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Newsletter January 201 PRAYER FOCUS
SERVICES JANUARY 2012 Ploërmel (14 Rue Général Dubreton) (There is normally a shared lunch after each service.) 1st First after Christmas 11.00am Eucharist 8th First after Epiphany 11.00am Prayer and Praise 15th Second of Epiphany 11.00am Eucharist 22nd Third of Epiphany 11.00am Family Service 29th Fourth of Epiphany 11.00am Something different (Candlemas) Rostrenen (La Chapelle du Collège de Campostal.) 8th First after Epiphany 10.30am Eucharist 22nd Third of Epiphany 10.30am Eucharist Huelgoat (Parish Church in the town centre.) 8th First after Epiphany 16.30pm Eucharist 22nd Third of Epiphany 16.30pm Fellowship Prayer & Praise For further information on these services or for information about Christ Church Brittany please get in touch with the Churchwardens or local contacts. DATES FOR YOUR DIARY/FORTHCOMING EVENTS Carol Service Callac - 1st January 2012: The Service will be ecumenical and bilingual. The service will be held in Eglise St-Laurent (the principal church in Callac) at 3.30pm. Refreshments will be available afterwards in the Salle Paroissiale situated at 15 rue Anatole le Braz (behind the Church). Talk on Anglicanism at Lanester - 12th January 2012: Laura will be giving a speech on Anglicanism to a group of Catholics from the Lorient area on Thursday January 12th in the Salle Paroissiale of Notre Dame du Pont, 136 rue Jean-Jaurès, Lanester, from 20h30 - 22h. Support from fellow Anglicans would be very welcome. Ecumenical Service St Brieuc - 25th January 2012: The joint ecumenical service will take place at the Chapelle St Guillaume in the centre of St Brieuc at 20h00 on Wed. 25th January. There is also to be one organised by the churches of the Lorient area on Friday January 27th, probably at Plœmeur, but time and exact place are not yet known. Please phone Laura for details if you are interested on 02 97 51 74 26. Alpha Course Alpha is a course about the Christian faith and is taking place in 7000 churches across Britain and lasts 12 weeks. It covers topics such as: Does God heal today? How does God guide us? Why and How should I tell others? It is open to anyone, no matter where you are on your spiritual journey- or if you know nothing about Christianity, and is very thought provoking, Bible based and answering many of the questions of life. We have been running this course in France for 7 years (nearly 2 years in Brittany) in our home, and if you would like to come, or to bring along a friend, please ring us or email us. Chris and Liz Barge, tel: 02 97 72 45 33, or e-mail lizzieandchris@wanadoo.fr Ploërmel - Friday 10th February – Musical Soirée and Home Made Cornish Pasty Supper. The next social being planned is to be held on Friday 10th February starting at 7.00pm. We will be entertained during the evening by a very talented pianist, Emma Cushway and the supper will be a traditional Cornish pasty (Brian’s Granny’s recipe). For catering purposes we will need to know in advance the numbers attending and also if you are a vegetarian. The evening will be at the usual cost of 5 Euros but please remember to bring your own drink. For further information and to book your places please contact Brian & Sandra Lean, tel: 02 97 74 89 30 or e-mail: garfield.lean@gmail.com (Thanks to everyone who supported the Christmas Social, when we raised almost 150 Euros, and had a lot of fun!!) Home Group and Fellowship Meetings – January Huelgoat - To learn more about the group contact Carole Turner, tel: 02 98 78 24 68 or e-mail: carole.turner@orange.fr Rostrenen - The next meeting is on Friday Jan. 6th at 14.30 in the Salle Paroissiale, 4 rue Joseph Pennec at Rostrenen. As it is the Feast of the Epiphany Roger Wikeley will be presiding at an informal Eucharist to be followed by 'galettes des rois'. For further information please contact Laura or Robin tel 02 97 51 74 26.
Redon Area - For confirmation of the date of the next meeting or for further information please contact Joy Morin on 02 99 71 12 30 or Maureen Wilson on 02 99 08 21 94. Ploërmel - Meetings are held on the 1st & 3rd Tuesdays of each month, at the home of Liz and Chris Barge, commencing at 3.00pm with tea and cake. For further information please contact Chris & Liz on 02 97 72 45 33 or e-mail lizzieandchris@wanadoo.fr. Bannalec There is a fellowship meeting for English speakers which normally take place at the Chapel at David and Rebecca Pugh’s on Tuesday evenings at 5.00pm. For further information please contact Rebecca or David on 02 98 35 46 59 OTHER NEWS AND MATTERS Bishop’s Christmas Message ("This is an edited version of the Bishop's message, the full text of which is available in church"). In the Christmas carol “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day” Jesus tells of his life as a dance in which we are invited to share. At Christmas our carols catch us into this dance of divine grace which is set out in St Luke’s gospel with its story of the muck and straw of a birth in a cave for animals; in St Matthew’s gospel with his account of the three astrologers following a star and presenting their gifts, and in St John’s gospel where he speaks of the Word made flesh and in whom we see and know the divine glory. Our Christian faith is said to be “a religion of the incarnation”, yet the reality of the incarnation takes us beyond the tinsel and the trimmings, to harsh reality. The child of Bethlehem was born into a world of oppression and occupation. The world is nasty, brutish and horrible in so many ways, and the God who made us and the whole vastness of the universe, did not stand aside from the muck, the mud and the mess. St Paul in his Letter to the Philippians writes of the Christ who did not think equality with God a thing to be grasped at or held on to, but he “emptied” himself, poured himself out in the love that goes to the uttermost. The God who meets us at Christmas is a God who does not stand aside, but reaches out into the darkness of the world, even, in the end, to the darkness of our human dying. He redeems a fallen world by remaking that world which he loves from the inside. If we as Christians share that life, if in our Christmas communion we feed on that life, then we are called to live that life. We are to be “Christopher’s” – literally Christ-bearers in our world. As the great Anglican preacher, Henry Scott Holland put it, “you cannot believe in the incarnation and not be interested in drains!” Nor about the hungry in the Horn of Africa, the victims of land-mines and the casualties of war, those suffering from HIV/AIDS; about justice and the right ordering of the economic life of the world; about the environment – deforestation in the Amazon, the melting ice-caps, polluting industries, the multifarious consequences of human selfishness. The child of Bethlehem was not born into a never-never land; the Christmas story is not a fairy-tale, but is of a love which comes down to the lowest part of our need – your need and mine, and the need of every man and woman whom we meet. Christina Rossetti’s words in this carol sum it up:
The grace given to us is a life and love to be lived – for Jesus gave us two commandments, the love of God with all our heart and mind and soul and strength, and the love of neighbour as ourselves. That in the end is what human life is about, and it is the grace that makes this possible that we celebrate Christmas by Christmas as we come to worship and adore Mary’s child, born at Bethlehem, Christ, your Lord and mine. May each and every one of you know the peace and joy of this great Feast of the Incarnation. + GEOFFREY GIBRALTAR
Prayer "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you" - Ezekiel 36 v. 26 I read recently an editor's note to Discovering Jesus by William Barclay who said "if you are in Christ it means Christ is the atmosphere in which you live- you never forget the presence of Jesus Christ- you always remember He is with you. This is the sense in which Christians are different- they are a New People" I thought then what a wonderful way to start a New Year, knowing that each of us is a new person, or has the chance to become a new person. As we start a New Year, could we make one of our resolutions to pray each week for the choice of a new Chaplain for Christ Church, and also for all those who are working so hard during this interregnum, that the churches would continue smoothly. Can we remember Revd. Roger Wikeley and all those who are taking the services, the Churchwardens and the Church Council, the musicians and all those unseen faces working behind the scenes, who are moving the church forward in it's spiritual journey. If you would like to join a growing group of members who remember to pray for all those serving in the Church, but also for the choice of a future Chaplain, that God's will may be done in this very important appointment, and are willing to pray, wherever you are and whenever you can, and would like to receive a weekly email reminder, please contact: Chris and Liz Barge Tel; 02 97 72 45 33 or e-mail: lizzieandchris@wanadoo.fr And finally… “Behold I am doing a new thing” (Isaiah 43: 19). I preached on this text, in sermons in Rostrenen and Huelgoat, on my first Sunday among you in Brittany, and certainly you have been experiencing all sorts of new things for quite a while as you have come to terms with the gifts and eccentricities of a string a locum chaplains! If there is one good thing about an interregnum and a sequence of different priests among you it is that you soon realise you will not get, in one person, all that you are looking for in your new chaplain! But God has his way of using us – not just chaplains – and by putting ourselves at his disposal we all bring something to the overall ministry of the Church. One of the encouraging signs I have seen right at the start of my ministry here is the way in which so many people give their time and talents in helping the Anglican Church in Brittany to flourish. As I write we are about to celebrate the most startling of all new things in the history of religion; the Christian claim that God became man! And, as I said in that first sermon, church people, especially, don’t have a good track record when it comes to seeing and accepting new things, but those who allowed themselves to be led to Bethlehem, and who knelt in homage to the new born babe, found their lives were changed. The clichéd way of saying this is to refer to the visit of the Magi who, having seen the Christ child, “returned to their country another way”. And that is the point of it all: in Jesus we see God’s way of leading us towards a world in which peace with justice can flourish if we will but pursue, in our own lives, his way; “the way that makes for peace”. By the time many of you read this Christmas will be over and we shall be celebrating the Epiphany, the moment when it became clear that Jesus was for all the people and not just the chosen few. This, again, was a very new thing; a very new way of seeing God at work in the world, and there were some who did not welcome this new idea; they wanted a personal God who would act as their personal carer. But in the life and ministry of Jesus we see one who opens his arms to all-comers and denies none of them. It is a daring thing to do, full of risk, but it is also the way of the Lord, and it is a way he calls us to follow. I recall a prayer from the 1960s written by the RC priest Michel Quoist: in it he grumbles because God asks him to love all people; it is too much; too demanding, but he agrees to try; he will open his life to one or two. But once the doors are open others crowd in until he screams out to God “my life is not my own anymore”. “Don’t worry”, says God, “while others came into your life, I slipped in among them!” * Sometimes we, too, may feel God is demanding too much of us; asking more than we dare to give (I know this feeling only too well!). Sometimes we may feel there are too many new things to cope with; new ideas of who and what God is; new demands made on us to love beyond our means – but as Michel Quoist says, and as Jesus himself showed, the unconditional love of God is for all people and it is still true – the more we give ourselves to gospel priorities, the nearer we draw to the God who did a new thing in Jesus. Christmas and Epiphany are festivals of pure joy! Let’s show it in our faces! *(You might find the whole of this prayer by Googling Michel Quoist “Lord, why did you tell me to love?”) Roger Wikeley
Newsletter Contributions: for the February issue, please e-mail your contributions to Chris Wilson at wilson.christopher@orange.fr, the deadline is Monday 16th January 2012. Any views expressed in this Newsletter are not necessarily those of Christ Church Brittany but those of the individual contributor. CHAPLAINCY OF CHRIST CHURCH BRITTANY PART OF THE DIOCESE IN EUROPE (CHURCH OF ENGLAND) Happy New Year to everyone.
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