Coming up…
- Sunday 2nd August, 9:30am – The Eighth Sunday after Trinity Communion service, hosted by St Mark’s with support from St Thomas’s – followed by coffee on zoom.
- Monday 3rd August, 11-12 – Weekly discussion group on zoom. All are welcome to join us, it doesn’t matter if you came last week or not, you’re welcome to join in.
- Wednesday 5th August 10:15-11:15am – Coffee Morning on zoom. Phone in or join us on the internet, all are welcome – you’ll need to make your own coffee.
- Wednesday 5th August – 6:30pm – 7:30pm – Weekly evening discussion group on zoom, note the new earlier times, logon for coffee and chat from 6:20pm. This is a new course on art & belief led by George Kidner and Jane Nicholson, further details below. All are welcome.
- Sunday 9th August, 9:30am – The Ninth Sunday after Trinity Communion service – on youtube, followed by coffee on zoom.
Sunday Services – are you in our virtual congregation?
Every week our Sunday service is at 9:30am on our YouTube channel here. We’d love to see your photos of you at home getting ready for the service – and now we’re live from the Lady Chapel, we’re hoping to see more of you in our virtual congregation! Please do share a photo of yourself for us to add to our wall by email to takepart@penningtonchurch.uk, it’s such an encouragement for us. After the service, you’re welcome to join us in zoom for coffee (you will have to brew your own!)
Facemasks – donations to New Forest Basics Bank
Across the New Forest, a team of stitchers have been creating thousands of scrubs and bags for our local hospitals. As facemasks are now required for public transport, and individuals are choosing to use them elsewhere too, the team are creating a fabulous array of colours and styles of individual face masks for adults and children. There are mask trees set up in Pennington, Lymington and other local towns and villages. You go along to a mask tree, select the mask you would like, and then drop in a donation to the New Forest Basics Bank. If you want to know the location of your local mask tree, please email debs.pope@gmail.com
St Thomas Church opening for private prayer and limited services
Prior to lockdown, St Thomas Church was open for visitors every day to drop in for prayer. St Thomas Church is now open again.
All the West doors are open wide to facilitate both fresh air circulation and easy passage for visiting pray-ers to enter and exit. Clear floor marking and signage aims to keep everyone safe. Please use sanitizer on entry and exit. In line with government guidelines, the necessary cleaning will occur daily; drinking water is available from the tap outside the West door.
Opening times are 10am to 4pm every day. (This might be extended on some days for the convenience of those who lock/unlock).
After much thoughtful and prayerful consideration, of the Covid 19 regulations and the guidelines from government and the national Church, St Thomas PCC has accepted the advice of their ‘Church re-opening sub-committee’ and has decided to restart worship at St Thomas’ with two communion services per week for a four-week trial period starting on 26th July.
The services will be their normal 8am Prayer Book service on Sundays and an 11am Common Worship service on Wednesdays. People attending will be required to use hand sanitiser on arrival, and to maintain two metre social distancing. The wearing of face coverings will be optional, unless they receive instructions to the contrary. The toilet facilities will not be open during the trial.
It has been decided to set the maximum capacity of St. Thomas’ Church for worship at 30, this will be reviewed at the four week point. Seating will be allocated on a first come, first served basis. People must sit at least two metres apart, although members of the same household may sit together. Full details of the precautions they shall be taking, and the reasoning behind the decisions, will be made available on the St Thomas church website as soon as practicable.
After the trial period, St Thomas’ shall conduct a full review, including asking for visitor feedback.
There are no current plans for reopening St Mark’s for private prayer yet. If you would like to visit a church building to pray, we encourage you to visit St Thomas.
St Mark’s Church Coronavirus update
Rachel has recently written to members of our congregation, which is available to view online, here.
The Lockdown Cookbook
Do you live in the New Forest? A plea from SPUD – an arts and education charity that creates opportunities for artists to engage – is asking for recipes. A request to the older members of our community: anything you’ve loved cooking over the years! Inspired by his great grandmother’s cookbook, artist Jonathan Oldfield is creating a culinary time capsule of the area during the pandemic.
They’re also looking for younger members of the community to cook and document their experience: they want to get the community communicating through cooking!
Email or phone them to get a recipe – and join their Facebook group to connect with others taking part.
More details: www.spud.org.uk/artistoutofresidence
Email: cookbook@spudgroup.org.uk
Telephone: 01590 473004
Facebook: www.facebook.com/groups/swaycookbook
New Forest District Council Statement of Community Involvement – Public Consultation
The Council have published a revised Statement of Community Involvement (SCI) for public consultation from Wednesday 8th July 2020 – Friday 21st August 2020 . The document can be viewed here.
The changes are highlighted in red. Comments to policyandplans@nfdc.gov.uk , or sent to:
the Policy and Plans Team,
New Forest District Council,
Appletree Court,
Beaulieu Road,
Lyndhurst,
SO43 7PA
…by Friday 21st August (please include your full name and address, and details of which parts of the document your comments relate to). If you have any questions please telephone 023 8028 5345 and ask for Andrew Herring or Dean Brunton, or alternatively email policyandplans@nfdc.gov.uk.
Rachel’s art for sale!
If you’d like to purchase art that our priest Rachel has created and showed in our our worship recently, please check out our new Red Bubble shop. Profits from sales of these items all go to support the ministry of Pennington Church.
YouTube
All our services can be found on our YouTube channel here.
Heartedge
We’re part of the HeartEdge network of churches, and we are therefore able to participate in various events being run by HeartEdge. This is a link to the events taking place this week. You’ll notice that our priest, Rachel, is one of the panellists for Friday’s workshop, thinking about growing online communities.
Traidcraft
With the church being closed during the lockdown we have been unable to sell our Traidcraft groceries and now various items are getting close to their “best before” dates. These items are – chocolate chunk cookies, packets of 2 shortbread biscuits, raisins, sultanas, teabags, medium roast coffee, decaffeinated coffee and rich roast fresh ground coffee. We also have a small stock of peanut butter, orange marmalade, brown rice, dark mint chocolate and decaffeinated teabags with a slightly later date. Toilet rolls and kitchen rolls are also available. Pat Wright would be delighted to hear from anyone interested in purchasing any of these items so please contact her on 678416 to make the necessary arrangements.
An update from Counselling Together
We’ve had an update from local group Counselling Together – can you help?
I hope you are well and your life and ministry is being well sustained through these difficult times.
I am writing to you as the outgoing chair of the trustees of Counselling Together. As we emerge from lockdown Counselling Together faces a number of challenges returning to face to face counselling but this is now being progressed so we would appreciate your prayers in these uncertain days.
However we do currently have a great need for new Trustees (1 or 2 would be great) including someone to chair the trust going forward. We would be very grateful if you would be willing to prayerfully consider whether God may be calling you into being part of this important ministry or whether you have someone else within your congregation who might be suitable.
We are very grateful for our partnership with local churches and their leaders across the Forest. There is some urgency to this and please contact me direct if you would like to discuss this further or nominate someone and you can find out more about the service by contacting the service on counsellingtogether@gmail.com
Please stand with us
Every blessing in Christ
Eddie Boon
Wednesday discussion group
The Wednesday evening group is continuing on a new series of discussions based on the pictorial arts led be George Kidner and Jane Nicholson. Each week, we shall look at a painting and discuss the themes that emerge from it.
Discussions tend to be lively and, sometimes, controversial! Do please join us on Zoom from 6.30 pm to 7.30 pm (please log on from 6.20 pm so that we are ready for a prompt start).
Monday discussion group
Following the successful completion of the Sharing God’s Life course, the group found some of the paintings included in the course to be worth exploring in more depth.
Each week we are taking a painting, picture or piece of artwork as a focus for our studies and are looking into the background of the artwork and the inspiration of its’ creation.
All are welcome to join us on Zoom at 11am every Monday.
Join the Sunday service via Zoom
If there are people you know in our congregation who do not have access to the internet and would like to phone in and listen to our services, please share this information with them to join the Pennington Church zoom during the service and listen to the audio. To phone in, please dial 0203 695 0088.
- You will hear: “Welcome to Zoom, enter your meeting id followed by hash”
- The meeting id you need to enter is: 971 631 0618 #
- You will then hear it say “Enter your participant id followed by hash, otherwise just press hash”
- Please just press the # key. then you will be asked for the passcode, please enter 1839 followed by hash (#).
You will then be part of a conference call, and you will be able to listen to the service, and then talk to others afterwards.
Lords Prayer
We invite you to video yourself on your phone or computer reading the Lords’ Prayer. Please then email your recording to takepart@penningtonchurch.uk
We’re now showing the Lord’s Prayer in our services with each line read by a different person and we’d love to include as many of our congregation in this as we can. Please be brave, and join in the fun. (Trust me, it was strange for me to get used to leading the service in front of a camera or a phone too.) Others in the congregation will be so delighted to see you taking part, as we are each encouraged by seeing those that we know and love.
Hampshire County Council Hub
If you would like to help with the community at large, the new Hampshire County Council Hub to support the community through the crisis has now been established. If you are able to offer support and would like to be involved, please contact them on 0333 370 4000. Your call will then be triaged and you will be passed to whichever organisation or local contact would be most appropriate.