From the Vicar

February 2012

The cover of Church Matters this month catches in a striking design much of what Lent is about. Lent originated in the preparation of candidates for baptism at Easter and in Lent, too, the excommunicated would prepare through doing penance for their rec-onciliation to the Church and readmission to its sacramental life. In due course Lent came to be a time for study and repentance for the whole Christian community as it prepared for its yearly celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection. The Introduction to the Season in Common Worship: Times and Seasons remarks that the characteristic notes of Lent are ‘self-examination, penitence, self-denial, study, and preparation for Easter, to which almsgiving has been traditionally added.’ The Ash Wednesday liturgy speaks explicitly also of prayer and fasting. Some may find themselves more drawn to certain aspects of Lenten practice than to others; our cover suggests, nevertheless, that all have their place and that we might balance our preferred practices with other obser-vances perhaps less immediately attractive to us. To do so would be to exercise, appro-priately enough, a kind of self-denial.
Our communal Lenten study in the benefice this year will involve watching a num-ber of films with religious and spiritual themes. We shall meet on Wednesday evenings at 7.30pm for the showings which will be preceded by a short introduction. Our meet-ings will be in Hempton Church so as not to displace the Boys’ Brigade from Dedding-ton. The films will last about 90 minutes and those who wish will be invited to move on to one of the Benefice’s hostelries for discussion of what we have watched. The first occasion will be on February 29th when we shall see Ingemar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.
On the Boys’ Brigade: please keep the BB expedition to Mmabatho (Feb 10 -18) in your prayers. We hope that our visit will strengthen our ties to the Tsogo Centre and the Church of the Resurrection and in particular bring into being a living connection between our young people and theirs. The trip is also intended to provide a memora-ble and challenging encounter with some of the realities of present day South Africa.

Hugh

January 2012

A Happy New Year, we wish one another. What are you going to do new this year - or stop doing newly ‐ to make yourself more happy and the year genuinely new? Or have you given up on the idea of a year's ever again being truly new. Is more of the same all you have in mind for 2012? If your ambitions are higher than more of the same (and they should be), how to realise those ambitions. Three suggestions. First of all, take the message of the Christmas just passed really to heart. God loves you ‐ yes, you in all your preposterousness. God loves you, flawed and fallible you, along with all humankind; God loves you enough to come to this world as a human being and to die for you. And that death means that heaven is open to you. What's more, Jesus is still present for you through the Holy Spirit.
You know these things theoretically of course, but with what intensity do you feel them? Take these considerations to heart afresh and let feeling their truth brace you for the year to come which will no doubt bring  difficulties and disappointments. Knowing that God loves you (and always will, however much you fall short of your own best intentions) should enable you to live trustingly and fearlessly, because if God is for you, who or what can effectually be against you? You can dare to come out of the comfort zone of your old self. Confidence of God's love makes change easier. And there's an impetus to change when New year's resolutions are in the air. There's a special seasonal invitation to think about what you might do differently so as to serve God better. We can all serve God better than we do; when the year is new and in the atmosphere there's openness to change, it's time to make some moves towards realising our deep felt desire to do better by God and for God. So don't be lazy! Resist inertia and make a resolution to alter something in your life, make an adjustment that, on serious thought, you think will bring you closer to God and to the way God wants you to be. If no particular thing is obviously crying out to be done (or not done), don't lose the moment of opportunity
that New Year is but look around ‐ there'll be something fresh and spiritually fruitiul for you to do. Then try hard to stick to the resolution, knowing that if you fail, you will be forgiven and another chance will be offered.

Because God loves you.

So:

1.) Be confident of God's love;

2.) Resolve to serve him better in some particular way; ‐and

3.) Because prayer underpins everything in the Christian life and because God is always more ready to listen than we to pray ‐ pray more. Maybe, in fact, you could go for 3) as your 2).

Simple! Happy New Year!

Hugh

December 2011

Advent calendars and Advent candles are a good way of encouraging ourselves to keep the season of Advent. If we take Advent just as the countdown to Christmas, though, as the numbers on the calendars and candles may tempt us to do, we may not keep the season properly. Advent is as much about Christ’s second coming as judge at the end of time as it is about his first coming at the first Christmas. Yes, we should prepare for Christmas, but we should also prepare for our being called to a final accounting before God. Preparation for judgement requires repentance and amendment of life – purple, the colour of penitence, is appropriately the liturgical colour for Advent.
Now, there might seem to be a conflict between these apparently sombre themes of penitence and judgement and the joyful looking forward to Christmas which is also central to Advent. In fact, though, judgement and joy cohere because what we rejoice in at Christmas is precisely deliverance from what judgement threatens. To dwell on the idea of judgement is not to run perversely counter to the joyful expectation of Advent; rather, attention to judgement sharpens our understanding of the Incarnation as the divine action that saves us from sin and its potential consequences of final alienation from God. The purpose of Christ’s coming at the first Christmas is to deal with the threat judgement poses for sinful human beings. Christmas, we might say, is God’s very happy answer to the problem of judgement.
The Short Eucharistic Preface for Advent in Common Worship reads as follows: And now we give you thanks because you sent him to redeem us from sin and death and to make us inheritors of everlasting life; that when he shall come again in power and great triumph to judge the world, we may with joy behold his appearing, and in confidence may stand before him.

This is well put. So try holding Incarnation and Last Judgement together in your thinking and praying this Advent. Consider that you stand under judgement and ask for grace to amend your life; become aware of how short you will fall, amendment notwithstanding, in your accounting before God on his seat of judgement; but become aware, too, that Christ came to make up the shortfall. This will make for a happy Advent and an even happier Christmas.

Hugh

November 2011

A need/wish list part two
Thanks to those who offered help in relation to items on last month’s list. May I repeat the request for someone to look after our South African link.
People to organise fund-raising for the Barford Churches. Things are looking up at Barford with stronger attendances and particularly invigorating family services. But, like everyone, we need money; we need, for instance to re-pair the ceilings. 
FIREWALKERS for Nov 12. Being there is good, doing it is better. Still time to sign up and get that sponsorship. I'll sponsor anyone who asks.
People interested in silent prayer.
Craftspersons to design and make a set of cushions for Deddington Church
Film buffs to put on a Church film series.
Artists to exhibit in our churches.
More helpers for our Boys' Brigade. This is one of the places where our mission to young people happens. You, whether young or old, can help that by helping the BB. (contact Chris Mitchell 338010 or cat@brookhouse1.eclipse.co.uk ).
People - young people? – to look after our internet broadcasting (for a fee, maybe). Do you know who might help us?
Volunteers to offer church-related contributions to Deddington on Air (contact David Rogers: tel: 337065 or david@deddingtononair.org)
People prepared to be in Deddington church for a couple of hours a week. We are not far off being able to staff Deddington Church through the day. Were we able to achieve all-day staffing, we could run a shop.
People able and willing to make cards (from photos of local scenes, etc.) which cards we could sell at such a shop.
A person or a group of people to research some pilgrimage routes in the Diocese connecting up with our Benefice.
CHEQUE BOOK CORNER
Ceiling repairs in Barford St Michael
Financing alternative use (NB – not redundancy) of Barford St John Church as a place of quiet prayer (maintenance, insurance).
Photovoltaics on Deddington Church roof (sun)
Projection system in Deddington Church (screen)
NB: these last two items got a fair wind at the Deddington Parish Forum but have yet to be finally approved by the PCC

October 2011

A need/wish list part one

People to join the Saturday morning prayer meeting in Deddington Parish Church. 8.45 - 9.15. Sounds awful? We pray for the future of our Church, mostly in silence, seek-ing to be open to the Spirit. No need to say anything at all, so no embarrassment (unless you think prayer is embarrassing in itself) but your presence would help.

Ditto for our newly instituted Midday Prayer at Deddington. 12.30-12.45 each weekday, broadcast. A short time in the midst of things to return to God. We are now saying three offices on weekdays and nearly twenty people a week make that happen. That's amazing but we could do with more. Prayer is what the church is fundamentally about. A church (like a family - well, we are a family) that prays together, stays together.

People to help run the experimental Nov 27th 10.30am service in Deddington. Craft activities, stable-building, coffee-making, croissant-heating, greeting, newspaper-buying, furniture-shifting. There’s a job for you, if you can help (contact Sarah Green)

Friends of Deddington Church (contact Leslie Milroy amilroy@umich.edu ). It’s past time we made a big push to bring in funds from those outside the con gregation who want to see the church in good order but the congregation's getting on board too will help.

Someone to take over from Vanessa Loach as co-ordinator of our Pastoral Care team (contact Vanessa threshing-barn@hotmail.com ). The team has made a real contribution to our community by befriending people and helping out in different situations. The team is involved at the moment in a highly impressive scheme for the daily transport of a patient to hospital in Oxford. Committed, sacrificial endeavour. Thanks to Vanessa for her three years at the helm. We mustn't let this go.

Someone to head up our relations with the Church of the Resurrection in Mmabatho. We are hoping to send our Boys' Brigade to our link Parish, which would rekindle our relationship (financial contributions to educational opportunity welcomed). But we need someone to work the phones with our Mmabatho friends.

Someone to do the Intercessions list for Deddington. Not rocket science but the list needs drawing up and monitoring. Viviane Hall did a great job but the Vicar can't cope. (contact the Vicar.)

Hosts for the Swedish Girls Choir coming to us from our link Parish in Jonkoping in December (9th-12th). 16 young ladies seek accommodation in pairs. And some others sleeping in Deddington Church would like showers somewhere! (contact the Vicar).

Hugh

September 2011

Phone hacking, riots, Norwegian massacre, Eurozone meltdown. Often it seems the really bad news comes from elsewhere, as of course it continues to do. But it’s not been a good summer for the UK and Europe and we can’t wave the bad news away as someone else’s trouble. Our Christian response in our small corner? Maybe ‘Keep calm and carry on’ in accordance with Thelma’s retro notice in her Coop stall is the best we can do.
Keeping calm, for Christians, will mean steering clear of tempting standard-issue Middle England hysteria, that easy, fist-shaking ‘string ‘em up’ hysteria (rioters) stuff and those fearful and falsely comforting enunciations that ‘all foreigners are fiends’ (vulgar Aussie/American Murdoch, icy and chilling Scandinavians, feckless Southern Europeans) – a bit rich from us, after all, these days.
Carrying on as Christians will mean continuing to acknowledge our own solidarity in sinfulness with our fellow human beings – even those of our fellow human beings dis-tanced from us by race, nationality and economic and educational circumstance. It will mean continuing to turn to Christ to ask for forgiveness for ourselves and for grace to amend our lives, to amend our lives so as to become more loving persons – so as to be able thereby to do more to help our nation and the world in general to become more loving.
The horrible, shameful ills of this summer at least have this benefit – that they allow us to recognise again how good our Christian faith is, because so evidently much of what has gone wrong recently wouldn’t have done so were individuals and societies truly committed to the fundamental Christian notion that you are not in this world for yourself and to get what you can get from it but for the sake of others and to help others to their fulfilment – to that fullness of life which Jesus and his values bring.
We do, then, have a gospel, wonderful good news, to proclaim and we should be able to do so more confidently following this summer’s events in which it has been easy to see that essential marker of worldliness, love of self at the expense of others. We know and should say and show in our lives that it doesn’t have to be as it’s been this summer, that the Christian way is a better way. Do not be conformed to this world; rather, love God and love your neighbour as yourself. Don’t commit to selfishness and fear; rather, ‘Love one another as I (selflessly, self-sacrificially) have loved you’. A wonderful gospel to proclaim to others—and, first of all, to ourselves.

Hugh

August 2011

A busy July PCC meeting at Deddington. We thought Women Bishops a wholly good thing, agonised about those who don’t and what provision should be made for them and felt that absolute parity between male and female bishops in terms of authority and status essential. Reports of our discussion will go to Deanery Synod. Also going to the Deanery, which is in the throws of devising a plan for mission and ministry in the immediate future, will be the PCC’s response to the idea that vicars might be only part-time in their benefices, the other part of the time going to mission in Banbury, a response that indicated reluctance to give up a full-time vicar alongside a grudging recognition that the needs of Banbury might be greater than Deddington’s. But if a growing Banbury and the reducing numbers of stipendiary clergy suggest lay people are going to have to take on greater responsibility for ministry and mission in the rural parishes of our area, where better to begin than Deddington? You’ve already proved you can do it….
The Revd Stephen Weston spoke about the projection equipment installed in Chipping Norton Parish Church and its benefits and the PCC has decided to look further into this as a possibility for Deddington.
We also considered a Worship Committee recommendation arising out of consul-tations with 30-50 year olds in our community and thought that trialling a new-look 4th Sunday service would be a good idea. It’s hoped that such a service will work for our established congregation and bring new people in. So, if we can find the people to staff the occasion, on Advent Sunday, we’ll be starting at 9.30 am with a Eucharist – robed choir, but rather shorter than usual - and going on to a range of Advent-themed activities (craft, music, prayer, discussion) from which people can choose. It’s come and go as and when you please and if all you want to do is have coffee and a croissant and read the papers, that’s fine. Brief final worship at 11.15 am. Expect a tap on the shoulder and a request for help! More of that lay ministry, please.
The Family Services at Barford continue to go very well, injuries to the Curate inflicted by younger members of the congregation notwithstanding (see report in the Church Times). Barford is still not out of the woods financially, though – so do come to the Fete in the Manor Gardens on August 29th and spend, spend, spend! Humiliation of the vicar and curate with wet sponges is now part of the ritual – for a fee, of course! It ought to be vicar, curate and youth worker, but I’m sorry to say the last of these sees the Greenbelt festival as a greater attraction. (In fairness it must be acknowledged that Sarah will still be recovering from a whole week away in Wales at the Boys’ Brigade camp, whereas the curate is only managing a couple of days there - and the vicar is skiving completely.)

Happy hols!

Hugh

July 2011

The last few weeks have seen a series of pleasant disruptions of our normal Benefice routine. Sweden trip, Hempton doors dedication, Deanery Eucharist, Ellie Bird’s baptism, Dan’s priesting and first Eucharistic presidency. Thanks to the many who put themselves out in various ways to help make all these such fine occasions.
July should be pretty much business as usual, though with Dan now often presiding at our Eucharists. There are some important items on the Deddington PCC’s agenda this month, however. We are to have a discussion of the proposed legislation to allow women to be consecrated as bishops – this as part of a C-of-E wide consideration lead-ing to voting on the matter by Diocesan Synods and General Synod. If anyone would like to discuss the issues or make a representation to the PCC before its meeting on July 20th, please get in touch with me. (Barfordians as well, of course: Barford PCC will consider the proposed legislation on Sept 14th.) If you would like to inform yourself on how things currently stand on this matter in the C-of-E, have a look at the copy of the Church Times supplement available in Deddington Parish Church and St Michael’s.
Deddington PCC will also be considering our 4th Sunday service in the light of consultations held at around the time of the APCM, the issue being whether we should change the service with a view to making it potentially more attractive to those who currently don’t come and, if so, how. Again, if anyone would like to make comment (as some already have), please talk with, or write to, me so that the PCC can take your views into account.
Looking further ahead, we have the Youth Choir from Sofiakyrkan visiting on the second weekend of December (concert in Deddington on Friday 9th). It may be that the Choir will be accommodated elsewhere in the Diocese but I’d like to know whether any-one in the Benefice would be prepared to put members up for two or three nights. Could you let me know?

Hugh

June 2011

At the end of June, Dan Inman, our curate, will be ordained a priest. The ceremony will take place in Dorchester Abbey on Sunday June 26th at 10.30 and will be conducted by Colin, Bishop of Dorchester. Anyone who would like to come would be very welcome and transport can be arranged. At 6.30pm that day in Deddington Parish Church Dan will preside at the Eucharist for the first time. Again, all are welcome. (There will also be a Holy Communion service in Barford St John at 4.00 pm to celebrate its Patronal Festival, the Birth of John the Baptist.)
Presiding at Holy Communion is one of the things priests, as opposed to deacons, are allowed to do, along with pronouncing absolution of sins and giving blessings. Dan will also be able to take weddings. These are great privileges and responsibilities and Dan will be taking a big step. Like all priests in the Church of England, however, Dan will remain a deacon, called to proclaim the gospel in word and deed and to serve the community ‘that the love of God may be made visible’ as the service for the Ordination of Deacons has it. As deacon and priest Dan will continue to need and value your prayers.
Further complications in the arrangements for services in June are occasioned by the Deanery Eucharist. This is to take place in Bloxham Parish Church at 10.00 am on June 19th and everyone from all the parishes in the Deanery is invited (again, we can arrange transport, if required). To encourage everyone to come we are asked to suspend normal morning services in the Benefice that day. So there will be no service in the Barfords on the 19th. There will be Holy Communion in Deddington at 8.00 am. At 2.30 pm in Deddington there will be the baptism of Ellie Bird, and Andy and Janet have invited everyone to what will be a joyful and moving occasion. After that there will be the usual third Sunday in the month Deddington occasion, ‘Free Spirit’: tea, coffee and cakes with some hymns and study of Galatians Chapter 2 (3.30 for 4.00). A small, unthreatening gathering and if you enjoyed the Lent series on the Bible, or want to improve your biblical knowledge, you’ll enjoy this. And please note the study day on the Bible taking place in St. Francis Church, Banbury on June 18th.
Before all that, you might like to come to the Ascension Day service in Hempton (7.30 pm, Thursday, June 2). Though he remains with us to the end of the age, Jesus’ return to the Father at his Ascension marks the completion of his mission in the body on earth and his taking of our humanity into the Godhead itself. Christ’s taking of our nature on earth in the Incarnation at Christmas ends with our nature being taken into the being of God in heaven. That raising of our nature into God himself is a most extraordinary and wonderful and the Feast on which we celebrate it is one of the most important in the Christian calendar. Dan and I and some others from the Benefice will be celebrating the day at the end of our pilgrimage in Sweden at Vadstena Abbey, the shrine of St Birgitta, a great figure of the 15th century and now one of the patron saints of Europe.

We are sorry not to be at the Benefice service in Hempton but Hempton will have Bishop Colin with them. It will be his first visit to Hempton Church. He will preside at the Eucharist and dedicate the wonderful new doors between the Church and the old schoolroom on the 160th anniversary of the original dedication of the Church. According to tradition, bubbly is provided by the Vicar (even in absentia) to aid celebration after the service. There will also be edible refreshments and there may be balloons to send heavenwards, too. An ecclesio-social occasion not to be missed (if you are in the country)!
If you haven’t already done so, you might like to sponsor my performances on the cricket field in games for Deddington CC. 50% of your money will go to the Cricket Club, 25% to Katharine House Hospice and 25% to the Tsogo Projects, the last helping HIV/AIDS infected or affected children in Mmabatho/Mafikeng, South Africa. A penny a run shouldn’t see you too much out of pocket. I’m averaging in the 60s at the moment, but was out for a duck last innings.

Hugh

May 2011

Rogation Sunday, when we ask God to bless the growing crops and the young animals, is the most obvious feature of the church calendar this month (29th). It’s a wonderful feast day, especially in the country and we shall celebrate it this year at Calcutt Farms in Hempton (10.30) and in Barford St John (4.00pm). There’s also a sequence of Saints Days at the beginning of this May - St George, for instance gets knocked off his normal April 23rd onto May 2nd because the Church doesn’t celebrate Saints Days in Holy Week, there being even more important things to think about then. Saints and Rogation notwithstanding, however, you could say that May this year is pretty ordinary in church terms. You could say that, but you’d be wrong, because all May is Eastertide.
It’s such a shame that people stop celebrating the great feasts of the Christian year almost as soon as they have begun. Christmas is meant to last for twelve days but is lucky if it limps past the New Year (though admittedly Christmas gets celebrated for many days before it really should). Easter, the greater feast, is meant to last fifty days through to Pentecost and fifty days really isn’t long enough to celebrate the extraordinary miracle of Christ’s Resurrection. It’s rather odd that there is still a fair amount of commitment to keeping Lent but that we usually make a lousy job of the fifty days of Eastertide, sinking speedily back into our ordinary routines. You would have thought it was easier to party than to fast, even in these straitened times. At least this year we have a sequence of Bank Holidays at the beginning of Eastertide to help us stay out of our routines and in the festive mood appropriate to the Easter season (there’s one/another good thing about The Wedding!). But now May stretches before us, doomed, if we are not careful, to feeling ordinary. Don’t let it happen; keep the party going. There’s nothing ordinary about Christ’s rising from the dead. It changes everything for the better – for the best, eventually, with everything that is wrong and sad dealt with. I’m sure our brilliant flower teams will see to it that the flowers don’t let the Resurrection down. The Easter Sunday display was magnificent and widely admired – Deddington was effective even over the internet, I’m told! Many thanks! And, indeed, thanks to everyone who worked hard to make sure that Holy Week and Easter were observed with due devotion.
That brings me to the Choir. One less than ordinary thing we shall be doing this month is rehearsing and otherwise preparing for the Deanery Choir visit / pilgrimage to Sweden. Rather over twenty people are coming for the Choir leg of the trip. The Choir, drawn from four Benefices, will sing Evensong in Sofiakyrkan, Jonkoping and the cathedral at Vaxjo and will join with our Jon-koping choir friends for the main Sunday service in Sofiakyrkan on the 29th. Five of us will then walk some thirty miles on pilgrimage to Vadstena, where the remains of St Birgitta, a major figure of the 15th century and one of Europe’s patron saints, lie in the Abbey Church. Dan will be part of the Choir and pilgrimage party, but will go to Sweden earlier on a placement at Sofia-kyrkan during which he will learn about the Swedish Church.
These arrangements mean that Dan and I, regrettably, will not be around for Rogation or for the Ascension Day service in Hempton (7.30 pm, June 2) at which the new doors will be dedicated. Bishop Colin, however, will be there (his first visit to Hempton Church) to perform the dedication and preside at the Eucharist. This will be a splendid occasion, worth putting in the diary now. Many congratulations to the Friends of Hempton Church for achieving some-thing remarkable with the new doors; not only to they look very fine, but they create new possibilities for the use of the Church building.
The pilgrimage group returns in time for a big celebration on Sunday 5th June, when we shall offer thanks after the morning service and at Evensong for the raising of sufficient money to fund our Youth Worker for a further year. At least, we shall do if we raise a further £5.5K or so in donations and firm pledges by the end of May. Over to you, but I’m entirely confident and the celebrations are inked in in my diary!
Happy Eastertide,

Hugh

April 2011

Libya, Japan, New Zealand…. Catastrophes natural and man-made have been coming fast on one another’s heels these last weeks bringing with them enormous suffering and raising hard questions. Are the Christian beliefs in a loving God and the perfectibility of the world and humankind anything more than fantasies? Is the Christian hope for a better - in fact, a perfect - order of things anything other than wilful self-delusion?
These questions are always with us, though the calamities of the last few weeks have made them more prominent in our minds than usual, perhaps. As Dan pointed out in a recent sermon, no truly satisfactory explanation has been given as to how evil and suffering can be part of an order created and superintended by a good and all-powerful God. Yet in the face of the bleak realities of sin, suffering and death we can present another reality, that of the Resurrection of Christ. That reality does not deny the reality of suffering and death – indeed the Resurrection is inextricably bound in with suffering and death. But the Resurrection is a fact that points to death’s not having the last word in the total order of things over which God presides. Death might seem to be the ultimate defining factor for humankind, that which imposes final limits on us and gives us over to meaninglessness and nothingness. Christ’s Resurrection, however, suggests oth-erwise. And if death, this greatest limiter of our lives, in fact lacks ultimate power over us, then it remains reasonable to believe that there is a kind of existence possible in which not only death but other limiting, oppressive and reductive forces currently constraining and diminishing our living have also been removed. We may rationally believe, that is, in an eternal life of complete and unending happiness and fulfilment, we may legitimately hope for a perfect order of things. Such, anyway, is the belief and the hope Christians have derived from the fact of Christ’s Resurrection.
But is the Resurrection fact rather than fantasy? Well, the existence of the Church is no fantasy; the Church is part of the same reality within which wars and earthquakes also exist. And the Church’s existence, many would say, is less likely to be grounded in fantasy or delusion or deliberate feigning than in a mysterious but real event which could only be understood as Christ’s not being held by death. It seems unlikely that Christ’s disciples would have embraced the danger of declaring their leader, executed by powerful authorities as a criminal subversive, alive again unless they had very good evidence for believing that to be the case. The coming into being of the Church is probably easier to explain with a real Resurrection than without one.
So as you wonder about the dreadful events of the past few weeks, don’t forget that there is also Easter. We may not be able to explain satisfactorily how a loving God can permit suffering, but, grounded on the reasonable belief that Christ is risen, Christian faith and hope are not absurd.

Hugh

March 2011

Easter is late this year and so therefore is Lent, which begins on Ash Wednesday, March 9th. On that day the traditional practice of the Christian Church is to impose ashes on the faithful as a sign of repentance. Lent is a season of penitence and self-examination, a time for the discipline of self-denial as a means to spiritual growth, a growth also enabled by renewed commitment to doing good, to practical love of neighbour, whether near at hand or far away. It’s a time for being more than ever serious about our spiritual nature and what is required of us because we possess that nature. It’s a time, in fact, to commit ourselves afresh to developing our relationship with God.
As way of helping that development it is customary for churches to offer a series of talks or discussions in Lent. In the Deddington/Barford Benefice this year we are going to run a course on the Bible (in part because this year the Church of England is celebrating the 400th anniversary of the first publication of the King James Version of the Bible.) In sessions led by the clergy of the Benefice, we shall consider how the Bible was put together, how it reflects Israelite History, the kinds of writing it contains, how the Gospels compare with one another and how the Bible is to be used today. Our meetings will be on March 10 (Thur); March 16 (Wed); March 30 (Wed); April 5 (Tue); April 14th (Th) at 7.30 pm. The meetings will be in Deddington Parish Church, with the exception of the one on March 30, which will be in Hempton Church. Find those diaries now and do come! (It’s more complicated than it would be ideally because a lot is going on in the Benefice and this means we can’t manage a single day of the week or a single venue.)
However you keep Lent ,whether by giving things up (might this help you break a bad habit for good?) or by doing more to help others, or both, do keep it. Do take at long, hard look at yourself and think about what you might want to change. Do reflect and pray. Do offer that helping hand. Do make that extra charitable donation. Give yourself a challenge in the spiritual area of your life. If you keep Lent well, Easter will mean so much more.
Kick-off, Wednesday March 9th. Eucharist and Imposition of Ashes, 7.30 pm, Barford St John Church.

Happy Lent!

Hugh

February 2011 - from the Curate

If there’s one thing that excites the opinions of churchgoers more than anything else, it is what they like in their Sunday worship. While you might, reasonably, have somewhat hazy opinions about Divine Providence, the nature of Christ’s presence or otherwise in a Communion wafer, or the future of ecumenism, you will almost certainly have very clear opinions about what constitutes ‘good worship.’ Someone accurately described your curate not so long ago as a ‘miserable traditionalist’ which, naturally, I took as a compliment. A Book of Common Prayer Evensong, with canticles set by Orlando Gibbons and an anthem by Thomas Tallis, is, in my opinion, almost unrivalled as an offering of praise and thanksgiving to the Almighty. Nonetheless, I realize that this makes me somewhat of a weirdo by my generation’s standards (although, as I reminded the schoolchildren not so long ago, living the life of faith means loving the weirdo). Suffice to say, each one of us meets God in different ways, and what occasions an encounter with God will not be the same for a cerebral introvert with a love of language and antique liturgy as for an unchurched thirty-five year old who engages with the world through images and sounds relayed on her iPhone, for example.
There are principles which we all share, however. Cranmer wrote in his preface to matins and evensong that when we worship, we ‘assemble and meet together to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at God’s hands, to set forth his most worthy praise, to hear his holy Word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary as well as for the body as the soul’: wonderful words, and the splendour of our Benefice is that Cranmer’s description of worship is as true of our Prayer Book evensongs as it is of our worship on First Sunday, Squeals and Wheels, or Iona morning prayer. Even if our expressions of worship are now plural here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we do share fundamentals, and our ability to adapt and be open to different groups and different experiences of faith even as we are one in the Body of Christ is impressive. The Worship Committee appointed by Deddington’s PCC to consider our pattern of worship reiterated the need to hold onto those clear fundamentals: our worship must always be for God (rather than an expression of ‘what I like’), and that we should order all our worship in such a way that it opens us up to the work of the Holy Spirit who, daily, is transforming us into the image and likeness of Jesus Christ.
Our worship should, also, the PCC agreed last night, speak clearly of the God who has come to us, and redeemed us, in Jesus Christ; it is ‘good news’ for all and, in that sense, evangelistic. This doesn’t mean tub-thumping altar-calls and the Vicar orchestrating a Billy Graham Crusade in the Co-Op, but it does mean that it is our duty and our joy to share our faith with those beyond our regular congregation. In particular, the PCC thinks there would be value in exploring the possibility of one service a month that was accessible to those in their thirties and forties, those currently missing from our Sunday morning services.

This would not be a service in the style of First Sunday, aimed primarily at children, but primarily a service for adults for whom our normal Eucharistic pattern is currently, for whatever reason, inaccessible. It would probably occur on the fourth Sunday of each month at 10.30am, following on from a formal Eucharist earlier in the morning, and preceded by a breakfast/brunch where the two congregations might meet and converse.
Unlike First Sunday, activities for children would be provided in the Living Room, giving those who come with children space in the main building to worship and reflect in forms that are appealing to them as adults. The plans are at a very early stage, and we are just beginning the process of consultation, both with those for whom the service would be intended, as well as the current congregation. What must be stressed at this point, however, is that this is not part of some sinister plan to abandon liturgical worship, evict the choir or - God forbid! - replace our Prayer Books with iPads. Rather, it is but an expansion of our commitment to offer worship to the Almighty that is accessible to all, complementing our already diverse forms of worship in our weekly cycle of prayer and thanksgiving. It may prove fruitless, but to embark upon this process of exploring how we might reach groups currently absent from our regular congregation, whilst upholding St Paul’s assertion that ‘we who are many are one body, for we all partake of one bread’ (1 Cor. 10.7), is both important and essential if that body is to remain lively and healthy in the years to come.

Dan

January 2011

Mary Coleridge’s poem Salus Mundi goes like this:

That striking last line assaults Christmas sentimentality full on: sweet little baby looked after by the animals when nasty human beings wouldn’t open their hearts and homes to him - but before you go ‘Aaah’ and push your face towards the little bundle of joy in the manger, watch out! - that baby already has teeth.
Yes, God with us means that the world will be saved. God so loved the world…. Baby Jesus is a bundle of joy, because he is the ultimate expression of God’s love – the Word made flesh, existing in total solidarity with us, happy to share our human nature and predicament, happy in the end to die as a human for us humans, God though he is. Love indeed – and we are rightly comforted as we recognise the depths of God’s love for us. Nevertheless, the salvation of the world that Christ brings about through his death is threatening and dangerous to the worldly status quo. There is going to have to be mas-sive change for this world to become the kingdom of our God. The world is going to have to be turned upside down and many people won’t like that one bit. Sensing the danger to themselves embodied in Christ, the worldly powers seek to get their retalia-tion in first – and that means danger for others. The conflict between love and self-assertion brings collateral damage. The slaughter of the Holy Innocents, who are caught in the crossfire between good and evil, is an unsentimental reality check as to the true meaning of Christmas.
Checking reality as unsentimentally as we may, we still find that the essential truth of Christmas is that God is with us. Knowing that truth, whatever else less pleasing we know, should make us feel profoundly safe. Christ comes to us and will stay with us to the end of the age. As St Paul has it, neither death not life, nor things present, nor things to come will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. And love conquers all. We are safe in love’s embrace: the force is with us. Nevertheless though at the deepest level Christ is our safety, he is undeniably dangerous to us as we exist on the abrasive surfaces of the world. Dangerous as he invites us to stand with him against the worldly powers and the unsatisfactory status quo over which those powers preside and which they seek to maintain – for these worldly powers may, in the world’s terms, crush us, if we resist them.
More dangerous still, though, is Christ as he asks us to recognise how we have taken shares in Worldliness inc, asks us to recognise our own compromises with the way the world goes, to recognise our own complicity with the unsatisfactory, our sub-mission to and service of the worldly powers, to acknowledge our sinfulness in general. Jesus asks us for these recognitions and then invites us to change. If we accept his challenge, it’s goodbye to the ego’s comfort-blanket of self-justification, chewing on which permits us to remain as we are, and hello to the wrecking-balls of honest self-examination and repentance, which smash the ego to pieces.
‘God with us’ looks comforting at first. Then it looks threatening - get off my back, Jesus, leave me alone; I‘d rather you weren’t so pressingly with us – I want to be me. Then it looks comforting again. Thank you, Jesus, that I don’t have to be the me I find less than satisfactory. Thank you that in coming to this world you changed every-thing and made it possible (if everything can be changed, so can I) for me to change too. That change may endanger the me I currently am. But to stay the me I am makes it impossible for the me I might and would like to be to come into being. And, espe-cially at this New Year, I want to begin anew. Our New Year’s resolutions are towards this aim - to become the persons we know we should be and want to be. In Christian terms our resolve is to be absolutely submitted to Christ, who knows what we should be better than we ourselves and will help us, on the side of change as he is, into those new beings if we will let him,
“In the juvescence of the year came Christ the Tiger”, says the poet. Particularly in the year’s young growth which is upon us now, we want to change and to grow. Let us succumb to that longing and risk the tangle – the passionate and dangerous tango - with the Tiger. That will involve us taking on the status quo in the world and in our-selves. In taking them on we shall, God willing, help to change the world and we shall ourselves, scratched and bitten in encountering God though we shall be – we shall be changed for the better.
So be it. It may hurt, but may that dangerous, tigerish baby in the manger, the God with us who makes all the difference in the world, and can make all the difference in us, the painful but life-giving difference – may he not stand on sentiment but get his teeth into us this New Year.

Hugh

December 2010 - Advent

Advent – a time of looking forward, of waiting, of preparation. A time to get properly ready for our yearly remembrance of Christ’s coming to his world at the first Christmas and a time to contemplate his coming again at the end of time. How might we ready ourselves? If we follow the round of services for this season, that will help us a great deal. We shall hardly be able to miss the season’s focus on Christ’s coming birth as the hinge on which history turns. We shall be required in those services to look forward to God’s coming to his world to save it from itself, required to recognise that everything is changed in that coming and required to acknowledge that in God’s time all shall be well for a world redeemed from it sinfulness. We can hardly miss the message if we come to Church on the Sundays of Advent. But perhaps we can find ways this Advent of sharpening that message’s impact upon us, so that, come Christmas, our welcoming of Christ may be truly heartfelt. Our Sunday attendance at Church will bring to the fore in our consciousness the doctrinal truths we already know – incarnation, the world’s redemption, its eventual consummation in Christ. We know these truths and we shall not escape them, or wish to escape them, in our Sunday worship this Advent. How might we, though, create the conditions for those truths to resonate in the depths of our beings? How might we permit those truths so to penetrate us that they change us radically? How can we ensure that our getting ready this Advent is not just preparation for a well-worn Christmas routine that touches us only superficially but for a life-changing encounter with the living God and his astonishing love for us.
I suppose we need to take time and find space to be astonished anew. We need to step out of Advent-as-pre-Christmas-rush and into a stillness of contemplation of the astonishing idea that the God who made the universe has come to this world and to each of us, willing, God though he is, to accept the limitations and the suffering of being human, so that the world and we can be drawn into his divine life. We need to find time to contemplate the answer to the question ‘Why would God bother?’ The answer is, of course, because God, astonishingly, is love rather than various other things we might have supposed a Supreme Being to be.
So, if you can, find the time and the space outside Sunday worship to be astonished afresh. That is the best preparation for Christmas. Find some time for reading the Bible and other material for the season (there is some in our Churches); if you like the internet, use our Advent Calendar on the website; or just sit quietly at home or in Church each day of Advent pondering for some minutes that great fact - Emmanuel, God with us; God with us in Jesus at the first Christmas, God with us always to the end of the age. Astonishing. Such contemplation should help us towards the heartfelt welcome we owe Christ this Christmas. And it should help us to change and so to be ready when Christ comes again in his glorious majesty to judge the living and the dead.

Hugh

From Sweden with Love

Last weekend, your tireless curate was sent on his (latest) adventure to film the consecration of Jan-Olof Johansson as the new Bishop of Växjö, the twin diocese of Oxford. Having departed at 4am, I arrived in a snowy Uppsala at lunchtime and set about installing the various devices and cables that our tech-man extraordinaire, David Rogers, had given me in a black briefcase before departure (and the Vicar, in a plastic bag, in the early hours of Saturday, at the Park and Ride). David, as you no doubt already realize, is a sort of ecclesiastical Q to my ecclesiastical James Bond (…). I don’t know where that leaves the Vicar, but probably the part played by Judi Dench in the recent films (please keep this bit in, editor!).
Our friends at Uppsala Cathedral were extraordinarily helpful, despite my inability to speak Swedish, and before too long we had the cameras installed and were ready to broadcast Vespers. The centrepiece of this broadcasting phenomenon, however, was the consecration of Jan-Olof on the following day, the last Sunday in the Church’s year, known by the Swedes as ‘Doom Sunday’. The place was swimming with clergy and bishops from across the globe, including the Bishop of Buckingham, and the good people of Uppsala had arrived en masse to witness the first visit of the Crown Princess, HRH Victoria, and her new husband, HRH Prince Daniel, to the Cathedral. It was also an important day in the life of the Cathedral since they were celebrating the ninetieth anniversary of their boys’ choir, a very distinguished musical ensemble from what I understood, and heard. It was a beautiful, and very moving, service, and Jan-Olof was delighted that we were able to communicate it to many beyond the cathedral walls. The broadcast went well, but for a few short interruptions, and was made possible largely by David’s remarkable ability to control the laptop from his study in Deddington; the man never ceases to
amaze! Do watch the services again, if you have not already seen them. You will soon notice how much we have in common with our brothers and sisters in the Church of
Sweden: but for language, everything else is remarkably similar to an English consecration. Also the Church there faces many challenges similar to ours, and there is a huge
amount that we can learn from each other in our shared commitment to the gospel in northern Europe. I have come back convinced of the importance, both of our parish link with Jönköping and also of the Church of England’s bonds with Svenska Kyrkan through the Porvoo Agreement. If you’d like to read more about the trip, and to see some photos, do have a look at my blog at www.deddingtoncurate.blogspot.com.
You can also watch the services again by going to www.rallyfm.net/swedishtv.html

Dan

November 2010

Stewardship.
 
Time, talents and money.  No problem with the first two.  We in this Benefice, as in the Church of England at large, volunteer massively with our time and talents.  That’s why our churches do the good job they do.  But money? Volunteering cash is a bit of problem for us, it seems, which is why our churches do a less good job than they might.
 
The Church of England’s General Synod recommends Church members give 5% of post-tax income to the Church (‘to and through’, in fact – the Church will itself give money away).  It is recommended that a further 5% be given to other causes which promote Christ’s kingdom.  These recommendations are, of course, grounded in biblical injunctions on tithing, but regular giving in the CofE is at only about 3.2 % of post-tax income.  Why are most of us not doing what our Church asks of us?

Stark inability, perhaps?  A good reason.  But how often, particularly where money is concerned, is ‘I can’t’ a convenient mistranslation of ‘I won’t’?  People will have to consult their consciences on this matter, of course; most will find, if they are honest, that they could afford to give at the level the Synod suggests.  It might involve a measure of sacrifice, but there’s not much spiritual harm in that. 
 
Or is it that we feel we have a right to direct our giving where we wish, when we wish and in the amounts and proportions we wish?  This apparently reasonable position is not so easy to maintain if we understand that we don’t ourselves own anything, but are stewards of what is actually God’s.  It’s what God wants us to do with what he entrusts to us (money, time, talents, life, self) that is the issue.  You can, of course, back yourself to make independently an accurate discernment as to what God wants, but in this financial area it might be wise to protect yourself against self-interested self-deception by accepting the teaching of the Body of Christ. 
 
There is further difficulty with the ‘I have a right to choose what I do with my money’ position besides the error of supposing it is my money in the first place.  That second difficulty is the large component of self, of me, in that ‘right to choose’ stance.  In giving himself for the life of the world Christ empties himself and submits absolutely to the will of the Father.  The injunction to half-tithe at 5% is an invitation to a similar sort of giving, an invitation to loose the ties of the ego on our gift, to an unconditional ‘over to you’, to a real giving rather than a kind of buying.  Given our deep-rooted desire to be in control, that is pretty challenging, but it will bring great spiritual rewards, primarily in an experience of the goodness of the God who loves a generous giver, an enhanced awareness that our trust in him is securely placed.   It certainly takes us away from the consumerist behaviour which dominates the culture in which we are set, where ‘what I want’ is boss. Half-tithing is one way in which we can, in obedience to God and trusting in him, step out of this world and its self-centredness into the selfless generosity of behaviour that characterises the Kingdom of God.  And surrender to God in faithful obedience in this area of our lives can only help us on the path to that total surrender to God that he asks of us – asks of us not so as to domineer in our lives, but so that he can bless us to the utmost.
But will ‘my’ money be well-used?  Since most of the money you give to the Church resources your parish (the great majority of the Parish Share paid to the Diocese is used to pay clergy in parishes), this question in the end boils down to whether you trust the Vicar and the PCC to spend ‘your’ money well.
 
This is more a question, just now, for Deddington than for Barford, Barford not having had much money recently for elective spending.  At the Deddington Forum, presentations on two items on which we have chosen to spend money, IT and work with young people, received applause.  Most people in the congregation, I would hazard, want these operations to continue.  We have also chosen to spend money on a Curate and I doubt many people think that it is money misspent.  IT, Youth Worker, Curate are important factors in making Deddington at the moment a vibrant and exciting parish and I am sure we all want it to continue to be so.  So why don’t we submit to the discipline of half-tithing (spiritually advantageous in any case) which would make sure of the funding for what we are doing now?   We can and should seek to raise funds in other ways, but we cannot be sure how much these efforts will bring in.  The only way of being sure we can continue our current work is to pay for it ourselves.
Is there any compelling reason for not giving the 5% a go?  Do the Maths, consult your conscience and, if you can, give it a go for a year to start with.  You will, once you’ve taken the plunge, love it.  Or your money back.  A year at 5% percent and if you don’t like it, tell us and we’ll give you the difference between 5% and what you were giving this year back.  No questions asked. (And, yes, this offer has been underwritten.)  If we meet this challenge and continue to give at 5% year by year, we shall save ourselves a lot of tediously money-focused time, effort and worry.  (Barford NB!)
 
Deddington Church members will shortly be getting a letter from me asking you to state how much you will be giving to the Church for the year beginning January 2011.  We estimate that what we are receiving from regular giving at the moment (about£40K) needs to be raised by half as much again to get us to around the 5%.  So the target is £60K pledged as regular giving by Advent Sunday (Nov 28).  If we can do it by Christ the King (Nov 21), though, we could have a very appropriate celebration on that feast day.  And 5% isn’t an upper limit – already-half-tithers, be generous too!
 
A bottom-end bottle of wine per week per electoral roll member commuted to a contribution to your Church, and we’ve done it.  For wine read, as appropriate in your case, beer, chocolate, newspapers, eating out, concert/ theatre tickets, foreign holidays, investments…  An average per person of about £4 a week more than is currently being given.  This can be done.  Pray about it and discover in prayer, maybe, that it should be done.  And then do your bit to make sure it is done. Many blessings will then flow - for ourselves as individuals, for our Church and for others - because that is what happens when you do God’s will.

Hugh

October 2010

First of all this month, a big ’thank you’ on behalf of all of us to Barbara Alt who is stepping  down from her duties as Churchwarden, Treasurer and PCC member at Barford.  Barbara has given many years of faithful service to the Church in Barford in these offices.   The responsibilities have been weighty and their exercise time-and thought-consuming, with a fair measure of anxiety thrown in.  Besides the day-to-day business of making sure the churches in Barford have been up and running, Barbara has been suprema of the Restoration Project at St Michael’s,  a major undertaking which has bequeathed a building in excellent repair to future generations.  Stephen Bunce will replace Barbara as Treasurer and we hope to be able to elect a Churchwarden in her place next Spring at the APCM.  Please consider whether you might like to stand for this office.

Barford St Michael’s Patronal Angel Festival was well supported and attended.  Thanks to all of you who made angels for the occasion.  I didn’t do a precise count, but we must have had a hundred and fifty and more on show .  Deddington Primary School did a great job for us.  And thanks to those who came as angels – look on the website to check some of them out.  We thought about angels at Deddington too on the last Sunday of September and on Michaelmas Day the Barford angels flew to Deddington for the Communion service with the School.   Happy chaos ensued.  (Some notes below clear up a couple of angelic matters).
The angels, as pure spirit, don’t need physical sustenance .  We human beings do, and God provides it for us.  Thanks to all those enabling a proper celebration of God’s life-sustaining gifts at our Harvest Festivals.  Bangers and Bingo at Hempton certainly hit the mark and Barford and Deddington will be offering comparable satisfactions.

Sarah Green will be joining us as Youth Worker this month.  Sarah will be seeking to form a Church Youth Group and will be a part of the Boys’ Brigade operation.  She will also play a role with the Internet Cafe that is going to start in Deddington Church.  Please sign up for stewarding of this Cafe on the list in Deddington Church.

We now have a New Media subcommittee at Deddington to advise the PCC on possible developments in our outreach to our community and beyond via the Internet, Facebook, Twitter and whatever else technology presents us with.  Please allow your minds to be stretched by the possibilities – it’s exhilarating as well as bewildering, or so I have found it.  Could we, for instance, use a second-hand outside broadcast truck with all mod.cons.?  There’s one going at £9K, if anyone would like to produce a chunk of venture capital. (OK - maybe ensuring we have money for more than one year of Sarah – see above – is a higher priority: but over to you.)  David Rogers will be talking to us about what we can do with computers and what they can do for us at the Parish Forum on Oct 21. Please come.  Computers aside, the Forum is an opportunity to make your views known on any Church matter.

We have also instituted a Worship Committee at Deddington with a brief to undertake a radical review of our services and offer suggestions as to how we might perhaps do things better.   Palestrina and compulsory Saints Days observance seem to me the obvious answer, but maybe the Committee won’t agree. This Committee is looking for additional members, so please talk to me if you would like to come on board.

Please let me know also if you are interested in joining a Deddington Deanery visit to Sweden at the end of May/ beginning of June next year.  Why Sweden? Under the Porvoo agreement the Church of England has entered into a close relationship with the Church of Sweden (and other Scandinavian and Baltic Churches) involving intercommunion and mutual recognition of priestly ministry.  Christ prays that his followers should be one and Porvoo is moving some of those followers towards that unity.   The agreement, though, needs to be rooted in parish life, and so visits to and fro are deeply desirable.  We in Deddington Parish and Deanery shall be hosting a party of Swedish Church people on Oct 14th.  The Swedes will be looking at how we implement ‘Living Faith’ and how we do our Youth Work.  Come to lunch at the Unicorn on 14th and talk to the Swedes, if you are free.  They’d love to meet you - and they speak very good English.

Angels and Swedes and us – and many others.: the great company of the Church of Christ’s worshippers.  Differences of language and culture (Swedes) and of nature (angels pure spirit, we – like Jesus –  soul and flesh) don’t stop us worshipping together the one Lord.  Neither does death.  We in this Benefice shall remember our connectedness with the saints in heaven and with ordinary believers like us who have passed from this earth – our loved ones among them – at the All Saints and All Souls services on Oct 31st.  This season around October is about the solidarity of human beings on earth with the departed and with the whole company of heaven - saints and angels – in the worship of Christ.  Let me know if you would like loved ones to be remembered at the afternoon services on Oct 31 and come and light a candle for them.           

Hugh

Notes on Angels:
The Nine Orders of Angels:  Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones;  Dominations, Virtues, Powers; Principalities, Archangels , Angels.
Healing Angels?  The Archangel Raphael heals in the apocryphal Book of Tobit

September 2010

Stewardship in Deddington (but Hemptonians and Barfordians, please read also).

I know some frustration has been felt over Deddington’s stewardship campaign.  For a start, people were expecting something more directly about money than Robin Brunner-Ellis offered us and then the PCC didn’t do what Robin wanted in advance of the last meeting he led.  As to the first issue, the rationale vis-a vis stewardship as traditionally understood (using well in God’s cause our time, talents and money) of inviting us to look at our future development was that, if we could come up with a plan for that development to which many people had contributed and on which most agreed, the resources for implementing that plan (time, talents and money) would be more likely to be made available.  As to the second problem, the PCC has now considered the comments, criticisms, aspirations and suggestions offered by the Parish at the Stewardship meetings.  It has further considered what is implied for our future by the way we are now; what directions are indicated, for instance, by our existing commitments, activities and personnel.  It has considered comments I presented to last year’s Parish Forum.  In the light of these considerations some formal resolutions have been taken and some further possibilities for future action have emerged.
We have resolved to have a Worship Committee, the brief of which will be to examine our patterns and forms of worship and, if it seems appropriate, propose changes.  This move is made in response to views expressed at the stewardship meetings that we do not find younger people in Church on Sunday much; that a less traditional adult-orientated service might be appropriately included in our regular pattern of worship; that our worship is not as good as it might be in leading us towards encounter with Christ.  Could we change things so as to make our worship more authentic and more attractive?
The PCC recognises the importance for the Church’s establishing and maintaining connections with young people of the Boys’ Brigade and the Youth Group.  We have therefore resolved to encourage more people to volunteer their time to support these groups.  We have also decided to ask people to contribute financially specifically to the Youth Work Project, in the hope that we can fund a Youth Worker for more than the one year to which we are currently committed. Please arrange your donations with Iain Gillespie.
We have resolved also to encourage more people to join our Pastoral Care Group and have agreed in principle to fund some training for its members.
We have resolved to bring into being a New Media committee which will report to the PCC on our internet operation and propose further developments.  The work of this committee should improve our outreach and our communication, particular with younger people.

We have resolved in principle to open an Internet Cafe in Church (we are researching interest in this venture in the community, but already have reason to think the facility would be used).  We shall need people to steward the Church if and when this Cafe opens.
If you would like to offer time to one or more of these committees, groups or operations, please let me know.
We are committed to the training of our Curate, Dan, and that training will involve his exercising a particular special responsibility.  Given Dan’s expertise in Church History and the importance of the subject, it would seem appropriate to have him run some teaching in that general area.
Some members of the Parish will be involved in a visit to Sweden around the beginning of June next year.  Whether, and, if so, how to cultivate further our connection with Sweden will be assessed following that visit.  (There will be a general invitation to members of the congregations of our Benefice, the Deddington Deanery and neighbouring deaneries to make this trip to Sweden.)
Our link with the Church of the Resurrection and the Tsogo Projects will be reviewed at the next PCC meeting.
The PCC invites your comments on all of the above and on any other matters of concern at the Parish Forum, which will be held in Deddington Parish Church on October 21, beginning at 7.30pm.  David Rogers, our Webmaster, will make a presentation on our IT operation on that occasion.
Please be aware, if you are not already, that a service of Evening Prayer now takes place each weekday in Deddington Parish Church at 6.00pm. It lasts about 20 minutes and is broadcast via the internet.  It is currently attracting (not counting the internet attenders) about the same sort of numbers as Morning Prayer.  Do come along.  We currently use the Church of England’s Common Worship provision, but shall shortly be experimenting with a less formal service and would welcome other suggestions as to the shape of Evening Prayer.       

Hugh

August 2010

Comments received on a couple of sermons recently remind me that I and others have for years felt the need for some forum in which sermons could be discussed.  All preachers want to hear what their listeners have thought of the sermon (nothing worse than no response) and all preachers need to hear the views of their audience if they are to go further with their own thinking on a subject.   
Those who preach regularly in the Benefice are more than happy to try to answer queries, doubts or requests for further explanation. Conversations  after the service can help, but they can only go so far and the church door is certainly not the place for group consideration of sermons.  I wonder whether we might use 'Church Matters' as the forum for discussion  A month's worth of sermons should throw up enough questions for a regular column.  
If you would like to give this a try, the best thing would be to place comment with Sue Addison via email or the red plastic folder in Deddington Church.  This means that your comments or questions will have been thought through (perhaps difficult to manage immediately in the heat of an adverse reaction to something said in a sermon) and that the response can, likewise, be a considered one.  A debate could then take place over several months with different people joining in.  
A process of debate seems a better way of exploring God's truth than our current system which allows Vicars and Co to pontificate and gives little opportunity for the views of others on the matter in hand to be properly developed and expounded and then heard by the whole Church community.  Certainly, lay people can and should have a view on the Scripture on which clergy sermons are based: that is why the Bible got translated into English.
And on the matter of translation, the King James version of the Bible is 400 years old next year.  Should we join the celebrations?  How about a Bibliathon - a reading through of the KJV - in a group, starting in September?  A chance to increase your Bible knowledge and to find our whether this Authorised version is really all it's cracked up to be.  Let me know what you think.       

Hugh

If you do want to post a comment about one of Hugh or Dan's sermons then we have created a Facebook discussion page which is available here.

From the Curate…...

I come to the Benefice from a period of academic overkill at Oxford. In fact, this is my first real foray beyond the boundaries of educational institutions. Imagine, my surprise, then, when I found out recently that I had become the institution!
I was born in Guildford during the Miners’ Strike and grew up in Hindhead, Surrey, on the edge of the Devil’s Punchbowl. During my teenage years I lived for a time in San Diego, Woking, and, more recently, the tropical paradise that is Hayling Island, several mudflats removed from Portsmouth. I was schooled at Lord Wandsworth College in north Hampshire (famous principally for its contributions to the England rugby squad), before reading Theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. From there, I went to The Queen’s College where I wrote a DPhil on the development of theology as an academic discipline in nineteenth-century Oxford. It really is more interesting than it sounds.
I’ve moved to Church Street in Barford from Ripon College Cuddesdon, the veritable Eton of theological colleges but without the same fees (or, indeed, many of the amenities of Eton). In preparation for parish ministry, I’ve enjoyed placements in rural south Oxfordshire, a fantastic church in north Fulham, a college chapel, and St Paul’s Cathedral (for some of which, I worked with a curate of yore, Ed Newell). It’s great to be finally starting ministry, despite the inevitable disorientation.
I became a Christian as a teenager. Some friends dragged me along to a Bible study at the Chaplain’s house at school and before I knew it, I seemed to be a signed-up follower of this rather curious Galilean chap, being baptized and confirmed when I was sixteen. Since then, I’ve taken a variety of rather odd life-choices that have led me to be a deacon in God’s Church, much to the aggravation of my more rational side, which would have had me clambering for a job in the Foreign Office or the City. I tell myself that there’s still time to become Ambassador to the White House and many clergymen over the years have been competent spies. I’ve yet to hear from MI6 and rather suspect I should stop watching Spooks.
When not being ‘professionally religious’, I’m a keen singer, enthusiastic walker, cook, traveller, terrible squash-player and - since arriving in Barford - gardener. My only claim to fame is several recordings of Portuguese polyphony with the choir of Queen’s and, rather more excitingly, the soundtrack to the last Harry Potter film in which the basses sang one note continuously for about three minutes as a funeral lament for Dumbledore: celebrity indeed.
My first month has been tremendous fun, if somewhat tiring. I’ve been really touched by everyone’s generosity and kindness whilst I’ve been trying to find my feet, and am enormously grateful to you all. I hope you’ll bear with me as I continue to settle into the rhythms of the Benefice and that, in due course, I will remember your name. I’m trying (‘very trying’, as my stepmother would say…)!         

Dan

A Goodbye

This month we say goodbye to Judith Tinsley, Head teacher at our School. Judith, with her astonishing energy and vision and her admirable clarity of purpose has achieved remarkable things at the School. It is a very good place for children to learn and to grow. That is partly because, thanks very much to Judith, it is a School with a marked Christian ethos, its religious and spiritual provision noted as excellent in the latest official report. Our Parish Church links with the School contribute to that excellent provision, and Judith has promoted those links vigorously. The Church, of course, has strong representation on the School’s Governing Body. Clergy and members of the congregations at Deddington and Hempton contribute significantly to Collective Worship at the School; church people help with pupils’ reading. The School regularly comes to the Parish Church to worship and on some of these occasions joins our Wednesday congregation for the Eucharist. That Eucharist is a context in which we have recently been trialling the Church of England’s new, child-friendly Eucharist Prayers. The School has made, and we hope will continue to make, a strong contribution to our First Sunday Service.
Besides worship, School and Church have worked together on our links to the Church of the Resurrection in Mmabatho, the Tsogo Centre and Thelesho Primary School. These links have helped Deddington children become aware of the HIV/AIDS issue in Southern Africa. The visit of teacher s from our School to South Africa in 2009 was an inspired and inspirational idea (Judith again). One of its fruits will be the visit to Deddington this month of Marina, Head teacher at Thelesho. Make sure you meet Marina, if you can; she is a remarkable woman. You could say that our Church of England School is in the front line of the reevangelisation of our community – more so, in fact, than are we, the Parish Church. The School involves many more people, children and parents, in its regular activities than does the Parish Church and so has enormous potential in the recommendation of Christ to those who do not know Him. Judith has made sure that this potential has in great measure been realised; many school families will be aware that the excellence of the School has do with its explicit and conscious Christian character. The School asks gently the great question: ‘What of Jesus of Nazareth?’ Thinking about the regulations on admitting children to Communion before Confirmation, regulations which require strong links between children who might be admitted and a Church, I have wondered whether our School is not in fact a Church. What doesn’t it so that we, the Parish Church, do in terms of belief in and worship of Christ and in the working out of that belief in the way its members meet the world? The School isn’t a Eucharistic community, but it could easily be if the rules on admission to Communion before Confirmation allowed Church Schools to be the communities within which the appropriate instruction in the faith was delivered. Does the Church of England really believe in its Schools?
I have come to believe in our School as an ecclesiastical community where worship is offered, the Gospel preached and lives touched and shaped and healed by Christ.
I was about to write to Bishop Colin about the School as Church and the rules on Admission to Communion when I heard that Judith had resigned. That made a difference, because how much a Church School is in fact a Church depends greatly on its Head teacher.
Let us, then, thank Judith for what she has done for School, Church and community, what she has done for the cause of Christ in Deddington, and let us wish her well in pursuing that cause in her new school in Witney. And, thanking her, let us thank God for Judith. Let us pray, too, for the process of the appointment of Judith’s successor,
for wisdom for all those involved in that process. Let us pray for the continuing well-being of the School and for the maintenance and continuing development of links between School and Parish Church. Let us pray that the School may continue to be a place in which children are taught excellently and are brought towards Christ through the School’s ethos and worship.

Hugh

A Welcome

This month, too, Dan Inman starts his curacy with us. We pray that his time with us will be a blessing for him and a blessing for us. We pray that he will learn from us and we from him. Dan comes to us at a time of change in the Church of England’s practice over curacy. The Church’s Initial Ministerial Education programme which starts this year puts the emphasis very clearly on curacy as a training post. Curates are now going to have to ‘evidence competencies’ to show that at the end of their training period they are fit to be let loose on Parishes as Incumbents or for other roles within the Church. (Why, oh why, was this system not in place ten years ago, you ask!? We shall need to make sure than Daniel does what he needs to do and is assessed as he needs to be assessed so that he can take further steps within the Church of England – so that, in fact, his gifts can be properly recognised and then properly used within a Church that feels it needs to submit to pressures for a fairly rigorous accreditation of its new employees as qualified, professional persons. How the Holy Spirit can operate in appropriate liberty within that system is a question one might ponder, but like it or  not, that is the reality within which Dan’s curacy takes place. We can certainly make that work to the satisfaction of the C of E, and it may turn out in any case that the old apprenticeship model of curacy still fits quite well within the new professionalised understanding of what a Curate’s training should be. In a way these are technical issues.
What most matters is that we should welcome Dan with enthusiasm and joy, with commitment to his growth and to our growth through him, and with love. If we do that, he and we will indeed be blessed. Dan will be telling us about himself and how he got here in the next issue of Church Matters.

Hugh

Hello, new technology

Should we welcome the new computers in the Vestry and what they can do for us – or should we, Ludditely, smash them up? Before we raise the mallets against the future, let’s recognise that those computers can do a lot for us. Fundamental to the provision of the internet connections we now have in Deddington Parish Church were the recognitions that this would allow us both to offer our community internet access in the Church and also to offer access to our services over the internet to our community and whoever else might wish to have that access. As to the latter, we thought first of the residential homes for the elderly. But our experiments in broadcast have shown that the constituency we might serve is wider than these homes. Deddington, Switzerland, Burundi, Sweden: in these places and others people can and do listen in. We could kit the Diocese of Kimberley and Kuruman up with a mobile internet station at moderate cost. Church services both ways, school links both ways, AIDS education via that mobile internet station...and so forth. We don’t yet know all that we could do; we know that the Diocese is very interested in what we have started on – it’s cutting edge stuff. Oxford i-church wants to stream all our services and Bishop Colin is as near to frothing at the mouth as a respectable Bishop can get at the prospect. Keeping those who can’t be there in touch with their Church is for him the crux of the matter.
But there are problems. Deddington PCC proved pretty enthusiastic at its last meeting about broadcasting our Sunday services, but it didn’t like the idea of doing the same for
Morning Prayer. That’s understandable: Morning Prayer is an intimate occasion and feeding it out to the universe on video and audio is to invite a sense of intrusion on something private. Should the surrender of one’s privacy be made, nevertheless ? Possibly – we are in the business of service of others, not self-satisfaction, after all. But maybe self-sacrifice has its limits – certainly knowing you are being broadcast makes a difference and a difficulty.
And this leads into the big question – what do you, the Deddington congregation, think about being broadcast and recorded for play back on a Sunday? How happy would the
Wednesday congregation be? Do let me know, but before you take a view, tune in to a recorded service on www.deddingtonchurch.org and see how you feel.
And what might you in Hempton and Barford like to happen in your Churches. Broadband or that mobile internet station? Think about it. Think about in terms of what you could
offer to your villages and beyond. Yes, it’s new, yes, it costs, but with imagination and faith, the problems of novelty and finance might be surpassable.

Hugh

July 2010

Volcanic ash, visa issues and the British Airways strike added to the excitement in the days leading up to the Maurice Frost Festival. Would our visiting choirs from Sweden and South Africa get here?
Preparations for the Festival began over two years ago and it would be a shame if things fell apart at the last minute. But, as they say, ‘Che sera, sera’ … . But everyone got here, no one, through the generosity of Deddingtonians and others, had to sleep on the street, complicated catering was managed with aplomb, the Deddington hostelries and Bakers Coaches did us proud, bishops preached, the community gathered – and the singing was great. The Choir of the Church of the Resurrection sang (and danced) to raise awareness of the huge problem of HIV/AIDS in South Africa. At the signoff concert in Bloxham School, pupils and staff were wowed by the energy and verve of African sound and movement. An extremely large donation from the School towards the Tsogo Centre for children infected or affected by HIV/AIDS in Mafikeng/Mmabatho was received with great gratitude. It went beyond Deddington on Radio Oxford and over the internet – people in Sweden and elsewhere tuned in to the Sunday morning Eucharist – some service! The Swedes joined our own choir and the Boys’Brigade brass to bring off a difficult Vaughan Williams piece, there was African – and Swedish – music and Setswana and Swedish as well as English were used in said parts of the service, which has probably never happened before anywhere. You can find a recording of this service and other Festival items (and a lot else besides) on www.deddingtonchurch.org. Maurice Frost, our former Vicar, would have liked best the traditional Evensong sung splendidly on the Saturday evening by the Choir of St George’s Chapel, Windsor and featuring a composition commissioned for the occasion by the distinguished composer Cecilia McDowall. Dr Frost would have been intrigued, too, by the hymn and reminiscence session on Sunday afternoon when a number of those who knew him contributed anecdotes – always interesting to find out how others see you! – and he would have been touched by the exhibition mounted about him and the Deddington Choir of which he was such a supporter. (Copies of the excellent brochure produced to complement the exhibition are still available in the Church.) There were many other wonderful moments: the Africans and the School together in Church for an Ascension Day Eucharist, and balloons flying away from the tower; the Swedish rite Eucharist in Hempton the same day, and that cake! the Afro-Anglo-Swedish toyi-toyi in celebration across the green, which brought people running with their cameras. The Festival was about recognising a contribution to Church music made by a Deddingtonian and about demonstrating how Church music can help to bind together communities widely separated geographically and culturally. It was also about having fun: there was much joy and our visitors loved it. Thanks to all of you who joined in and made it happen.

Hugh

June 2010

A big thank you to everyone who helped in so many ways with the Maurice Frost Festival and the Choir visits.  For me there were many highlights; among them the sound of  the mens’ voices of St George’s Choir; Peter  - the Desmond Tutu look-a-like;  the Anglo/Afro/Swedish  toyi-toyi  in celebration across the Market Square; the Hempton Cake; Balloons after the Ascension Day service at Deddington;  the Setswana reading  from Acts; the Vaughan Williams sung by our choir and the Swedes with Boys’ Brigade brass; the exhibition and  pamphlet on Dr Frost; the hymn karaoke with reminiscences:  a brilliant concert at Bloxham School from the Africans; the anthem Psallite  Domino;  the co-ordination of the catering, particularly on Saturday afternoon;  the prosecco-filled ‘fridge in the Nave; the relief of having it all over... We shall have a session reflecting on what happened shortly, with I hope some video, photos, audio recordings and refreshments,  for now enjoy the peace and quiet! Hugh

June 2010

From Canon Hugh Marshall
This year marks the 50th  anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood on Trinity Sunday 1960 in St Paul’s Cathedral, London. The Vicar has generously  invited me to keep the anniversary by celebrating the 10.30 a.m.  Eucharist in Deddington Parish Church on Sunday June 13th, the Sunday nearest to the anniversary.
 This is to be less of a celebration than an occasion to give thanks for all the opportunities of worship and service that there have been during these years of ministry, to repent of the many that were missed or fumbled, and to give praise  for God’s presence in them all.
Along with our family, a  number of those who have shared in this ministry at various stages, enriching and supporting it, will be  joining us for the service and we hope that lots of our friends in Deddington will also be there. Do come, and please stay for a drink afterwards.

June 2010

I had this by email from someone who attended the morning service and the evening concert in Deddington on May 16 during the Maurice Frost Festival:
A few years ago I was on a mini-bus trip to a Christian Aid rally in Brighton, along with people from various churches around the Bicester area, and was struck by the enthusiasm of the people from Deddington for their church. It seemed quite unusual to hear such enthusiasm for a village church so I vaguely made a mental note to come to a service in Deddington one day. Then late last night it suddenly occurred to me to look up the service times so that I could give it a try this morning.
 What a great day it's turned out to be! My favourite preacher (Bishop Colin) AND a South African choir! And then a knock-out concert in the evening which even my non-church-going husband had to admit was fantastic and with amazing acoustics. 
 I hope to be back soon for an 'ordinary' service. Although any church that can get a day like today together, however infrequently, is definitely no ordinary village church...
A generous compliment from an outsider, but is it a compliment we are happy to accept?  Does Deddington really want to be ‘no ordinary village church’?  And what constitutes ‘extraordinary’ in this context?  Part of what the writer has in mind, I suppose, is the measure of commitment, enthusiasm and energy in its congregation on which Deddington Parish Church is able to draw, But that commitment and that energy might find their outlet in doing - doing as well as possible, of course  - the more routine things in which the life of a country Parish Church should be grounded. We can probably all agree in broad terms on what it is definitely proper for a village church to aim at; rich Sunday worship, strong fellowship in the congregation, proper care of one another and our neighbours when we or they are in trouble, attention to the Church building, fund raising are some of the things that rightly make up the normal brief for a village church.  To fulfil that brief you don’t have to venture upon what might be called extravagances such as the Frost Festival. Or for, that matter, on extravagances such as Sculpture exhibitions, high-powered considerations of immigration or Islam, celebrations of Saints’ days, having a Boys’ Brigade Company, or a Youth Worker, or overseas links –all fairly unusual for village churches.
Extraordinary commitment doesn’t mean we have to do extraordinary things, though it seems almost certain that the emailer quoted above was rejoicing not just in the commitment and energy that went into mounting the events she attended, but in the events themselves.  For her, what happened was special and therefore good, not just the spirit in the congregation that made possible what happened.
Does Deddington want to be ‘no ordinary village church’ if that means doing out-of-the-ordinary things as well as doing the ordinary things excellently?  Doing things village churches don’t normally attempt is costly first of all in terms of the effort required to think carefully about whether one can and should be doing the things in question, even before one gets to the costs of the projects in terms of time and energy and money.  There is an ordinary and honourable routine of work in the Church that needs to be pursued and as you pursue that, you know where you are.  Doing things differently, going beyond the routine, is variously problematic and inevitably taxing of resources – and tempers; changing things, as we know, often stirs up anger.  On the other hand, not changing things, not pushing beyond inherited boundaries of practice, often breeds frustration and leads to decay.

So do we, in Deddington, but also in Hempton and Barford, aspire to be out of the ordinary or just to do the ordinary things well?  In the end, the whole idea of an ‘ordinary’ village church is a little off-key.  All churches are different and particular and therefore special; each Church is called to a particular work of its own, in its own particular circumstances.  So we need to review those different circumstances and take stock of the available gifts, enthusiasms, energies, resources which can be brought to bear in and on those circumstances. This will help us to assess, with open minds and without prejudging the issue with reference to a stereotyped idea of what is appropriate for village churches, what it is possible and right for each of our different churches in their particularity and specialness to attempt in the cause of God’s kingdom. 
We will almost certainly find that there is some extraordinary thing we can and should do (Hempton’s Ride and Stride Teas – not ordinary, but spectacular; Barford St John’s Labyrinth -  by no means unique, of course, these days but still  provokingly unusual; Deddington’s probably unique Setswana-Swedish-English Eucharist).  The Holy Spirit doesn’t, work to set one-size-fits-all patterns, though it might be more comfortable for us if he did, because then we would know where we were.  As it is, the action of the Spirit, if we are open to it and prepared to let it work on us, draws us away from what we might suppose we know (‘village churches always do it like this, always work within these parameters’) towards questions about what might, surprisingly, be possible, towards the taking of risks, towards ventures in uncertainty – that is, towards the discovery and implementation of what the God who goes always ahead of us truly wants from the particular unordinariness with which he has blessed us. Further, that blessing will be renewed as we respond to Spirit’s drawing, for we will be changed into a fresh distinctiveness, blessed with new particular capacities and opportunities which we must use to make some newly extraordinary offering in God’s cause.  This is a process that doesn’t end.  This is disturbing, but it is exhilarating, too. To seek to meet the Spirit’s challenge is to live fully. 

Welcome to post-Pentecost ‘Ordinary’ time!

Hugh

May 2010

May this year in the Church calendar is a month particularly full of joy.  It  brings Ascension Day and Pentecost, two of the highest Feasts of the Church.  Jesus, completing the mission his incarnation inaugurated, returns in triumph to the Father, reascending to a throne of glory.  He does not leave the disciples comfortless, however, but sends the Holy Spirit to empower them for the mission that remains the Church’s today, to proclaim to all the world the good news of Christ’s victory over sin and death, to proclaim what his Ascension marks, ‘Christ triumphant, ever reigning’.
That the Gospel both is to be, and can be, proclaimed throughout the world is apparent at the first Pentecost in the miraculous gift of languages to the disciples, or perhaps better ‘apostles’ – for now the disciples are sent out into the world in the cause of their Lord.  We shall be able to experience immediately and celebrate appropriately the spread of the Gospel through the world and its expression in different languages at our Maurice Frost Festival and associated events, when some of the lessons and the liturgy will be rendered in Swedish and Setswana by our friends from Jonkoping and Mafikeng.  Ascension Day is the anniversary of the Dedication of St John’s Hempton and the Choir from Sofiakyrkan will sing at a special Eucharist that evening, whilst in Deddington earlier that day the Choir of the Resurrection will lead a Eucharist with the School attending at 1.15 pm.  The Festival should produce in us the joy and excitement appropriate to the conclusion of the Easter season, but which isn’t always very apparent in the services at that period.   May I thank all those who have been, are now, and will be helping with the Festival in whatever way.  The Festival is a major and difficult undertaking, but worth the time and the trouble for a number of reasons, not least of which is its contribution to the cause of Christian unity.  Let us pray that it will be a great success.
Before that, other joyful occasions: on May 2 in Deddington First Sunday is themed to joy and in Barford the following week (May 9) we have a Rogationtide procession from St Michael to St John with the blessing of crops and animals.  On the morning of May 9 the service at Deddington will mark the beginning of Christian Aid week:  Easter joy should lead to a glad serving of those in need – and thank you to those who will be involved in the distributing and collection of Christian Aid envelopes.  The current arrangement of services in the Benefice means that you can attend both these important services on May 9.  You will remember how after Pentecost the apostles ‘spent much time together in the temple’, which seems to have much to do with the Lord adding to their number those who were being saved.  How much time can you afford to give to Sunday worship?
The Pentecost service in Deddington at 10.30 am will include the baptism of Ruby Spengler-Peck, and we hope that there will be a link to New Zealand via the internet to enable a godparent to take part.  On Trinity Sunday (30th) Sue Footner will talk about the Mercy Ships Charity at the 10.30 am service in Deddington.  Finishing off the month with an occasion of great biblical joy, on 31st we celebrate the Visit of the Blessed Virgin Mary to Elizabeth.  Gerard Maley Hopkins associates this Feast with ‘Spring’s universal bliss’ and writes ‘This ecstasy all through mothering earth / Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth /  To remember and exultation / In God who was her salvation.  We should exult too, Christ being also our salvation, but it being a Monday, I don’t suppose many will attend the Eucharist in Deddington.  That won’t, for once, worry me immediately, since I shall be away in Sweden.  Mary, Elizabeth, Jesus and John the Baptist may, however, be a little disappointed.

Hugh

Vicars report on 2009

So how is the Parish doing? Statistics don’t really capture it; for what it’s worth the raw Sunday average body count for Deddington was 98 in the calendar year 2009 as opposed to 99 in 2008 and both those counts are just below what we had in 2002 and 2003. In the years between we were up above 100, sometimes substantially so.   In Hempton the 2009 average was 17, lower than 2008’s 20, when a couple of special services raised the figure, but only very slightly down on the average over the last seven years.   My impression, (for what it’s worth, again) is that we have a greater number of regular attenders in the Parish than we did a few years back, but that these regulars by and large attend Sunday worship less frequently than regulars used to. 
 
What’s clear is that we have enough people on board in both Churches to do some excellent work - and the degree of a congregation's preparedness to be actively involved in a Church’s work may be a better measure of how that Church is doing than attendance statistics. Certainly, we score very high on this active commitment measure.   We are fortunate to have our retired priests who contribute strongly to our worship, providing us with a breadth of style and perspective.

At Deddington we have a fine and committed choir and organist and so we are able to perform traditional liturgies to a high standard.  We also have a music group that provides a good lead for our more modern services.  
Readers, intercessors, sidespersons, welcomers, sacristans, servers, presenters, sound-system managers, service-sheet producers, cleaners, flower arrangers, kitchen-staff and the group which designs our First Sunday worship all give of their time and trouble to make our acts of worship offerings of the whole church, offerings which, though we must always be on the look-out for ways to improve them, we may reasonably hope are acceptable to God.  And our faithful bell ringers week-on-week let our community know that we are very much in business.  Hempton operates on a smaller scale but the degree of commitment is similar.
 
That’s just Sunday worship – which, by the way, we are now able to broadcast from Deddington over the internet. We also have a thriving and growing Wednesday Communion service at Deddington.  A group of about a dozen maintains Morning Prayer daily in Church.  The Saturday prayer group enacts our corporate commitment to seek the will of God for our Church. Squeals and Wheels for the very young and their carers has just gone weekly by popular request and is staffed by a small Church group now, not just by the Vicar.  As far as weekday worship goes, my only regret is that the Eucharists on Saints Days and other special Festivals are so poorly attended. I have yet to hear a convincing justification for the general non-attendance. It’s good to have occasional weekday services also at Hempton (eg Good Friday and Ascension Day).
 
A number of small groups meet for prayer, study and fellowship.  We should perhaps be developing more of these groups and increasing the membership of the existing ones.  Recognising how important a part of our work it is for us to cultivate our relationship with God, we should also, I think, make sure that Quiet Day and pilgrimage opportunities are regularly offered to the whole congregation. 
 
We maintain our rather heroic commitment to a full-time paid Youth Worker, having seen what Clare Cardy achieved for young people in our community during her time with us.   

We would, of course, love to have more young people (and their parents) in our Churches on Sunday - and our First Sunday services are helping this to happen - but we should not underestimate what we already do for this sector of our community, as if what happens on Sunday is all that matters.  That said, whilst we show strong commitment to our Children’s Activity Mornings, we could probably be more supportive than we have been of the Boys’ Brigade and the activities any Youth Worker we appoint may arrange.
 
We exercise a ministry of hospitality at both Churches just through having them open.  Comments in the Visitors’ books show that this is much appreciated.  At Deddington our offering the Church for use at the Farmers’ Market contributes greatly to a hugely successful community enterprise.  Hempton’s hospitality on the Historic Churches’ Ride and Stride day is probably the best in the County. At Deddington we offer a regular welcome to members of our community and others through our Teas on Sunday and by hosting the Katharine House Coffee Morning.

There may be opportunities to expand this ministry of hospitality.  The installation of a broadband connection in Deddington Church has made the provision of computer facilities there a realistic possibility.  Offering these facilities would require us to steward the Church regularly.  If this could be managed (perhaps only for certain periods of the day), our general ministry to visitors would be enhanced.  One thing, by the way, that I should like to see on offer to visitors is a more spiritually-oriented guide to Deddington Church, good and useful though our current historical/architectural guide is.
 
One area of need which we don’t, as yet, meet involves the Mothers’ and Toddlers’ group which meets at the Windmill Centre on Fridays.  This group would love Church members to help with serving the refreshments.

It’s a pity it’s a Friday morning, and so clashes with the Katharine House occasion, but maybe we could organise a rota.  It would be more going out in the name of Christ to meet and serve people where they are.
 
All of the above could not happen without a huge investment of time and energy by members of the congregations in the work of the Churches. In a sense, this is only doing what we should as disciples of Jesus, but I am, nevertheless, enormously grateful to you for doing it.   Your commitment brings a lot of excitement, stimulation and fulfilment to me personally, because it means we can consider, attempt and achieve things that could not be countenanced in a less vigorous Parish.  That being so, the question that arises is where do the limits for us lie; how far, as the Jabez prayer has it, should we be seeking to ‘increase our territory’, the terrain we cultivate for God? We shall be addressing that question as we continue with our Stewardship programme under Robin Brunner-Ellis’ guidance.
 
Mention of Stewardship brings me to a thank you to all who give money to the churches and to all who help raise it through bazaars, operating the kitchens, helping at income-bringing events and so forth.   But a warning: if we do want to increase our territory, our income will have to increase likewise.
 
That’s all largely positive but an honest reflection on the last year or so needs to register that there have been some problems at Deddington.  Deddington Church has been re-floored and re-furnished to superb effect, but, unsurprisingly, not without some blood on the flagstones (Hempton has managed its programme of refurbishment to this point more harmoniously).  The question as to whether the Vicar should stay has also tested us spiritually and brought tears.  It now looks as if we have got past these issues without catastrophe, but difficult as they were, we should as a body have comported ourselves better in dealing with them.  We can, as with any exposure of our failings, learn from what happened.  I have had to do a lot of uncomfortable reflection in response to criticisms made of me, and I hope others have also looked at themselves critically.  I know that some apologies have been made, but suspect that more ought still to be forthcoming.  I fear ‘amendment of life’ may not have happened as much as it
should; it’s easier, after all, to justify oneself and continue behaving as before.

It would be a pity, though, to spurn the spiritual opportunity our difficulties have offered us.  It comes down first to cultivating a proper humility and then to being true to our Christian calling in dealing with one another.  That calling demands of us a generosity of spirit towards one another, a determination to try to think the best of one another, to put up with one another’s shortcomings, to make allowances for each another across the range of our differences, to see things from the other person’s point of view, to be concerned for the difficulties others may experience in our common life.  Our calling commits us to loving one another, in fact.  Without love, whatever we may achieve, we are nothing.  The temper of our life together is something we need to work on.
 
Things get difficult when they matter to people, and conflict in a church body is at least a sign of the church’s mattering to people. Much better the energy of conflict than apathy.  Engagement with our Churches has been fruitfully expressed in the activities detailed above; it is apparent too in the willingness of Church members to sit on the Parochial Church Council (not always unmitigated joy) and to bear office (always hard labour).  I should like to thank all PCC members and particularly our outgoing PCC Secretary, Jen Childs, for her hard work and her humour, our Treasurer and Vice Chair, Iain Gillespie, for his computations and his chairing of a couple of difficult meetings and our Church Wardens, George Fenemore and Glynne Bianchi, who have been magnificently committed and efficient in fulfilling their duties - who habitually, in fact, go well beyond the call of duty.  Les Chappell at Hempton does likewise and I should like to thank him and the Friends of Hempton Church for the smooth running of matters there.

I’d also like to recognise the contribution of those who aren’t exactly members but who help us greatly, nevertheless.  For instance, Mike Ramsdale and James Greenwood our flag-flyers, Don Anderson, our Examiner of Accounts, Sue Shattock whose catering we have much enjoyed, David Rogers who has got us up and running on the internet and who supervises our website, Robin Nash who has looked after the Youth Group and Clare Cardy who has continued in her ministry to young people of the Parish. Clare’s husband, Jon Cardy has done and will continue to do a fine job for young people of our community through his work at the Warriner and in Bloxham Youth Club. Sue Addison manages a host of secretarial and administrative tasks with energy, skill and forbearance.
 
So we look forward to the future in a consciousness that we have been greatly blessed by God in the past and the faith that these blessings will continue if we seek to serve our Lord with full commitment.  We look forward to greeting friends from Africa and Sweden, to welcoming Daniel Inman as our Curate, to going on with refurbishments at Hempton; we pray for success in our search for a Youth Worker and that the Holy Spirit will guide us as we attempt to discern God’s plans for our future. 

Hugh

April 2010

‘April is the cruellest month’, says the poet. The statement’s meant to be felt as odd, counter-intuitive – don’t we all rejoice at the coming of Spring and its new life? That for the poet, though, is the trouble - the seasonal call to live anew, the challenge to break out of the cosiness of spiritual torpor (‘winter kept us warm’). The physical energies of Spring ask of us an energetic response of the spirit to the possibilities of life. The rising sap insists that we are part of a realm of change and growth and should embrace that reality. Comfortable as we are, we might rather stay as we are. In fact, we may fear moving on into difference. Change and growth, no thanks! (Q. How many Anglicans does it take to change a light bulb? A. Change?!)
It has been remarked that Christians concentrate more on the observance of Lent than of Eastertide. I wonder whether that has to do with a certain comfortableness regarding the self built into the customary practices of Lent. We are supposed to deny ourselves in Lent, but I’m not sure how much Lent as we do it helps us leave our old self behind. That old self rather calls the tune; it’s a prime point of reference, after all – it is what is to be examined and denied, but is it thereby transformed? I suspect Lent often ends with a relieved picking up again of the old self with its old routines and habits in blessed assurance that that self can’t be all that bad because it managed the Lenten disciplines it set itself.
If one were to be cynical about Lent, one might say that it dabbled in difference in order to leave us fundamentally unchanged. Really very cosy. We can deal with the Lent dabble happily enough. What we may not be happy to deal with are the implications for us, for our selves, of Easter – Easter that changes our predicament absolutely and should change us. Christ’s resurrection means that sin and death are not ultimate realities but that love and life are. Like the poet’s ‘cruel’ April, Easter thrusts new life in our faces and demands that we live it, live the new life presented to us by the cancellation of the terms and conditions set by sin and death. Their cancellation involves – or should involve - a cancelling of fear, including the fear of change and growth which locks us into our old selves and tends to leave us closed off from other people in their challengingness, too afraid to love. Easter tells us that nothing can separate us from the love of God, and so there is nothing to fear. Even the losing of our lives will end in the joyful acquisition of our true selves.
Eastertide, then, ought to be about abandoning ourselves with joy and without fear to the new life of love which Christ’s Resurrection certifies as the ultimately valid way of living. Living that life will see us changing and growing, drawing closer to God. Perhaps if we are to observe Eas-tertide as we should, we ought to keep watch particularly for the presence and effects of fear in our lives – fear which inhibits our surrender in love to God and to one another - and to ask for grace to live fearlessly out of a Resurrection faith. The fearful attempt to manufacture se-curities of various kinds for ourselves should give way to a generous, loving openness to others and to a trusting abandonment of ourselves to God’s purposes for us, which are always loving purposes. In that openness and abandonment we enter on eternal life.
‘April is the cruellest month.’ This is one poet’s jaundiced reply to another. That other, earlier poet , like the later one, associated Nature’s Springtime with spiritual pressure, but for him the sweet showers and the mating songs of birds were met by a natural human longing to go on pilgrimage. Pilgrimage is a venture of trust in God, a deliberate surrender of security, a deliberate stepping beyond the familiar to pursue the things of God, a journey in search of spiritual transformation. It is an accurate image of the truly Christian life. May we this April, this Eastertide, not find the spiritual demands of the season cruel; rather, may we find ourselves impelled, joyously, to go on pilgrimage.

Hugh

Maurice Frost Festival

15th - 16th May

Please click here for more information on the events taking place during the Festival. Quite a few people in Deddington remember the Revd Dr Maurice Frost, former Vicar of the Parish. Dr Frost was an eminent hymnologist and, to mark the 50th anniversary of the completion of his Historical Companion to Hymns Ancient and Modern, Deddington Parish Church is holding a Festival. On Saturday 15 May at 6.30pm the Choir of St George’s, Windsor (our Parish patrons) will sing Evensong, at which the Rt Revd John Pritchard, Bishop of Oxford, will preach. An anthem by the distinguished composer, Cecilia McDowall, has been commissioned for this occasion. Evensong will be followed by the laying of a wreath on Dr Frost’s grave in our churchyard and then, after refreshments in the church, there will be a Songs of Praise led by our own choir and those of our link parishes in South Africa and Sweden, whom we have invited for this celebration.

There will be a lot of new faces around in Deddington in mid-May! I hope you will enjoy their presence and I’m sure you will make them welcome.
The next day, Sunday 16 May, our 10.30am Eucharist will be led by the choirs of the three linked parishes. The Rt Revd Colin Fletcher, Bishop of Dorchester, will preside and preach at this service. In the afternoon of 16 May (3.30pm) Tea and Hymns with Dr Frost will be an occasion for villagers to celebrate Maurice Frost and to reminisce over tea, coffee and cakes about him and church life in Deddington in his time in the Parish Church.
All Deddingtonians are cordially invited to take part in these celebrations of an important person in the history of our village. The Parish Church is hoping to mount an exhibition on Dr Frost for the Festival weekend and I should be most grateful if those who might contribute memories or materials about him would contact me.

Hugh

March 2010

Some surprise was expressed that Robin Brunner-Ellis’ morning on stewardship in Deddington devoted more time to animals and angels than to money. It makes sense, however, to try to identify areas of consensus as to a church’s shortcomings and some shared aspirations as to how it should be, if you want to devise a plan of action to take that church into the future - a plan, that is, which most people in the congregation will be happy to get behind enthusiasti-cally and to which they will offer their resources of time, energy - and money.

It was apparent at the stewardship morning that many thought a priority in our planning should be to get more young people into church. I think ‘young’ in this context probably means anyone under 50 and I suspect ‘into church’ means ‘in church regularly on Sunday mornings’. This aspiration seems fine, but a couple of points need to be made. Though none of us would say that church is all about Sunday, our proper respect and concern for Sunday ‘prime-time’ worship may distort our perspective on church life. Concentrating on Sunday morning may lead us to overlook the fact that many young people are ‘in church’ at other times in Deddington. If authentic church is about prayer and worship and hearing the good news of Jesus Christ, then the Primary School – our Church School - does pretty well as a church. Furthermore, its collective worship programme brings the School to the Parish Church regularly, sometimes to join our Wednesday congregation. Then we have more than 30 boys in our Boys’ Brigade Company. Christian devotions are conducted at each of their meetings and, of course, there are their regular Sunday Church parades. The Squeals and Wheels service brings babies and toddlers and their mothers, most of them not Sunday regulars, into Church and there have recently been requests from mothers that we should run these services weekly. Our Youth Group awaits the appointment of a new Youth Worker. All these church operations (and they have some degree of impact not only on the children but on their parents) need to be acknowledged and valued as we consider where exactly we should be putting our efforts in the years to come.

Then again, it’s by no means all doom and gloom in respect of younger attendance every Sunday. The First Sunday format is having some success already in bringing younger families to church. Maybe we should have more services of this kind. Certainly, if we are truly serious about having young people - children and parents - come in greater numbers regularly to Sunday Morning worship, it will surely mean, as Billie Goodway Ward’s letter (see below) points out, that our current way of worship will have to change radically. We should have to offer a way of worship that would attract younger people to church on Sunday even in the face of all the cultural pressures now militating against Sunday attendance. That would certainly be an exciting undertaking and, despite what I have noted above about the impact we are already having on the young, to attempt it might be the right and faithful thing to do.

May I invite members of the Deddington congregation this Lent to ponder and pray about our planning for the future. And do think about my suggestion of attending two services on the Sundays of Lent and think of Barford in particular. I know that the Barford congregation, for whom the future at the moment doesn’t look particularly rosy, would love to welcome Deddington people to their services.

Hugh

January 2010

January brings Epiphanytide.  Epiphany means showing or manifestation and at this season, after celebrating the gift of Christ to the world at Christmas, we rejoice in the manifestation of Christ in his glory as the Son of God, glory made apparent through the adoration of the Wise Men, at his baptism by John, in the miracle at Cana - in the turning of water into wine - and, finally, at his Presentation in the Temple forty days after his birth, the Feast commonly known as Candlemas, with which the Epiphany season closes. 
 
Epiphany is an appropriate time to think about how we, the Benefice churches, manifest the glory of Christ - and we do! - and how we might better do so.  We shall be encouraged in that thinking by our Stewardship campaign, in the course of which we shall attend to how we can best put at the disposal of our Lord for his mission on earth all that we have been given by him.  The campaign starts at 9.30 am on Saturday January 30th with a full morning session in Deddington Church led by Robin Brunner-Ellis, Diocesan Adviser on Christian Giving and Fund Raising.  Please do come.  (It would help if you let me or the Churchwardens know that you will be coming so that we can make appropriate provision at the lunch that will follow Robin's presentation.)  
 
The Eve of Candlemas is a particularly appropriate moment to be concentrating on how we as churches manifest Christ's glory.  Candlemas is a kind of hinge on which the Christian year turns; with it the Advent/Christmas/Epiphany sequence finishes and we turn towards Lent, Holy Week and Easter.  It is in Holy Week, on Good Friday, that Christ's glory is fully manifested at the Crucifixion. At Candlemas Simeon, speaking of Mary's suffering, points us towards Christ's suffering on the Cross. However, we receive that Candlemas message fortified for the suffering it implies for us by the joy of Christmastide and Epiphany; God with us, the Son of God set openly before us for our recognition and adoration. Without second-guessing the Spirit's operations upon us, I'd be surprised if his teaching through our Stewardship campaign doesn't present us with the costs of manifesting Christ's glory, doesn't ask sacrifice of us, doesn't indicate that we should walk the way of cross.   But we can walk that way because our glorious God, manifested in Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Son, born into our world, is with us - always - guiding, strengthening, reshaping, loving.
 
Hugh

December 2009

Advent looks towards the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgement. It is, therefore, an appropriate season for self-examination, for repentance and change of direction. Advent is also the beginning of the Church's year - an appropriate season for starting on something new. Following the Deddington Forum and the ideas and energy it has generated, we have a good opportunity to develop a new vision and new directions for the Benefice.

Perhaps we also need to look at developing a new character for ourselves as church communities: not all the energy around the Forum was positive. I wonder whether it was inevitable that the Forum should give rise to anger, hurt and ill-feeling, as it did. I would hope that a Christian community could find ways of speaking truthfully and generously and listening thoughtfully and considerately such that even difficult matters, matters, say, where opinions differ markedly, or where criticism needs to be expressed, may be discussed openly, graciously and without rancour. We might think about what disciplines we need to set ourselves under, as individuals and communities, to achieve this. Were we to achieve it, we would be exhibiting in this that love of one another which Christ demands of us and which is essential if we are to be effective witnesses for Christ in the world.

As to being effective witnesses, I should like you to consider these related and fundamental questions: what are our church communities - in Deddington, Barford, Hempton - for? and what should the extent of our ambitions be? Please tell me what you think.
We shall be helped in the development of new vision and in the discernment of new directions by Robin Brunner-Ellis from the Diocese, who will lead our Stewardship campaign. The first occasion in this campaign is an open meeting in Deddington on the morning of January 30th (see notice elsewhere in this issue.). Please attend if you possibly can.

Whatever else new happens in the coming year we will have a new Curate. Deddington PCC (with the approval of the Barford Churchwardens) has ratified the appointment of Daniel Inman, who will come to the Benefice in July 2010. Dan is in his mid-twenties, single and has a D.Phil in Church History. He is currently finishing his training at Ripon College, Cuddesdon. As a condition of having Dan with us, Bishop Colin expects me to stay in post in the Benefice at least until January 2012, which I am very happy to do. Please do not suppose that I shall in fact leave then. I might (if spared) stay until I have to retire, for all I know as yet. We shall in due course have to try to discern what God knows and wants.

Hugh

November 2009 - A long Walk in Sweden

Freezing to death seemed to be on the cards. How low would the temperatures have to go? The tent was basic, the sleeping bag of questionable quality. Yesterday spring had been coming to southern Sweden, but today, as I started my long-anticipated walk, there was snow on the ground. My exhilaration at getting under way hadn’t survived day one. I’d got lost more or less immediately, the snow causing confusion; the rucksack was painfully heavy and it looked as if I couldn’t keep to my timetable even if I stayed alive.
The idea had been to spend six weeks of my sabbatical investigating the Swedish Church. It is similar in many ways to the Church of England, to which it is now closely affiliated. I wanted to talk to Swedish Church people about their circumstances in general. More particularly, there’s a link between the Diocese of Oxford and the Diocese of Vaxjo and the beginnings of a Parish link between Jonkoping (Vaxjo Diocese) and Deddington – a choir from Jonkoping visited us last year. Could I do anything to strengthen these links? Then there was that romantic Swedish right to roam legislation which gives you liberty to pitch your tent more or less anywhere for a night or two. Did that really work? And perhaps I could improve my rudimentary Swedish by six weeks’ exposure to the language without my Swedish-speaking wife.
Good enough reasons to be worrying now about diminishing body temperature in a freezing forest in the Smaland Highlands? Possibly, but the comfortable hotel in Vaxjo from which I’d started in the morning seemed rather attractive that first night of the walk. At least I had several layers of clothing available, good gloves and, most important of all, a woolly hat.
Finding myself not dead the next morning, I could reflect that pilgrimages were not meant to be fun. For the walk was a pilgrimage. The shrine I was seeking was that of St Birgitta at Vadstena, about 130 miles north of Vaxjo. I wanted to spend the latter part of Holy Week and Easter at the great abbey built at Birgitta’s instructions in the 15th century for the religious community she founded. Through her community and through her writings Birgitta’s influence was considerable - in England greatest in the 15th century - and she is now a patron saint of Europe. Birgitta, you might say, is part of a Swedish Christian pay-back to us for the important role in the evangelisation of Sweden played by English churchmen in the 11th century, when St Sigfrid, an Englishman, is said to have founded Vaxjo Diocese.
So I went from Sigfrid to Birgitta, from Vaxjo to Vadstena. Dropping down out of the snow belt to Lake Vattern I reached Jonkoping – on schedule, amazingly – and the warm hospitality of friends in that charming city. I could rest and leave some baggage. Some days and about fifty miles later, having walked up the east side of Vattern under a lighter load and with spring now indisputably sprung I reached Vadstena. In the company of fellow pilgrims, I experienced the Swedish Church’s grave and decorous liturgies for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, familiar and followable despite the foreign language, and Holy Week’s culmination in the services of Easter Eve and Easter morning. The distribution of daffodils (‘Easter lilies’ in Swedish) at the end of the latter was just one of many moving moments in the services I attended. Most moving of all, however, was to know myself, or rather to feel myself, a member of the world-wide Church, united to my fellow Christians everywhere.
Priests in the Swedish Church, despite its wealth and high staffing levels, don’t get sabbaticals. The Church of England is in this respect, anyway, wiser. I came back from my three months away refreshed and restored, with new perspectives and maybe even actually changed. I’d like to thank all those in Deddington and Hempton who bore heavier burdens than usual in looking after the churches of the parish in my absence. I hope you will come to feel it was worth it!

Hugh

July 2009 - Changes at the Church

The replacement of the tile flooring of the Parish Church should be completed in July. The tiling in the chancel will remain. We are sorry for the  inconvenience caused by the building work, but it will be good not to have to worry about the safety problems occasioned by the numerous broken tiles, and the new Hornton stone paving will respond very sympathetically to the other stonework in the Church. It is worth noting that the floor of the Church was paved in stone before the tiles were introduced in the 19th century. The pews we have been removing (we may retain a few) are likewise of a relatively recent date. The new chairs will permit greater flexibility for both community and Church. Some will mourn the loss of the Church’s Victorian aspect, but others are already finding the new flooring and the chairs visually pleasing. We will experiment with various configurations of the chairs and remaining pews to see what arrangements work, whether we should provide additional seating and what kind of seating that should be.   Hugh Picture: Colin Robinson