerfully different turn, filled with greater confidence.

 

Small acts of kindness and courage ripple away and gather pace.  There will be other Sauls out there, other cynical commentators, whose lives will be changed by what you do.

 

 

See wellandfosse.org for much more information, including contact details for

The Very Rev Christopher Armstrong and the churchwardens