This weekend is our patronal festival. Obviously, we can’t meet in person, as we usually would! We will be celebrating on youtube at 9:30am on Sunday morning. All are welcome to join us. If you’re on facebook, please like and share the link to our service, it helps more people to find us and join in.
I want to encourage you as to the reach of our services. As you may know, on a Sunday morning in St Mark’s, we would often have about 15 people at our 8am service, and about 30 people at our 9:30am service. At the end of a week, many of our recent services have now reached approximately 700 views on youtube. We’re hearing really encouraging stories from local people (and those further afield) who are appreciating connecting with us in this way.
For those who do not have access to the internet, it’s possible to phone in and listen to our services. To do this, please find instructions at the end of this post about Zoom.
St Mark’s Patronal Festival
For our patronal festival, we are asking you to consider a special donation to St Mark’s Church. We would love to buy a better camera and associated hardware, that could be used during this lockdown for live content, but would also be usable when we are in the building again too. Some of those that are connecting with us online, are unable to ever physically be with us in the building, and we want to ensure that we are in a position to be able to continue to grow and develop this reach and connection, to continue shining God’s light into our community. Please follow this button if you are able to help us with this purchase:
Supporting St Mark’s
As well as this one off purchase, we really need your support to keep our church going. Usually we would be receiving significant income from our hall bookings and from our fundraising events, as well as cash collections in church. Obviously, all these sources of income have currently dried up, and we need your support to ensure that we can continue to offer our work in this community. Please consider if you are able to make offer any additional support in this season. You may want to give in a regular way through the Parish Giving Scheme, or to offer a one of donation at this time. All details on our website here or please contact our treasurer, Teresa Nivison – teresa@penningtonchurch.uk
VE Day
On 8th May it’s the 75th anniversary of VE Day. There were some fabulous events planned locally, but unfortunately they are not able to proceed, given the current stay at home instructions. So we invite you to join in our stay at home street party! Decorate your home red, white and blue. Enjoy a picnic in your front garden.
Join us on our youtube channel at 1:30pm for a special Pennington VE day commemoration event, and then at 2:20pm we invite you all to stand on your pavement and make a noise to celebrate the signing of the declaration of surrender.
Connecting with each other
We trialled a coffee morning on zoom this week, and it will now be a regular meeting – every Wednesday morning at 10:15-11:00am. See the end of this post for details of how to connect with us via Zoom.
All are welcome to join us on the internet or to dial in on your phone; feel free to share this information with others – obviously you’ll need to make your own coffee!
The draw club takes place during this as well, on the fourth session of the month. If you’d like to purchase some extra lines in the drawclub and increase your chance of winning, please check out the draw club form here.
After our Sunday services, the zoom meeting is always open for coffee and chat too. All are welcome to join us, to chat with each other and connect. We look forward to welcoming you.
Weekly Small Groups
Last week our evening group started up, meeting on zoom. It meets Wednesday evenings from 7-8:30pm. All are welcome to join us, either connect in through the internet, or join in with the phone. We are looking at a short study examining rule of life, helping us to think through questions of rhythm and purpose, which have been thrown up for many of us in this unexpected season.
On Monday 27th April, we will have a pilot meeting for our daytime group, from 11-12am on Zoom. All are welcome to join us, at this first meeting, we’ll be working through any technical issues that people may have with the technology, and discussing together the options for the group going forward.
Even if you’ve not been part of this group before, you’re welcome to join us. Log into zoom, or call Rachel – 01590 462022 – if you’ve got any questions.
Instructions for Zoom:
Either join online using this link, https://zoom.us/j/9716310618?pwd=VjdyWUVyaTZ4ZlJNT1hNeHFLS3pyUT09 – or 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.
- You will then be asked for the password, please enter 1839 followed by #
You will then be part of a conference call, and you will be able to talk to others from the church that have already joined it.