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BUSHEY PARISH MAGAZINE APRIL 2020 60 Pence

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BUSHEY PARISH MAGAZINE APRIL 2020 60 Pence BUSHEY PARISH MAGAZINE Our Parish responds to the pandemic: see pages 9-10 APRIL 60 pence 2020 2 Ministry Team Rector of the Parish of Bushey: The Revd Guy Edwards 0208 950 1546 [email protected] Guy’s usual rest-day is Monday (Tuesday when Monday is a Bank Holiday). Please do not contact him then except in a serious emergency. Associate Rector: Fr Tim Vickers 01923 464633 with responsibility for St James’s [email protected] Usual rest-day: Friday Parish Curate: The Revd Andy Burgess 07539 409959 [email protected] Usual rest-day: Monday Lay Leader of Worship: Christine Cocks [email protected] CHURCH WARDENS [email protected] Elizabeth Jones Ingrid Harris PARISH ADMINISTRATION Parish Administrator: Jacqueline Birch 020 8421 8192 Church House, High Street, Bushey [email protected] Parish Finance Officer: Sinead English 020 8421 8192 Church House, High Street, Bushey [email protected] PCC Secretary: Martyn Lambert [email protected] The Parish Office is on the first floor of St James’s Church House and is open: Tuesday, 9am-3pm; Wednesday, 9am-2pm; Thursday, 9am--3pm. Safeguarding Officer: Fiona Gray 07902 511392 Parish website: www.busheyparish.org [email protected] 3 Worship in the Parish of Bushey For Holy Week and Easter services schedule, see page 36 NB—During the current pandemic, all public and private use of the churches is suspended until further notice and the buildings are closed, even to the clergy. However, the clergy will continue to conduct most scheduled services from their homes. Worshippers may follow these services at the appropriate times below via live-streaming on our churches’ Facebook pages, or catch up with them later there or via the Parish website.. St James’s Church (SJ) 1st Sunday of the month 08.00 BCP* Holy Communion, followed by coffee and croissants 09.30 All Age Family Eucharist, followed by coffee and croissants Other Sundays of the month 08.00 BCP* Holy Communion 09.30 Sung Eucharist (with incense, 3rd Sunday of the month), followed by coffee and croissants 18.00 Choral Evensong (2nd Sunday of the month) St Paul’s Church (SP) 1st Sunday of the month 17.00 Sanctuary Service Other Sundays of the month 11.15 Sung Eucharist, followed by coffee Holy Trinity Church (HT) 09.30 Morning Worship with Holy Communion Weekday Eucharists Wednesdays CW** 12.30 (at SP) Thursdays BCP* 11.00 (at SJ) Morning Prayer is now being said at 09.00 on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays in St James’s, on Wednesdays in Holy Trinity and on Fridays in St Paul’s. Please check LOOK, the weekly notice sheet, for further details of all services. * BCP: Book of Common Prayer **CW: Common Worship 4 Canterbury pays tribute to York The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, paid tribute to the outgoing Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, in his absence at what would have been Dr Sentamu’s final General Synod. Dr Sentamu (pictured), who leaves his post in June, is currently travelling in the Pacific. Said Archbishop Justin: “He has gone to visit parts of the world which are suffering the effects of climate change right now. He has gone typically to be alongside those who are suffering: a pattern of his life throughout his ministry.” The archbishop continued: “Speaking about Sentamu when he’s not here … means we can show our gratitude, thanks and love for him without him being able to stop us.” Recalling the Archbishop of York’s work on the inquiry into the murder in 1993 of black London teenager Stephen Lawrence, Archbishop Justin noted: “He has said that he himself was stopped at least eight times by the police”. Reflecting on the Archbishop of York’s impact nationally, the Archbishop of Canterbury added: “The Church of England will miss you, Sentamu, and the wider country will miss you. There aren’t a lot of bishops who are so well-known outside the Church.” *Dr Sentamu will be succeeded by the current Bishop of Chelmsford, Stephen Cottrell. Palm Sunday: Jesus at the gates of Jerusalem Holy Week begins on Palm Sunday (April 5), when the Church remembers how Jesus arrived at the gates of Jerusalem just before the Passover. He was the Messiah come to His people in their capital, yet He came in humility on a donkey, not in triumph on a war-horse. As Jesus entered the city, the crowds gave Him a rapturous welcome, throwing palm fronds into His path. They knew His reputation as a healer and welcomed Him. Sadly, the welcome was short-lived and shallow, for Jerusalem would soon reject her Messiah and put Him to death. On this day, churches worldwide will distribute little crosses made from palm fronds in memory of Jesus’s arrival in Jerusalem. 5 From the Ministry Team Culture – and what it has for breakfast Our Rector, the Revd Guy Edwards, looks at Mission Action Plans and the contexts they must take into account to succeed. By the time you read this, many of us in Bushey Parish will have met with the Revd Kate Peacock for the second of our two Mission Action Planning Days. Kate works across the Diocese of St Albans to help parishes focus their operations and plan and act for a future in which the life and work of the local church flourishes. The clergy team are developing these discussions and thoughts into a Mission Action Plan (MAP) that we will debate and refine further in the first meeting of the new PCC and present to the Parish towards the end of May. If you have not yet contributed to this process – by attending a MAP day, joining the discussion in the church committees, responding to the promptings of the Vision Bulletins or in conversation with the clergy, wardens and pro-wardens – there is still time to do so. MAPs are a relatively new feature of life in the Church of England. Most dioceses make it mandatory for parishes to produce them. They are as fundamental to our assesment of our life as the accounts and budgets that every parish is required to prepare annually. To fail to plan is almost as bad as planning to fail. I welcome them. They are not window-dressing, nor items just to be ticked on an already crowded to-do list. They are serious attempts to give focus to our Church community life in an age when we can no longer assume that the Church has a future, but need to read the “signs of the times”. MAPs should be working documents that are constantly referred to as the basis for our actions and priorities. They need to be reviewed and updated regularly as we achieve some objectives, make slow progress on others and perhaps fail on a number - always learning as we go. This is simply common sense and a necessary process for any organisation committed to a better future. Above all, MAPS embody strategy. 6 In considering our wider cultural context, I agree with those people (artists , novelists and poets, journalists, educators, philosophers, theologians and church leaders) who argue that in the last three decades or so we have been witnessing a shift in the world culture that is very far- reaching – as significant a change in the way people think, feel, earn, consume and live as any that have gone before. We can all think of some of the labels that have been applied to great cultural shifts of the past – those periods of tumultuous change known as the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment, for example. Major theologians such as David Bosch argue that, amid such changes, the Church has reinvented itself no fewer than five times, with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and through revisiting the Bible and the apostolic tradition, on each occasion under new conditions. Bosch and others suggest that, having had these five ages of the Church, we are now living in the sixth. This, of course, is the controversial subject of major discussion in all Christian traditions. The imperative to change needs to be held in tension with the fact that the Church has received a deposit of faith – the apostolic teaching contained in the New Testament, the inheritance of the creeds and councils, the sacraments of the new covenants. The Church has a long historical memory and is the inheritor of that which is precious and enduring. We don’t just “make stuff up”. However, the shaking of the foundations in wider culture is the reason our churches have to be quick on their toes, adaptable in worship and community life and especially innovative in the ways they reach out with the gospel. Being a church with a future depends critically on wisely navigating this tension between tradition and changed context. Scholar and bishop Tom Wright has coined the term “faithful improvisation” for the life of the Church in this new age. Think of a jazz musician who, knowing the scales and harmony by long practice, thereby has the freedom to create something new and fresh - of 7 the moment, yet completely harmonious with the original song. In all of this, we need to have a strategy - hence Mission Action Plans. However, it has also been said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. In other words, we can devise all the strategies we wish, list all our good intentions and develop detailed plans with allocated responsibilities, costings and timescales. But if our organisational culture, the way we habitually do things, is not up for scrutiny and change, none of our strategies will work. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
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