A great day at the Hall

... And an apology if you went looking for our new St. Cuthbert's Hall page. "Blogger" which hosts the page has had rather grievous problems over two or three days. It meant that we lost all the material uploaded to the site on Thursday.


Some of it has come back - and I've restored the Hall page and the tab by which it's accessed. So it's all there (at least as I write!) - please try again, especially if you were frustrated by a previous absence of content. Access the Hall material by using the tab which is now back near the top of this page.

Meanwhile thanks to all who worked so hard for a very successful Open Day today - not to mention our caterers and stall-holders. We had a steady stream of visitors to the Hall, wonderful food on sale as well as an abundance of plants, books and cakes. Members of Hall user groups were to hand to welcome visitors - and the general impression they gave was that they were very impressed by the new facilities.

And here's our new brochure - for any who'd like to download it.

Ready to open...

The picture is an action shot taken at our Tuesday Lunch Club earlier this week. I took it while photographing the various parts of our Hall which we'd like more people to see - and here's how...

We're holding an Open Day at St. Cuthbert's Hall this Saturday, 14th May, to show off the new and renovated facilities in the Hall extension. The builder's van was parked outside again this morning, but we're confident that all will be ship-shape and sparkling. Running alongside the Open Day we have "Coffee Plus" which is rather more than a coffee morning - lunches too + books, plants and cake stalls. Please come if you can between 10a.m. and 3p.m.

To celebrate the new opportunities and possibilities there's now a dedicated "St. Cuthbert's Hall" page on this blog - simply click on the tab at the top of this page.

While you're up there we now have another dedicated page - for our Parish Magazine and homilies / sermons preached at St. Cuthbert's... and elsewhere in the case of the last few days. The most recent entries are both offerings from the Vicar: the first is for Sunday 8th May from the Parish Eucharist; the second he delivered in his capacity as Rector of the Durham and Newcastle Chapter of the Society of Catholic Priests when it met in Byker on Monday 9th May. Just click through to either of them.

Weddings, Walks & Easter continues

11a.m. last Friday found me up a hill - Catbells in the Lake District. It wasn't any lack of royal feeling on my part, but because it was the last part-day of my post-Easter break before I had to get back that afternoon for a wedding rehearsal at St. Cuthbert's. I couldn't get home in time to watch the royal wedding on the box, so much wiser, I felt, to put the brilliant weather to good use and take in a quickly ascended fell.

At the top we found people with an aerial up. At first I felt they must be tuned in to the TV coverage, but then realised it was a radio aerial - I think they were tracking ospreys. Back down the hill in Keswick the festivities were in full swing with a special street market, give-aways and giant TV screen in the High Street. A great day! - and that includes watching all the recorded coverage once we got home.

Back in the parish it was the first wedding of the season - of Carl Nevin and Emily Reed, daughter of the previous occupants of our Vicarage. Congratulations to them!

And so to Sunday - which felt rather better than people expect of "Low Sunday." You can find Rosie's sermon by going to the "Magazine and Homilies" page on this blog - and with it I've now up-loaded her sermon for Maundy Thursday. You should be able to open new links on this page without difficulty, though if you don't have Microsoft Silverlight it's recommended that you download it if you want so see the page at its best - as I have just had to for my old desktop computer (without any problems - the link to the programme presents itself; just click to run the programme).

Christ is Risen!

We've had an excellent Holy Week and Easter Day at St. Cuthbert's. Thanks to so many people who made it all possible, not least the folk who put in much hard work behind the scenes - and there's a lot of scene-shifting as the church itself changes its appearance and character in our journey through Holy Week.

Recently I've been finding problems with the website which hosts our Parish Magazine and Sermons. So - thanks to my older son, Adam, who  knows about these things - I'm trying a different hosting solution. I'll place links to various items on a new page of this blog which you can access further up this page. Click and you should reach the document you want. For a start here are some direct links just uploaded:

The April 2011 issue of our Parish Magazine

The May 2011 issue of our Parish Magazine (this hasn't actually reached the printer yet, but will hopefully be appearing this week; meanwhile you can view it here first)

My Homily for today - Easter Day 24 April

And may we all know the joy and peace of Easter-tide!

Front Page News

St. Cuthbert's Church made it onto the front page of the Newcastle Journal this morning - as the newspaper carried the news of Lew Parker's retirement from winding our church clock. Inside Lew got most of page 9, and his picture both on that page and on the front. He's also in the Journal's North-East  news rival, the Northern Echo. I can't tell you on which page because all the copies had been bought up in our local newsagent.

But you can read the stories on-line. The Journal story is here - and the Northern Echo's story is here. The Echo web page even carries a video of Lew winding the clock and adjusting the mechanism.

They're both genuinely good news stories. And we're very glad to have had Lew carrying out this job for so long - and his father before him! A Happy Retirement to Lew - with thanks to him and to those carrying on the good work.

Your "busy" time?

Clergy are quite accustomed to being asked during Advent, "So this is your busy time?" I'm always pleased to hear this, because generally it indicates that the questioner has quite enough on his or her plate with preparations for Christmas - and isn't going to expect too much of me.

But of course it's Lent that's the really busy time. And - notwithstanding all those Lent study groups, extra devotions and the full observance of Holy Week - what really takes up the time and generates the stress is getting ready for Mothering Sunday and the Annual Parochial Church Meeting.

Well... Mothering Sunday approaches this weekend - join us if you can as we say it with flowers, and more... And the Easter Vestry & Annual Parochial Church Meeting is the following weekend - Sunday 10th April after the Sung Eucharist. To keep things brief we aim to publish in adavance as many as possible of the Annual Meeting reports. They're in the Parish Magazines for March and April, but you can find the Reports alone here.

Meanwhile, the April issue of the Parish Magazine has now been published - and the online issue is here. But you'll have to get hold of the paper copy to get our Holy Week and Easter Card included...

Starting Lent - the Garden and the Wilderness

Brothers and sisters in Christ, since early days Christians have observed with great devotion the time of our Lord’s passion and resurrection and prepared for this by a season of penitence and fasting.

By carefully keeping these days, Christians take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and in devotion to our Lord.

I invite you, therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.


... So we began Lent in the Liturgy for Ash Wednesday. I'm always rather glad to get into Lent. This year it's taken much longer than usual due to the lateness of Easter - though it's questionable whether for all that I'm any more prepared. But - while it's good to hit the ground running - the point of Lent is not to have everything worked out perfectly from it start; it's to let those disciplines of Lent work in us to prepare us for Holy Week and Easter.

Our Reader, Rosie Junemann, took us into the contrast between the Garden of Eden where things go wrong for Adam and Eve and the Wilderness as Jesus prepares for his public ministry - read her sermon for the First Sunday of Lent here.

I followed the Sung Eucharist with a Baptism of three children (including twins) and approaching 200 guests in church - and in my brief homily (off the cuff so not online) reflected on the imperfect-ness of our world, all too conscious of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. Questions of theodicy, our fallen nature, redemption and forgiveness are all in that Old Testament reading for yesterday (Genesis 2.15-17; 3.1-7). I'd wondered whether I'd get away with using it in such a context, but we had a great time, a largely responsive congregation and perfectly behaved children. Which in part makes me wonder why General Synod is getting so wound up about the Common Worship Baptism Service - isn't it more a matter of how you do it rather than its content that is the issue? Elements such as the "Commission" don't work off the page - but there's permission to use your own words in order to be more direct; why not use it, rather than asking for yet another text?