Mary
Church Office
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Wednesday, 5 December 2012
Last week's photos...a bit late!
Finally, I found time to put these together. Easily the best photos of last week. Click on them to have a proper look. Messy Church was great. Come along next time, if you weren't there!
I've got some good ones ready for the next few weeks. But I'm not against putting up several. So keep sending them. Have a happy snow-day!
Mary
Church Office
Mary
Church Office
Friday, 23 November 2012
Happy thanksgiving!
Have a good week!
Mary
Church Office
Monday, 12 November 2012
New life!
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| St. Mary and St. Michael, Mistley with Manningtree |
We're in the midst of changing our website, but while we do, we can't do a lot with it! Therefore, our sadly neglected blog which has languished, unused and unloved for too long, has a new lease of life. Please do check here for news and events coming up. What's more, our general service pattern and our special Christmas services, and more besides, are all available on the tabs at the top of the page.
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| St. Lawrence, Bradfield |
That's it, for now. Stay warm and look forward to the snowdrops.
Mary
Church Office
Friday, 10 December 2010
Christmas 2010
Dear Friends,
Advent is a season of expectation and preparation, as the Church prepares to celebrate the coming of Christ into the world, which traditionally both looks back to the first coming of Christ and looks forward to the second coming or return of Christ.
As Christmas Eve approaches, the mood changes from longing and expectation to joy and recognition. The song of the Church changes from ‘Maranatha’ - ‘Our Lord, come’ (1 Corinthians 16:22) to ‘Christ is born today’ with alleluias and glorias ringing out through the church’s worship and liturgy.
As we wait with, and through, the familiar characters in the gospel stories, just as Christ was formed in Mary so let us reflect on Christ being formed in our lives, coming again to us, to be born again in us this Christmas time.
Maranatha! Our Lord, come!
Revd. Chris Hills
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
Big Bang Day
Big Bang Day
If you are reading this I guess it didn’t happen. I mean the world didn’t end. I write this on Tuesday 9th September, the day before Big Bang Day, when the long awaited particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva is switched on for the first time. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest atom smashing machine has been designed to smash together beams of phenomenally high velocity protons in order to discover more about the nature of matter and what the universe was like one trillioneth of a second after the big bang that created the universe. One fear that has been expressed about this experiment is that the scientists will inadvertently create black-holes here on earth into which we will all be instantly sucked never to reappear, heralding the end of the world.
I’m carrying on writing this in the confident hope that this doesn’t happen and that you’ll still be here tomorrow to read these musings. The scientists at LHC are hoping that these high energy pile ups will allow them to see a particle that has long been predicted to exist but hasn’t yet been seen – the oddly named Higgs boson. If they see it for the first time, that of course will be exciting and will confirm their theories; but if they don’t see it that may be even more exciting because it could lead to a whole rethink about the basics of nuclear physics – akin to the great rethinks in the days of Copernicus or Newton.
The existence of the Higgs boson was proposed by Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University in 1964 in order to explain the origin of mass in the universe. Such is the theoretical importance of the Higgs boson and its predicted omnipresence in all matter, it has been dubbed ‘the God particle’.
Now that God has been mentioned it is worth asking where does all this leave belief in a creator? Will the LHC experiments get us any nearer to proving or disproving the existence of God? Could further experiments take us back to before the big bang? Nuclear physics has been amazingly successful in helping us to understand the evolution of the universe that we see and experience today. We can investigate its development right back to the tiniest fraction of a second after the big bang, when space and time exploded into being. However, to go back and consider the nature of things before the big bang at the beginning of the universe makes no logical sense at all, because there was no time before the big bang – the dimension of time was created in that explosion. The universe we experience today depends on something beyond both space and time and therefore beyond the realm of physics. This leaves plenty of room for a belief in a creator – one who doesn’t just ‘light the blue touch paper and retire immediately’ but who sustains the whole space-time web in being.
All this is giving me a bit of a headache: I think that I’ll go and have a lie down confident that Richard Dawkins doesn’t have all the answers.
Andy
If you are reading this I guess it didn’t happen. I mean the world didn’t end. I write this on Tuesday 9th September, the day before Big Bang Day, when the long awaited particle accelerator at CERN near Geneva is switched on for the first time. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s largest atom smashing machine has been designed to smash together beams of phenomenally high velocity protons in order to discover more about the nature of matter and what the universe was like one trillioneth of a second after the big bang that created the universe. One fear that has been expressed about this experiment is that the scientists will inadvertently create black-holes here on earth into which we will all be instantly sucked never to reappear, heralding the end of the world.
I’m carrying on writing this in the confident hope that this doesn’t happen and that you’ll still be here tomorrow to read these musings. The scientists at LHC are hoping that these high energy pile ups will allow them to see a particle that has long been predicted to exist but hasn’t yet been seen – the oddly named Higgs boson. If they see it for the first time, that of course will be exciting and will confirm their theories; but if they don’t see it that may be even more exciting because it could lead to a whole rethink about the basics of nuclear physics – akin to the great rethinks in the days of Copernicus or Newton.
The existence of the Higgs boson was proposed by Professor Peter Higgs of Edinburgh University in 1964 in order to explain the origin of mass in the universe. Such is the theoretical importance of the Higgs boson and its predicted omnipresence in all matter, it has been dubbed ‘the God particle’.
Now that God has been mentioned it is worth asking where does all this leave belief in a creator? Will the LHC experiments get us any nearer to proving or disproving the existence of God? Could further experiments take us back to before the big bang? Nuclear physics has been amazingly successful in helping us to understand the evolution of the universe that we see and experience today. We can investigate its development right back to the tiniest fraction of a second after the big bang, when space and time exploded into being. However, to go back and consider the nature of things before the big bang at the beginning of the universe makes no logical sense at all, because there was no time before the big bang – the dimension of time was created in that explosion. The universe we experience today depends on something beyond both space and time and therefore beyond the realm of physics. This leaves plenty of room for a belief in a creator – one who doesn’t just ‘light the blue touch paper and retire immediately’ but who sustains the whole space-time web in being.
All this is giving me a bit of a headache: I think that I’ll go and have a lie down confident that Richard Dawkins doesn’t have all the answers.
Andy
Thursday, 17 July 2008
The Hard Sayings of Jesus
Mark Twain is remembered for numerous pithy sayings on various subjects. When it came to the Bible he is reported to have said that the things that bothered him most were not those that he did not understand but those that he did understand - because the latter he would have to do something about! This is especially true of the teaching of Jesus. We might find Jesus’ sayings ‘hard’ because they challenge us to put things into practice (e.g. ‘love your enemies’) or we might find them ‘hard’ simply because we lack understanding of the culture and context in which the words were spoken. Or we might find Jesus’ sayings hard because we are be required to think; this can be very hard work when we find our contemporary prejudices and convictions challenged. The distinguished Bible scholar F. F. Bruce wrote in the introduction of his book The Hard Sayings of Jesus: “It is all too easy believe in a Jesus who is largely a construction of our own imagination - an inoffensive person who no one would really trouble to crucify. But the Jesus whom we meet in the Gospels, far from being an inoffensive person, gave offence right and left. Even his loyal followers found him, at times, thoroughly disconcerting. He upset all established notions of religious propriety. He spoke of God in terms of intimacy which sounded like blasphemy. He seemed to enjoy the most questionable company. He set out with open eyes on a road which, in the view of ‘sensible’ people, was bound to lead to disaster.”
We all find some thing Jesus said hard to understand or accept or put into practice. A recent Sunday gospel passage (Matthew 10.24-39) caused some people real difficulty. What did Jesus mean by ‘I did not come to bring peace, but a sword’ and ‘I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’? I didn’t address the passage at the time (I had other fish to fry!) but I do intend to. I wonder if there are other hard sayings of Jesus that you would like to see addressed in a future sermon series. Please drop me a note about it (the barest details only are required) and the ministry team will do their best to throw some light on it.
We all find some thing Jesus said hard to understand or accept or put into practice. A recent Sunday gospel passage (Matthew 10.24-39) caused some people real difficulty. What did Jesus mean by ‘I did not come to bring peace, but a sword’ and ‘I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother’? I didn’t address the passage at the time (I had other fish to fry!) but I do intend to. I wonder if there are other hard sayings of Jesus that you would like to see addressed in a future sermon series. Please drop me a note about it (the barest details only are required) and the ministry team will do their best to throw some light on it.
Andy
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
A balanced spiritual life
A balanced spiritual life
An interesting phenomenon of Church History is the way that different movements have arisen emphasising different aspects of spirituality. Each has been a corrective to what the movements’ leaders have seen as a deficiency in the church of their own time. There have been movements which have focussed almost exclusively on ‘the word’ because, they argue, Jesus was very much word-centred. Others have said that we have forgotten that Jesus was a charismatic, and so they have made the gifts of the Holy Spirit the primary focus of their movement. Yet others have argued that Jesus came primarily to release captives, so it’s issues of social justice that must be paramount; still others have majored on the sacraments because Jesus was clearly a sacramentalist. Each movement or tradition has had a very important and timely point to make, and in so doing has potentially made a life giving contribution and corrective to the wider church. Richard Foster, in his book Streams of Living Water, makes the observation that today many people are coming to appreciate this fact more; they have even begun to explore traditions different from their own. For example, today there is a growing appreciation within the evangelical churches for things thought more catholic such as contemplative prayer, whilst catholic churches have been discovering the gifts of the Spirit.
Richard Foster shows that all Church movements of the past can be helpfully grouped into six different streams - the evangelical, the incarnational, the social justice, the holiness, the charismatic and the contemplative streams. In which stream would Jesus most naturally belong? The answer is all of them. Jesus embodied all these streams in a balanced way, like the well balanced wheel in the diagram. For those who wish to become better disciples of Jesus there is a need to reflect on how well balanced their own wheel is. Having thought carefully about my own wheel I can see that it has serious punctures and needs inflating in some places before it would give anything but the bumpiest ride! I am working (as a member of a Renovaré group) to put some air into the weakest parts of my wheel. How is your wheel shaping up? Happy motoring!
Andy