Last week Guildford Cathedral welcomed 2,800 children to the year 6 leavers services at the Cathedral. These uplifting events were a way to mark the end of primary school for all children at our schools. Here is a wonderful prayer from St. Mary’s Church of England Primary School - ChessingtonPlease don’t let goDear GodAs we prepare to take these important steps from primary school to secondary, please don’t let go.Hold our hands and guide us on the right path, helping us to make positive choices.As we face new challenges and sometimes stumble, please don’t let go.Pick us up and give us the strength and courage to carry on.As we say goodbye to old friends and teachers and meet new ones, please don’t let go.Help them to see all that is good in us, showing mutual kindness and respect. As we enter unfamiliar places, perhaps feeling a little lost and alone, please don’t let go.Walk alongside us, giving us courage and helping us to find our way.As we are presented with new and sometimes confusing situations, please don’t let go.Open our minds and hearts to new ideas, helping us to grow with empathy and tolerance.As we are asked to take more risks and decisions on our own, please don’t let go.Give us the strength and knowledge to become more independent.If we know you are holding us tight and always by our side, we won’t let go of you.You will remain in our hearts, helping us to learn and grow, full of kindness and honesty.Amen
The North Shields Baby Bank, based at St John’s Church Percy Main, in North Tyneside, has helped more than 400 families since its launch in March last year with items including nappies, wipes, clothing and baby formula.The church is now appealing for help to replace its heating system, in order to keep the baby bank operating over the winter months.Revd Lee Cleminson, Vicar of St John’s, said: “People are really, really struggling with energy prices, food prices and the cost of petrol and all sorts of other expenses. They are referred through different agencies and community projects to the baby bank but also there are people who knock on the vicarage door, because I live next door to the church.“People are so generous with donations and with every item of clothes, we wash it, iron it and present it in a wonderful way. All parents who have accessed the baby bank have been overwhelmed by the generosity and good quality items and the quick response they have received."One particular baby bank user commented, with great appreciation, that the baby items that she had received, 'had left her with one less worry for the day'“The heating system is absolutely essential to the administering of the baby bank, otherwise clothes and other supplies will get damp and volunteers will not be able to work here.”
You are meant to turn your phone off when attending a silent retreat at the Archbishop of Canterbury’s residence, Lambeth Palace, as part of training in monastic life. But you are never meant to turn your phone off as a corporate tax lawyer at an American legal giant — a client could need you at any time.That was one of the culture clashes that Eloise Skinner, 30, faced as she juggled her job as a £140,000-a-year newly qualified corporate tax solicitor at Cleary Gottlieb with 12-month training dubbed “monk school”, where she was “trying to find my own personal sense of direction.”“It was an integrated programme,” Skinner said of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s monastic-inspired The Community of St Anselm. “I’d leave the Cleary office in Moorgate [in the City] one evening a week to head to Lambeth Palace and attend week-long, silent retreats in a monastery in Cornwall for a few weeks during the year too.”There, Skinner would wear monastic robes called albs — “they really remove any sense of personal ego” — and sleep in a simple room. “We went really deep into the traditional types of monastic practice, and how to apply some of them to your life as a modern monk. Coming straight from [work in] central London, it was quite disorientating to move into a fully silent monastery. When I went back to ‘normal life’ afterwards, I noticed that I’d become a little bit more intentional about what I said when I spoke.”Skinner had become a Christian as a teenager, when she also decided to pursue a career in law. Her first home was on the 19th floor of an east London council estate — and growing up, her parents were touring musicians, “so we didn’t really have any money”. She successfully applied to read law at Cambridge, and undertook seven work-experience placements at US and Magic Circle law firms before settling at Cleary Gottlieb.Skinner found her two worlds hard to reconcile. Although her monastic training had updated the traditional vows — the monastic “poverty” order, for example, was interpreted as “not buying things you didn’t need” — there were still jarring contrasts with days spent dealing with huge sums of corporate money.“My job [as a tax lawyer] wasn’t that sort of perception of firms getting out of paying tax, more about helping people understand what their obligations were,” Skinner said. “Law, especially the way I was practising it, is full-on. You need to give it all of your time and the hours are very unpredictable. Most of the cases were cross-border transactions, so you’re on UK time and, say, US time and Japanese time; you can’t always say, ‘I’m not available — I’m in a monastery.’ ”Gradually — and in a process accelerated by Covid lockdowns — Skinner’s monastic year helped her realise that tax law wasn’t her calling; she left in January 2021. “For many, the pandemic was an opportunity to reflect on what you actually want to do — you, not society or your family or university. [It was about] carving out some time to actually think, ‘What is it that I care about? What are my values? What are my priorities?“When lockdown happened, it felt like it was OK to change your entire life because so much had already changed.”Now Skinner’s work involves helping others to do the same. She runs One Typical Day, an education technology start-up that helps students find out more about potential careers, and The Purpose Workshop, a social enterprise that helps people reconsider their lives and careers; clients include Cambridge and Oxford universities.“My lifestyle obviously had to change after leaving law,” she said. “When I started, I had really wanted to use my salary to save up. Now it’s just about covering my basic needs, and seeing where the business builds from that.”Skinner admitted to missing some elements of her corporate lawyer life: “I really miss being in a big team — the fast pace, constantly having people asking you to step up. Being self-employed, you have to create that for yourself. While it was stressful, it was also incredibly rewarding because you’re always improving.”Still, for anyone else looking to escape corporate life, Skinner has some advice. “It doesn’t need to happen overnight. When I read about other people’s career changes, it seemed so dramatic and intimidating, [but] if you go step by step, over time it takes you further than you had imagined.”
The Church of England has been urged to abolish fees for couples marrying in its churches amid a sharp decline in the number of traditional ceremonies.Blackburn Diocesan Synod has put forward a proposal to set marriage fees at nil or a minimal amount so that “everyone who wants to get married in church should be able to, without worrying about affordability”.The Rev Dr Tom Woolford, from the diocese, said that churches were facing competition in the wedding market, with thousands more licensed venues and specialist venues offering the convenience of an all-in-one ceremony and reception on the same premises.He said: “It is far better to offer marriage for free than not at all, which is increasingly becoming the reality in many parishes.”Fees are set by the Church of England. It costs a minimum of £560 for couples marrying away from home, or £512 in their parish. This covers the cost of the vicar, use of the church, calling out the banns and administration, but not “extras” such as an organist, choir or bell ringers.Basic fees have risen by 300 per cent over the past 22 years, Woolford said, and over the same period the number of Church of England weddings nationally has fallen by 50 per cent, from 63,371 in 1999 to 31,430 in 2019.Even fewer church weddings have been taking place in poorer areas such as Blackpool, where there was a 79 per cent drop between 2010 and 2018.Woolford said that “anecdotally, many clergy speak of couples making enquiries about getting married in their parish church, only to baulk at the cost when informed”.He conceded, however, that cost is not the only reason for the decline in church weddings, and that the fall was partly down to growing secularisation within society. Baptisms are free but have also fallen, he admitted, though only by about half the rate of weddings.The proposals were put forward before a meeting of the General Synod, the church’s parliament, next month. They are due to be debated. However, with dwindling funds, the Church of England does not appear to be in favour of removing the fee.Couples who have married in church have mixed views over whether the fee should be scrapped. Evie Pearce, 27, who works in engineering, married her husband, Dewi, 30, a firefighter, at St John the Baptist Church, Barnack, Cambridgeshire, last July.She said: “We wanted to get married in church, but it did work out more expensive. We paid about £500 and we had to pay for the organist even if we didn’t have them play. If they did abolish fees, maybe it would make the church more at the heart of the community again.”William Nye, secretary-general of the Synod, said: “A wholesale elimination or reduction of the fee would be a poorly targeted intervention as many couples can afford to pay the fee, which represents a small proportion of the overall cost of their wedding. The income lost from setting the fee to nil or a nominal amount reduces the resource available to fund ministry, including in the poorest areas — at a time when many dioceses … are facing deficits.”He added that a priest or rural dean has an option of waiving or reducing the fee in cases of “clear financial hardship”. About 5 per cent of marriage fees were waived in 2019.In response, the Church of England urged couples to get married in their churches. A spokeswoman said: “A church wedding is a unique occasion in which a couple exchange time-honoured vows in a special and spiritual atmosphere. We know from research that many couples want this for their wedding day, whether they are regular churchgoers or not.“We would like to reassure couples that they don’t have to be christened or confirmed, and we welcome couples who already have children — just ask.”
