Coming up…
- Sunday 28th June, 9:30am – The Third Sunday after Trinity Communion service on youtube, followed by coffee on zoom.
- Monday 29th June, 11-12 – Weekly discussion group on zoom. Looking at the calling of Matthew this week. All are welcome to join us, it doesn’t matter if you came last week or not, you’re welcome to join in.
- Wednesday 1st July 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 1st July – 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 5th July, 9:30am – The Fourth Sunday after Trinity Communion service, celebrating St Thomas’ patronal festival – on youtube, followed by coffee on zoom.
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
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).
St Mark’s Church Update
Prior to lockdown, due to the challenges with vandalism locally, St Mark’s Church has not had a tradition of being open for private prayer. You may well have heard on the news that churches can now be open for private prayer, and that from July they can be open for services. This advice is permissive, but not prescriptive.
At St Mark’s, we are not currently planning to open for private prayer yet. Many of you will know that our priest, Rachel, is in the ‘clinically extremely vulnerable’ group, and so has been asked to shield. This advice has been extended until August, so she is unable to go into other buildings until at least this time. The advice from the Church of England also suggests that others in at risk groups, including the over 70’s should also not be encouraged to participate. At this time, we are therefore planning to continue our focus on online worship, and see how the guidelines and advice develops over coming weeks, as a large percentage of our usual congregation would not currently be advised to go into the building.
You are probably aware of the huge amount of effort that goes into creating our online worship, and I am hugely grateful for all the support from Paul technically putting the services together, and from everyone that has been participating. I am also a governor at both our local schools, Pennington Infants and Pennington Juniors, as well as all the other work related to church here. In the last few months, it has been hard to take even my day off, and I have been struggling with the additional anxiety related to shielding. I will therefore be taking the coming week off as a week’s leave, spending time with my family, and growing in confidence to go out for walks again now that I can do daily exercise.
I’m aware that many of us are facing challenges with our mental health in this season, and I encourage you also to find ways to be gentle on yourself. Together, we can learn to care for and be compassionate on ourselves and each other.
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.
Watch it here:
follow HeartEdge on facebook, for full details of their forthcoming workshops.
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.
Lymington and Pennington Flower Festival
Lymington and Pennington Town Council are running the 2020 Flower Festival. This year’s theme is ‘VE Day 75’ or ‘Lockdown Inspiration’.
WHO CAN PARTICIPATE? The competition is open to EVERYONE in Lymington and Pennington: residents, businesses, organisations, schools, clubs, shops, care homes etc.. IMAGE ELEMENTS Your image could be of a window box, school project, hanging basket, a pot, flower bed, front/back garden, vegetable patch, allotment, public space, wildflower meadow, natural landscape etc.
GUIDANCE Photograph must be taken in 2020. Photograph must be taken in the Lymington / Pennington area. Competition open: 01 June 2020 – 31 July 2020. This is not a photographic competition; the subject of the image will be judged.
Entry form here: http://www.lymingtonandpennington-tc.gov.uk/CHttpHandler.ashx?id=40168&p=0
Women in prison: calling all creatives!
A chaplain from a women’s prison has asked whether we could create some cards, bookmarks or other bible art for those currently in their prison. Lockdown has been difficult for everyone, but especially in prison being locked down in even smaller spaces. These cards, bookmarks and other bible art could include your favourite bible verses or prayer. These would be a huge encouragement to those in prison that they are not forgotten, that they are cared for by Christians as we are reminded in Hebrews 13:1-3.
Please do not write your name on the card/artwork, please leave them blank, or write on the back ‘Made for you from the churches of Lymington and Pennington’.
We would like to send on to the prison by 20th July; if you can support this, please feel free to drop off your creative pieces at the vicarage in Pennington on Ramley Road.
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: this week we shall be looking at the stained glass window in Chichester Cathedral by Marc Chagall.
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.
Having looked at Rublev’s Icon and the Supper at Emmaus by Carravagio, on Monday 22nd June the group will be sharing our own Rachel’s inspiration for her artwork centred around the Lord’s Prayer during the Thy Kingdom Come initiative.
All are welcome to join us on Zoom at 11am every Monday.
Sunday Services
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. Please do share them with us at 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!)
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.