Dear Friends,

This Sunday we focus on what it means that we worship a Trinitarian God. Undoubtedly God is a mystery which we experience more fully than we can understand, but I am keen to encourage us all to get past any sense that the Trinity is a complicated puzzle. At its simplest, I think our belief that God is Trinity is about recognising that the Godhead is revealed as "relationship". When we think about our own lives we begin to realise that, made in the image of God, this is true of us too. Our fundamental relationship is with God who holds us in being, and from there our identity is shaped by the ways we relate with others. The revelation of the God that Jesus shows us is that love is the nature of the relationship of the Godhead, and we are called, as those made in the image of God, to make love the nature of our relationships too.

This coming week there is an opportunity to meet with our brothers and sisters from the churches across our Deanery: Thursday 16th June, 7pm at Bratton Fleming Church, Deanery Synod. The speaker is the Venerable Verena Breed, Archdeacon of Barnstaple. She has a real love of the distinctive ministry we are all called to in a rural environment, and began her own ministry as the sole priest in a group of parishes right on the edge of Chester Diocese in the Peak National Park - so she knows our kind of life at first hand. There are very few Deanery Representatives in our Mission Community but this meeting is open to any one who is interested to come - so if you are able to participate it is a really good way to get a sense of what is happening beyond our own parish boundaries.Extending even further: diocesesan efforts continue to work with organisations finding homes for Ukranian refugees. Updates on this - including a link to donate to a fund helping refugees with the cost of travel can be found here: https://exeter.anglican.org/pray-for-ukraine/

God bless

Samantha