Vicar's Newsletter for first Sunday after Trinity

From_the_Vicar
Dear Friends, This month we begin the new pattern of face to face church services across the Mission Community. I would like to register thanks to the team who helped get the Lynton service up and running and all who have maintained worship there while other churches were less accessible, and now to all who are preparing carefully for Covid compliant services in their local church. I’ll attach the service pattern again so that everyone knows where services are taking place each week. Why not sample worship in a church beyond your parish on a week when there is not a service there?


This week’s suggestion for growing in prayer: prayer is the action of opening our lives to the presence and guidance of God for which we are created. Our communal worship provides a good pattern for the different aspects of prayer that might become godly habits in our lives. Our experience of communion offers a sign of prayer at its simplest and deepest – coming into union with God; we intercede for the world aligning our hopes and fears with God’s will for the life of the world and crying out for transformation; we pray for forgiveness, for a clearing of all that impedes our relationship with God; and we offer thanksgiving and praise, recognising our dependence on God, and expressing our wonder.

Knowing that we pray with others can be something encouraging and strengthening. I’d like to suggest that we develop a Mission Community prayer calendar with something to pray for each day. To start I suggest that each day we pray for a different parish:

Sunday: the whole Mission Community

Monday: Brendon

Tuesday: Countisbury and Lynmouth

Wednesday: Lynton and Barbrook Thursday:

Parracombe

Friday: Martinhoe

Saturday: Trentishoe

If anyone would like to be involved in taking this deeper and coming up with ideas for prayer within each parish or more widely, do get in touch

God bless

Samantha