Dear Friends,
Thank you for your support over Holy Week and Easter, both those who helped – such as the choir, organist and Roy, our verger – and those who worshipped over this special eight day period. I know that quite a number of people felt they had benefited from this remembrance of our Lord’s final week of earthly life. On that theme, what a wonderful little dance-drama the Wentworth Sunday School presented on Easter morning, managing to tell the whole story in about five minutes. Well done!
Here I must thank Christine Clapham who has helped to get the new children’s group off the ground. Sadly she feels she does not want to continue with this but I know she will continue to offer support with things like display work. We should also thank the Mothers’ Union, who have agreed to donate some of their accumulated funds towards things the Sunday School requires as it gets established.
Since I wrote last month a new and enlarged Wentworth Catering Committee has been formed. Redz is chairing it and Christine Hayes, one of our new members, will be taking on a lead role. We are very fortunate as she is a professional caterer. Some of you may have sampled her rather more-ish cakes after church already!
This is part of a letter received recently from Philip Shipley, in response to one I sent. I would like to thank you for your kind words in both your letter and in the item in the magazine. I did not expect the reaction there has apparently been to my leaving. The monetary gift [actually a W. H. Smith token] was totally unexpected and, to my mind, unwarranted, as I never thought of myself as anything special, but it was a wonderful gesture, and I feel very humble and send my heartfelt thanks. The signed thank-you card I will treasure, and it sits on my bookcase in pride of place . I worked with some wonderful and caring people at the events, and I think that working almost as a family is very important, something you must have to succeed, and I couldn’t have had better colleagues and friends when I needed them. I remember them all in my prayers, and thank God for his great gift of fellowship and love.
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Anyone who has been in the parish church recently cannot fail to have noticed that our organ has been behaving like the Cheshire cat – gradually disappearing before one’s eyes! This is, of course, the long-awaited refurbishment actually beginning. Unfortunately this means that the work will stretch further into the summer than we had hoped, but Richard is performing miracles on the electronic organ and the piano, so music will continue to be a part of our worship. We are sorry that a few brides have been a bit disappointed but they are, I gather, reasonably reassured by what is on offer. Richard is putting in a huge amount of work as project supervisor and I, certainly, am most grateful to him for that. Building work has never been my forte.
On that theme, Harley church is planning a few fairly small ‘tidying up’ jobs to make the church a bit more user-friendly. Bigger projects are re-flooring the meeting room and modernising the rather inadequate toilet. I gather that financial contributions towards the new flooring are welcome. Meanwhile we are all getting used to the new(ish) Common Worship Communion Service. I do think that in a fairly small church building with, in general, a younger congregation this is the right way to go. And I hope that we shall all find that new words provide us with what the old ones did; that is, a doorway to God, which is what worship is all about.
