Our friends continue to be most grateful for donations sent from here for the benefit of the community in Brinnington and the homeless friends at Barnabus. Currently, because of continuing Coronavirus safety precautions, our donations to both destinations are somewhat restricted.
The Brinnington Parish Centre normally accepts donations for outreach purposes through their Drop-In sales and coffee mornings for the benefit of people in their community struggling with financial and other problems. For safety reasons the Parish Centre is closed for the foreseeable future and they have no storage space for donations. We have been unable to deliver your donations to them for over a year now. With permission of the Centre Manager, we continue to slowly re-distribute some of the items, particularly clean unmarked adult clothing, to other charities through the doorstep bag system until we can safely deliver to Brinnington once more. We have a large quantity of bric-a-brac including kitchen items stored safely to take to them as and when they can accept it.
We continue to be most grateful to Steve Best of Holmes Chapel Methodist Church for collecting donations for Barnabus from here, as and when it is safe to do so. We are advised that donations for Barnabus, including clothing and shoes, should be either new or as clean as possible, free of any marks or stains. If you wish to donate any clothing which can only be dry cleaned, please kindly have this done before donating it to us.
Thank you all for your generosity towards our friends in need.
As some of you may be aware, our church buildings and contents are insured through the Ecclesiastical Insurance Office. The organisation, which is celebrating its 130th birthday, has launched the Trust 130 Scheme through its charitable arm which is one of the largest corporate donors to charity in the UK.
Every time a new customer takes out a new home insurance policy with Ecclesiastical the sum of £130 is donated to a church of their choice, namely, St Luke’s Holmes Chapel. So far £430,000 has been paid to 2283 churches in the UK under this scheme and there is no limit to the number of donations which can be made to our church.
If your home insurance is due for renewal, and you are interested how Trust 130 can benefit our church, please contact Ecclesiastical Insurance by telephone on 0800-783-0130.
It’s good to have our magazine back in print again this month – hopefully uninterrupted for the foreseeable future.
There have been some comments made querying why the parish magazine was not printed for a few months in 2020 and earlier this year, particularly since other printed material has continued to come through our letter boxes. Our previous printers in Macclesfield decided to retire last March and David, at The Print Room agreed to take over. He has been extremely helpful and has actually been working through most of the pandemic. I took the decision to temporally halt printing primarily to protect our deliverers from the risk of infection, especially when we were all being urged to stay indoors! I hope you understand the reasoning. Stay Safe!
If the COVID-19 restrictions have been eased by May, we will hold our first working party of the year to tidy the area around the memorials at the Knutsford Road Cemetery. From mid-May, 30 people will be allowed to meet outdoors and so we plan to work at the Cemetery on Saturday 22nd May from 9.30am until 11am.
If you are able to help you would be very welcome, no gardening experience is necessary. We will maintain social distancing, if this is still in place, to keep everybody safe. Please bring hand shears, weeding tools and something to kneel on.
If you feel unable to make it until later in the year, we completely understand.
I am really looking forward to a morning of gardening and chat.
A team from Urban Village Medical Practice has been outside Barnabus’s Beacon Support Centre in their mobile vaccination unit to offer the COVID19 vaccine to people experiencing homelessness.
The Revd Canon Paul Hardingham considers the need to stay connected
‘You’re still on mute!’ If you’ve used Zoom over the past year, you’ll be familiar with this cry! After a day on Zoom, the last thing we often want to do is using it for a chat with friends or a church service on Sunday! Now this reveals a wider problem that we face. We know that staying connected in the pandemic is hard. When we’re tired and busy, it’s easy to stop connecting with others, which would encourage our faith or wellbeing. This might also include not sending a text, Facebook comment or phoning somebody up.
Remember what Paul says: ‘For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.’ (Romans 7:15). It’s often easier to avoid connecting with God and others, when this would be good for our sense of value, purpose and identity. Certain patterns of behaviour can make us feel safer, but in reality they prevent us from living our lives fully as God intends.
Paul adds: ‘What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death? Thanks be to God, who delivers me through Jesus Christ our Lord!’ (Romans 7:24,25). Through the death and resurrection of Jesus we have the freedom to act differently. Lent is an ideal time to develop new habits, especially when we are tired or anxious. It may involve spending less time on Facebook, turning the TV off to call a friend who we need to catch up with, or getting up a bit earlier to spend time in Bible reading and prayer.
Let’s keep reminding ourselves that ‘God is bigger than Zoom’ and make sure that we don’t get disconnected! Let’s be committed to doing the right thing, rather than simply the easier thing.
