St Mary's Parish Magazine - February 2001

Be a disciple

Passiontide

Lent meetings

Winter talks at St Mary’s

PCC warmed

From the registers

WHAT’S ON THIS MONTH? - February

Readings for Sundays in March

Saints in February

Daily prayer topics in February

Music at Evensong in February

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On Friday February 2 we shall be celebrating the festival of Christ’s Presentation in the Temple as a child (otherwise Candlemas). There will be a Sung Eucharist at 7.30pm. This will be in the traditional way with the lighting of candles in the Church Centre as we acclaim Christ, the Light of the World, and carry them in procession into church.

The Guides and Brownies will be joining us once again for the 9.30am Eucharist on Sunday February 11.

Betty Walker’s now traditional Pancake Party falls on Tuesday February 27. Join her in the Church Centre. First serving is at 8.00pm. Tickets are £2.50 and are available from Betty and Anne May.

Don’t forget to put your old magazines (any sort) in the box under the tower. Sue Bailey, librarian at the local prison, is more than grateful to pass them on to the inmates.

On Ash Wednesday (February 28), both Eucharists will, as usual, include the imposition of ashes as the mark of our corporate commitment to the process of Lent. The Eucharists happen at 10.00am and a choral Eucharist at 7.30pm. The ashes are made by burning last year’s Palm Crosses, so please make sure you have returned yours either to Selwyn in church or through the Rectory letterbox by lunchtime on Shrove Tuesday.

During Lent, the Friday lunches will take place as usual at the Rectory at 12.45 pm. The first will be on Friday March 2. We shall, as usual, be raising money towards the projects included in the Bishop’s Lent Appeal - details of this are not to hand as yet, but there will be a full explanation in the March magazine.

Joan Walker sends her thanks to all those who contributed in any way towards decorating the Church at Christmas, particularly the flower ladies who worked so hard on the Saturday.

Congratulations to Millie Brett on her 90th birthday. Although now housebound, she has been a life-long member of St Mary’s and was a Sunday School teacher.

Treasurer’s update

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Just over a year ago, we started to fill in the squares on a large chart under the tower. No, we weren’t counting down the number of days until Christmas - we were working towards funding our “shopping list”. This represents the projected shortfall between our expected income and expenditure for the year, and last year it started at £14,950.

During 2000, the parish once again rose to the challenge. Everybody has worked hard at fund-raising activities; the Yellow Pages scheme, whereby we earn money by using practical talents and donate the revenue to parish funds, continues successfully, with over £1,000 raised; and one-off donations are generously given. As a result, we reached our “shopping list target” at the beginning of December, and I will be able to send the surplus - around £630 - to the Diocese as an additional payment against the capital of our interest-bearing loan.

We are on target with our regular housekeeping budget, too. While some expenses have been higher than expected (such as the work that was needed on our organ as a result of a serious electrical fault), so too has some of our income (such as greater stewardship giving). These variations on our budget have almost exactly cancelled each other out. Not only that, but we know that some of our expenses in 2001 will be lower: our annual Fairer Shares contribution, for instance, will actually go down by about £750 - and we have now paid off the full cost of the photocopier.

The reason for our “shopping list” is the need to pay not only the regular bills that keep our church running, but also the £1,000 a month which is steadily reducing our “mortgage” to the Diocese. At the end of 1997, this stood at £101,000; by the end of 1999, it had reduced to £67,600.

You may remember that, early last year, we were able to report that the Diocesan Board of Finance had been kind enough to help us towards our target. It converted £15,000 of our interest-bearing loan to an interest-free loan, and converted a further £10,000 into an outright grant.

Well, a few weeks ago, I received a note from Bob West, my contact at Diocesan Financial Services. He was able to confirm - just in time for the end of the financial year - that an additional grant to St Mary’s had been made, and that a further £5,000 has been deducted from our interest-bearing loan. Since we have kept up our payments to the Diocese of £1,000 a month, this means that our “mortgage” has been reduced by nearly £30,000 in the past 12 months. Our total remaining loan is therefore now £37,800 - that’s against £101,000 just three years ago.

Three years ago, we estimated that the mortgage on the new Centre would take 19 years to pay off. If we continue to pay at our present rate, with no major increase or decrease, the loan will be paid completely by around Easter 2004. If we are able to use any future “windfalls”, such as tax rebates, to this end, that date could be even nearer.

More than anything else, I feel it is important to remember that our Centre is a vital social and pastoral resource, and I don’t think we can imagine life without it now. It helps our life as a community and our outreach to those who live in the area, and there is no doubt that it has been worth it.

We have other important projects to fund at St Mary’s, such as the tower and bells project. The ringers are spearheading this project, and have made fantastic progress already - I hope you’ve all bought a shopping bag or an apron! It can sometimes feel that the end will never really be in sight. However, I thought you might like to know the facts about how far we have come, and to be encouraged by the light at the end of this particular tunnel.

So, as we head into 2001, I would like to say some enormous thank yous. To Harold and Anne and Heather, for their diligent work in banking and bookwork, which is such a great help to me; to John Timbury, our independent examiner, and to Julian Jones, the professional accountant who (free of charge) has put our 1999 accounts into the correct format for the new Charities Act; to Selwyn, for everything he does to support me in my work as Treasurer; but most of all, to all of you for your continuing generosity and support. If anybody would like more details of anything I’ve described here, please don’t hesitate to ask me; but you’ll get the full story at the Annual Parochial Church Meeting on April 3.

Cassie Tillett

A quiet day

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A parish quiet day has been booked for Saturday March 3 at St Michael’s convent in Ham where some of us went for a similar day a couple of years ago. The day will be run by Selwyn, Jenifer and Betty, and as that date is the first weekend in Lent the day will be an opportunity to explore the Lenten themes of Temptation, Repentance and Forgiveness. The timetable of the day will be approximately like this:

9:00 am Morning Prayer at St Mary's

9:30 Travel to Ham

10:15ish Arrival and coffee

10:45 First talk

11:00 Silence begins

12:00 Join the Community for the Eucharist

12:30 Lunch (bring our own; NOT in silence!)

2:00 pm Second talk

2:15 Silence resumes

3:15 Third talk

3:30 Silence continues

4:00 pm Evening Prayer

4:30ish Set off home

There is probably room for about 15 participants, and the cost will be only a few pounds per person. If you would be interested in joining, there is a list to sign on the table under the tower.

Be a disciple

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The Diocesan Certificate in Christian Discipleship is a new course which has just begun in various centres across the diocese. Unfortunately information about it arrived too late to be included in the last magazine. The course is designed for people who wish to deepen their understanding of their faith. It is less “academic” than the Certificate in Theology, which has been running for the past two years; it will build on people’s life and faith experience and help to explore the relation between them, and will aim at raising and answering questions about basic Christian belief. It will be specially suitable for those who have previously taken an Alpha or Emmaus course.

The centre for this in our area is St Mary’s, Caterham, where sessions are taking place on 30 Thursday evenings from 7.30 to 9.30 pm. To complete the course and obtain the Certificate you need to have worked through six modules, of five sessions each, but not all modules need to be taken in the same year - thus you could spread the workload over a number of years to suit your own pace and availability.

The course fee is £5 per module (£30 for the whole Certificate course), and the modules are as follows:

Knowing God - exploring who God is and how our understanding of God can change and develop

God’s Ancient Word for Today - discovering what scripture is and its meaning for us today

Introduction to the Gospels - investigating how the Gospels were written, why they are different, and what they mean for our faith

Prepared to Care - exploring the link between our faith and our caring for others

All God’s People - developing our understanding of what it means to be “the Church”

Growing New Christians - developing evangelism and nurture in the local church.

The first of these has already begun - the others begin on various dates in March, April, June, September and November. If anyone is interested in taking part, or would like to know more, or would like to see details of the dates and centres in the other two episcopal areas, then please have a word with me as soon as possible.

Selwyn Tillett

Passiontide

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On Sunday April 1 (Lent 5) instead of Evensong our choir will present the well-known Passiontide cantata The Crucifixion by Sir John Stainer. For anyone who does not know it, this presents the events of Holy Week as an extended musical meditation of about an hour’s length, with opportunities for the congregation to take part in appropriate hymns at key points. Andrew Wilson will accompany, Sam Hudson will conduct, and there are tenor and baritone soloists yet to be announced.

As this is definitely an opportunity to listen and worship, rather than a concert, there will be no ‘admission charge’ - but probably a retiring collection afterwards and possibly a cup of tea in the Centre to allow people to be sociable. Please put the date in your diary now!

Lent meetings

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Churches Together have organised a series of ecumenical Lent meetings on the Wednesday evenings in Lent, beginning on March 7. They will take place at St Elphege’s at 8pm. Each of the five meetings will be addressed by a representative of some national organisation who is also a member of one of the Christian denominations which participate in Churches Together, and each of them will speak for about 45 minutes on a broadly ecological theme.

The Anglican representative, speaking on Wednesday March 14, will be Bishop Hugh Montefiore, whom we all remember from our Confirmation service in September. He has been for many years a speaker on “green” issues, both as an Anglican representative and in his own private capacity, right from the days when people hardly took ecology and the idea of global warming seriously.

There will be a Roman Catholic speaker on “the gift of life and the right to life” on March 28, and the series will be rounded off on April 4 by a representative of the United Reformed Church who will give some ideas as to what churches and individuals can do to keep people’s awareness of green issues alive.

There will be full details of all the meetings in the March issue, but even at this stage it is worth saying that the whole idea for this series of five meetings arose from a discussion in our own PCC led by Chris Holmes, Pat Kingsbury and Carolyn Churchyard. For that, if for no other reason, it would be good to see the evenings well supported by St Mary’s people!

Accordingly, the Annual Parochial Church Meeting, which was to have taken place on April 4, and would therefore have clashed with the last of these meetings, has been brought forward a day and will now take place on Tuesday April 3.

Winter talks at St Mary’s

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Chris Holmes has arranged a series of talks in the Church Centre during the rest of winter and into the spring. This month, on February 14, Betty Walker will be talking about Ruskin and Tolstoy under the title “The Hedgehog and the Fox” while on the 22nd Pam Vernon will be talking about William Morris, the influential Victorian artist.

In March “On the Air” will find Helen Clare (a popular radio star of the 1940s and 50s) and our own Lez Couzens entertaining us with songs and anecdotes from the great days of light entertainment. In the same month Jenifer Davison talks about the monastic tradition in the light of her own experience of living in a community. A number of people were unable to hear Chris’s talk on Beddington in Tudor times; this may be repeated at some point in March. See next month’s magazine for dates.

All talks begin at 7.30pm in the Centre; refreshments will be provided. Further information from Chris, and see him if you would like transport.

PCC warmed

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Huddled together for warmth in the Vestry, the PCC met on a very cold and frosty January 15. We were soon warmed, however, by the Treasurer’s report (full details of which appear elsewhere in the magazine). We had confirmation that the Shopping List had exceeded its target last year by £675, and that this amount had been forwarded to the Diocese to reduce the capital on our mortgage. We also received the Finance Committee’s recommended budget, together with the proposed Shopping List for 2001. It was gratifying to note that the target is nearly £1,000 less than last year, which was itself less than the year before.

The Churchyard Committee reported that estimates of costs to refurbish the paths were awaited. Plans to re-position the standard lamp to give more efficient lighting to the path, and the provision of clear direction signs to the Centre, were progressing slowly. The need for planning permission and faculty approval inevitably means that the PCC cannot always move as quickly as it would wish.

The Disability Audit Group has now completed its work, and a report of its findings was presented to the PCC. It is likely that some of the recommendations can be readily implemented, and these will be progressed as quickly as possible.

The PCC heard that the scheduled date for the APCM would clash with the final session of the Churches Together Lent course. It was thus agreed to move the APCM from Wednesday 4 to Tuesday April 3. The council’s next meeting is on Tuesday, March 6. This will be the final meeting prior to the APCM and will include consideration of the annual report and accounts.

Diana Harries, PCC Secretary

From the registers

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Baptism Jan 7 Emma Rose Siobhan Lawrence, 18 Chiswick Close

Funeral Jan 12 Alice Ann Forrester, aged 96, of 5 Bridle Path

WHAT’S ON THIS MONTH? - February

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Thu	1	MU&OG: Slide show on Nepal and Tibet by Carol Linstead. Church Centre	8.00pm
Fri	2	Candlemas: Sung Eucharist & Procession	7.30pm
Sat	3	Quiz Night: Church Centre	7.00pm
Sun	4	EPIPHANY 5
Mon	5	Magazine Panel meets, 2 Peaks Hill	10.00am
Tue	6	Parents and Toddlers meet, church	10.00am
Wed	7	St Mary’s Guild: ‘20 Trains of Thought’, an afternoon with Dudley Taylor. St Mary’s Ct	2.30pm
		Churches Together at Wallington Baptist Church	7.45pm
		Deanery Synod meets; Christchurch, Sutton	8.00pm
Sun	11	THIRD BEFORE LENT
		Guides and Brownies join the Eucharist	9.30pm
Mon	12	Churchyard Committee meets, Rectory	8.00pm
Wed	14	Winter Talks at St Mary’s: The Hedgehog and the Fox - Betty Walker talks about Ruskin and Tolstoy. Church Centre	7.30pm
Thu	15	MU&OG: Annual General Meeting. Church Centre	8.00pm
Sun	18	SECOND BEFORE LENT
Thu	22	Winter Talks at St Mary’s: Pam Vernon gives an illustrated talk on William Morris, the influential Victorian artist. Church Centre	7.30pm
Sat	24	St Mary’s Court Trustees meet, St Mary’s Court	10.00am
		Archdeacon’s Visitation	11.00am
Mon	26	Centre Committee meets, 19 Redford Avenue	8.00pm
Tue	27	Shrove Tuesday Pancake Party, Church Centre	8.00pm
Wed	28	ASH WEDNESDAY
		Sung Eucharist	7.30pm