News and Comments for Sunday May 24th and beyond
Fr Paul will “live” stream Mass on our Church Facebook page this Sunday morning at 9:30am, hopefully from the Church. Steve Ansell, our Director of Music will be offering live music at 11:00am.
Good News! Your PCC (Parochial Church Council) voted unanimously to appoint Dave McGrory as our Parish Treasurer to succeed Liz Somers-James who died very suddenly on Palm Sunday April 5th. Liz managed to balance being our Church treasurer, an active choir member, a launderer of Church linen as well as a whole host of other very worthwhile interests from School Governor to the Citizens Advice Bureau plus many other roles and trustee work with a variety of worthy causes. We express our gratitude for the work Liz did for us, and we send our love and prayers to her sister Mary.
We also extend our sincere thanks to Dave for offering to do this vital financial job within our parish church, and hopefully we can support Dave in his new task over the coming months as we slowly return to the “new normal” of life after the pandemic. Our hope is that we can make this task less onerous by having a team to support our new treasurer with tasks like banking the money each week and counting collections after Mass each week.
The Question of Church Finance – As your parish priest, I would very much like to extend my sincere thanks to all those people in our congregation who have continued to give your weekly/monthly offering to the Church over the duration of this pandemic. I have firmly resisted talking about money and giving, as I am acutely aware that many people have been struggling just to survive financially from week to week. We will inevitably face an acute financial shortfall in our ability to pay our bills after all this has passed, but for the time being, I believe that we should concentrate on the urgent pastoral matters before us, and worry about money later down the road. I have always maintained that if we get our commitment to God in proper perspective, the giving looks after itself. “The beginning of anxiety is the end of faith, and the beginning of true faith is the end of anxiety.”—George Mueller