WEDNESDAY 30th NOVEMBER

                       Sue Kirby and Weston Favell Primary School experience Christmas

Today the church will be pleased to welcome the children, staff and helpers from East Hunsbury's Simon de Senlis Primary School as they 'Experience Christmas' with us.

And Tiny Tots will be in their usual setting of the church hall at 1.30 with Allison and her team. Here's Allison looking very happy about that...

Space 3 in 'Experience Christmas' is about Mary. We are taken into her house, to feel what it must have been like to meet an angel with Good but Scary News. If we know we're doing the right thing, then we can confront the difficult things we have to do with confidence.


Advance Notice

Advent Soup 12.00 p.m. this Saturday 3rd December.

If you're a regular at St. Peter's Lent lunches, you'll know what to expect: tasty soup and bread, and a good natter. This is the first time we've held a similar lunch in Advent, and there's only one of them, so don't miss out. The difference is that this time you'll have the chance to choose where your money goes from three nominated charities - a sort of 'Oscar moment'. In no particular order the three charities are: 

The Emmanuel Church Coffee Shop
The Northamptonshire Historic Churches Trust
Northampton Association for the Accommodation of Single Homeless  (N.A.A.S.H.)

See you there!

Prayer Diaries

When it comes to prayer, do you find you sometimes get stuck in a rut? Of course it's good to be faithful in praying for the things which are close to our hearts: we're told not to give up, but to be relentless in asking God for good things.  The St. Peter's prayer diary will give you something different to focus on each day so that you can widen your concerns and gain a different perspective. The December edition is available at the back of the church now.



For now we feel the world spin round
On some momentous journey bound -
Journey to what? To whom? To where?
The Advent bells call out 'Prepare,
Your world is journeying to the birth
Of God made Man for us on earth...'

from John Betjeman's 'Advent 1955'. Read the whole poem for yourself in various collections of his work. You may also be able to find it on the web.

                                                               In Mary's house

TUESDAY 29th NOVEMBER

                                                                            Brrrr!

God of the waiting,
give us courage to wait with those in the most broken places of the world,
and with all those who struggle to be bearers of hope there.

We pray for those who wait for wars to stop,
for violence to cease.
God of the waiting, turn conflict into peace.

We pray for those who have given up on the coming of hope,
because they feel they wait in vain
at checkpoints, at borders, for jobs, for food.

We pray for all those whose lives are crushed
under the structures and systems of injustice.

God of the waiting, wait with your world.
Turn anger into reconciliation,
and our lack of hope into courage,
so that our waiting may be over,
and all the things of darkness shall be no more.
Amen

(A Christian Aid prayer)


'Experience Christmas'

...is a journey of the imagination through five different Spaces set up around the church.

Space 1 helps us remember that in among all the other preparations for Christmas, we have to prepare our hearts for the coming of Jesus. The candle light shines into the dark places of our lives.

Space 2 takes us into the Kings'palace, as they were thinking about what they should take as gifts for the baby Jesus. What gifts should we give Him?

                                                               'The Kings' Space'

More about the other spaces tomorrow...

Today it will be the turn of Year 2 of Weston Favell Primary School to explore the mysteries of the Advent and Christmas stories.

Through this week, twenty-two different members of the team will help in telling those stories to the listening children. Wow!

                                                  The church hall car park:  28.11.16

Coming up tomorrow:

Morning Prayer at 8.30 a.m.

'Experience Christmas' for Year 2 of the Simon de Senlis Primary School.

The Wednesday 10 a.m. Holy Communion will be in the hall...

...and in the afternoon, Allison and her team will be there too with Tiny Tots at 13.30.


Have you ever been to the Wednesday service?

'The voice of prayer is never silent
Nor dies the strain of praise away'.
                              J. Ellerton

MONDAY 28th NOVEMBER

                                                All age engagement: Advent Connections

God of Abraham and Sarah,
and all the patriarchs of old,
you are our Father too.
Your love is revealed to us in Jesus Christ,
Son of God and Son of David.
Help us in preparing to celebrate his birth
to make our hearts ready for your Holy Spirit
to make his home among us.
We ask this through Jesus Christ,
the light who is coming into the world.
Amen

 

 

                                              The church hall yesterday afternoon

The worshipping community at St. Peter's celebrated Advent Sunday yesterday in different ways: orders of service changed: colours changed, the first candle was lit. Everyone from the youngest to the oldest found some space to think about what watching and waiting could mean for them.

The Advent CD was distributed to worshippers after the morning services. There are enough still available for this Wednesday's morning congregation and for those receiving communion at home. And if you missed out, please send an e-mail to advent.stpeters@gmail.com  and we'll do our best to get a CD to you.

The December CORNERSTONE became available this weekend in an unexpected but seasonal green cover after a just-in-time print run. Make sure you have your copy: it's a good read! Thank you to Amanda and her team!

And the church Christmas Cards will now be dropping onto doormats throughout the parish letting all our neighbours know about the major services over Christmas.

'Experience Christmas' began this morning with Year 1 from Weston Favell Primary, and will continue this afternoon, welcoming children from Headlands Year 3. The team will be back in tomorrow morning at 9.00 a.m. after Morning Prayer at 8.30.

How do you experience St. Peter's?  What don't you know about what's going on?

Advent  by Pamela Cranston

Look how long
the weary world waited,
locked in its lonely cell,
guilty as a prisoner.

As you can imagine
it sang and whistled in the dark.
It hoped. It paced and puttered about,
tidying its little piles of inconsequence.

It wept from the weight of ennui
draped like shackles on its wrists.
It raged and wailed against the walls
of its own plight.

But there was nothing
the world could do
to find its own freedom.
The door was shut tight.

It could only be opened
from the outside.

(Pamela Cranston is an American Episcopal priest working in California. Our theme for Advent 2016 is 'Open Doors' so it seemed to fit neatly)

Perhaps you'd expect it, but there seem to be absolutely no Advent jokes (we started to riff around four candles, but of course there are five, so that doesn't work), and the Christian Christmas jokes are all terrible. So if you have some good ones, send them in...

ADVENT SUNDAY

                                                   Pour down, O heavens from above
                                             And let the skies rain down righteousness
                                                                       (The Advent Prose)

TODAY'S HEADLINES:

Nearly thirty families attend 'Connections' family event.

Mary and Joseph begin their journey around Weston Favell.

Parishioners celebrate at Advent Sunday services.

Tents go up in St. Peter's before 'Experience Christmas'

And tomorrow...

The week begins with Morning Prayer at 8.30 a.m.

From 9.00 a.m. the first of our visiting schools are welcomed to the church by Sue Kirby and the 'Experience Christmas' team.

In the hall, people will be giving blood from 11.00 a.m.

Please pray for all who take part in 'Experience Christmas', that children (and through them their families) may have their eyes opened to the meaning of the season.

Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.

Where is that Law for which we broke our own,
Where now that Justice for which Flesh resigned
Her hereditary right to passion, Mind
His will to absolute power? Gone. Gone.
Where is that Law for which we broke our own?

The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.
Was it to meet such grinning evidence
We left our richly odoured ignorance?
Was the triumphant answer to be this?
The Pilgrim Way has led to the Abyss.

We who must die demand a miracle.
How could the Eternal do a temporal act,
The Infinite become a finite fact?
Nothing can save us that is possible:
We who must die demand a miracle.

                                 W. H. Auden

This is the Advent section of a long poem (1500 lines and 52 pages) called 'FOR THE TIME BEING: A Christmas Oratorio', written during World War 2. You can find the whole work in W.H.Auden's 'Collected Poems'.

ADVENT ST. PETER'S 2016: DOORS OPEN!

Hello and welcome to the beginning of the Christian year at St. Peter's. Every day until Christmas Eve we'll be putting up posts on this site to tell you what's happening the next day, and to let you know how the previous day has gone.

We hope it will help you with finding your own way to celebrate this time of waiting and watching.

The Advent Calendar

In the church hall, you'll find our own St. Peter's Advent Calendar pinned on a display board. As the season progresses we'll hope to surround it with other images and information as we open the daily doors one by one.

A limited edition of about fifty smaller hand-crafted calendars will find their way to various places in the parish.

We are counting down to the arrival of the baby Jesus on Christmas Day.

Our Open Church

During the first week of Advent St.Peter's will be open a lot, because 'Experience Christmas' will be running in both mornings and afternoons for children from local primary schools. In subsequent weeks the church will be open most mornings starting with Morning Prayer at 9 a.m. for everyone who would like to find some space for the 'alert waiting' of Advent. Each week there will be a different 'Prayer Space' focus in the Crispin Chapel.

The CD

We're giving away about two hundred CDs to individuals and families worshipping at St. Peter's' services this week. On the CD is a programme of words and music for meditation on the theme of 'Waiting'. Here's the poem by the Welsh minister, R.S.Thomas, which was the inspiration for the CD:

'Kneeling'

Moments of great calm,
kneeling before an altar
of wood in a stone church
in summer, waiting for the God
to speak; the air a staircase
for silence; the sun's light
ringing me, as though I acted
a great role. And the audience
still; all that close throng
of spirits waiting, as I
for the message.
Prompt me, God;
but not yet. When I speak,
though it be you who speak
through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

Advent Sunday

'Cast away the dreams of darkness, O ye children of the day'.

There will be services at 8.00 a.m. and 10.00 a.m. as usual, and coffee will be served in the church hall after the ten o'clock. The Traidcraft stall will be selling seasonal and other items then too.

Please pray for the residents of St. John's home as they enjoy Evensong in their lounge at 15.45.

There will be an Advent Connections event in the Hall including activities and refreshments at 16.00, but if you haven't got a ticket, please contact Sue Kirby as soon as possible!

And during the evening Sue Kirby and her team will be dressing the church ready for 'Experience Christmas'.

Keep coming back!

Thank you for visiting the site today. We'll be posting new details each evening, so come back and see us again soon.