The Three in One June 2020 Salcombe, Malborough and South Huish Benefice Directory Vicar: The Revd. Daniel French The Vicarage, Devon Road, Salcombe, TQ8 8HJ 842853 [email protected] Assistant Priest: Father Stephen Ball 859006 [email protected] (South Sands Hotel) (Special Responsibility for Malborough) Deacon: Revd. Christian Hill [email protected] 562693 Benefice Administrator: Debbie Plummer Office 842626 [email protected] Wardens: Salcombe: Lynn Hillaby 561478 Roger Petty-Brown (Assistant) 842732 Tony Axtell (Assistant) 842155 Malborough: Trevor Rendle 561674 Margaret Ellis 853385 Gill Boyce (Assistant) 561698 South Huish: Bruce Williams 561621 Organists: Salcombe: Trevor Becker 07410 186962 [email protected] Malborough: Gill Rogers 843614 South Huish: Trevor Becker 07410 186962 Benefice News: ‘The Three in One’ Editor: Ann Merritt 854069 [email protected] Cover Photo: Goodshelter, Salcombe Estuary by Bobbie Dunne All photos are available as prints - Please contact the office 2 Amazing Value! Fantastic concessionary rates available for Salcombe charities, clubs and organisations For further details contact Tania or Annabel on 01548 844704 3 BONNINGTONS NEWSAGENTS 12 Fore Street, Salcombe - Tel: 01548 843247 TOBACCO - CONFECTIONERY - STATIONERY - CARDS DRY CLEANING - LAUNDRY - SHOE REPAIRS NATIONAL LOTTERY JO GEORGE (John & Carole Gunstone) 4 CHURCH CONTACTS Holy Trinity Church Salcombe PCC Secretary (Vacant) Deanery Synod Representatives David Parkes, Sheila Reed 842387/842392 PCC Treasurer David Stevens 843156 Gift Aid & Weekly Envelopes Joan Parkes 842387 Electoral Roll Secretary Ann Woodhatch 843654 Friends of Holy Trinity Charles Rowse 843941 Parish News Editor Ann Merritt 854069 Proofreader Nikki Turton 842847 Typist Nola Baylis 842877 Distributer Sue Flynn 842244 Malborough Baptist Church Church Administrator Hywel Jones 561700 Family Worship on Sundays 10.30am Communion on first Sunday Catholic Church Priest Monsignor Fr. Andrzej Jablonski 852670 Mass: 5pm Saturday, Salcombe 10.15am Sunday, Kingsbridge Methodist Church Kingsbridge Rachel Mitchell 852073 Hope Cove Sue Morgan 560237 Worship: 10.30am Sunday, Kingsbridge 6pm Sunday, Hope Cove Malborough Church PCC Secretary Deborah White 561978 Deanery Synod Representative Jane Brannan 561531 PCC Treasurers Trevor & Pauline Rendle 561674 Electoral Roll Secretary Patricia Handley 562240 Gift Aid & Weekly Envelopes Pauline Rendle 561674 Bell Tower Captain John Cole 561831 Galmpton & Hope Cove Church Warden Bruce Williams 561621 PCC Treasurer Pam Windle 562021 5 Editorial - June 2020 - Three Worlds It is becoming apparent that Christians are now having to navigate three worlds. Each world interacts with one other world. It strikes me that we do well to grow in confidence around this and be fluent in the dialect of each. This for churches will be a crucial part of transition to the new normal. The first world is the earth itself, the material world. If your relationship with the material world has not changed in the past two months then I do not know where you have been. The joke going around is that by the end of lockdown we are going to be a monk, a hunk, a drunk or chunk - choose carefully. Lockdown has dramatically quietened down the planet from human activity. The quiet world looks almost like an alien land. There are all sorts stories and anecdotes of this ecological lift. Some for example are appreciating birdsong for the first time and wondering why they have not taken that in before? My kids are playing on empty roads, and the echo of footballs resounds up and down Devon Road. It reminds me of a 1970s childhood where few cars interrupted play. Do we want to go back to what it was before Covid-19? Can we justify treating God’s world as a consumer item? My son has mild asthma and rarely uses his pump but if we venture to London he needs it five times a day. Do we want to return to that? The second “world” is cyberspace. This is a manmade sphere of pure information. Even the most secular of newspapers, The Guardian, had to grudgingly confess that one in four Britons were daily using the internet to pray. ‘Prayer’ and ‘God’ now top the search engine polls as opposed to more seedy enquiries. As of writing last Sunday the UK churches rush to use Zoom meant that the app overheated in Britain. Prayer, it would seem brought the internet to its knees - literally. Churches are rising to the task of live-streaming and significant numbers are dropping in. Perhaps like an anonymous Christmas service this allows the less familiar to take a peek without commitment? Certainly our views on Facebook livestream have been very marked and recently came near to a thousand views on a Sunday. The third “world” we have to navigate is that beyond this one, heaven. A pandemic presents the easily forgotten reality of our mortality. Modern life has had a tendency to swerve away from questions about our finality. But, now we know that we are no longer invincible, we are faced with stark realities that would have been normal to our forebears. For Christians this presents a moment of serendipity where the “greatest story ever told” has remarkable relevance. The sceptic might say that this is all pie in the sky, and that heaven has no relevance except as a comforting fairy-tale. The faith story of the Bible and the saints speaks of this other world as the kingdom from which all good values and principles derive. It is the metaphysical layer upon which all that is beautiful, good and noble is founded on. 6 How these worlds relate is essential to the good news. But, it is easy to get mixed up and muddled and in doing so present a Gospel-lite version of Christianity. First, the internet is not everything. It is a shadow of its mother world. Sometimes this is a hard fact to digest because the internet is very beguiling and rewarding. Try and confiscate a phone from a teenager and you will see what I mean! The internet for the churches is both simultaneously important and not that important. At its best it can be a window, or a mirror, into the real world. A window, however, remains just a window. Likewise, this world is but a shadow of the next, or to use another analogy - the suburbs, the outer rim. If we get too caught up in this world we lose that greater perspective and the present world will feel very flat as if it were folding in on itself. Just as the internet can become addictive so a materialistic mind-set can also limit us. What is the next life like? In C S Lewis’ Great Divorce, heaven is presented as a world of giants while hell is a grey town of diminished, squashed and small minded individuals. I believe that when God made us in His own image (Genesis 1.27) that wry image is not so much about us having free will, consciousness, imaginations and creativity. Those things are fantastic but we are limited in those and I imagine that even in heaven we shall not have brains as if we were infinite super computers. What God has given us of infinite capacity is the human heart. St Benedict spoke of the human heart as a sanctuary with infinite walls. This we share with God, the ability to love, forgive, and be compassionate. This spiritual organ is appropriate because if we are to inhabit eternity we need to learn to get along with even our adversaries. For eternity we need infinite hearts. Let me conclude with an anecdote I heard recently. A prominent Christian journalist went to a series of Washington parties for Christian leaders. He was surprised that all conversation and gossip was about power, political intrigue and social media. The gatherings were put together to bring politicians with influential church figures for the greater good. From the church “movers and shakers” no one ever talked about Jesus or the Bible. He said that after a few years of these charades he stopped going. They were exhausting. In the “new normal” my hope is Christians speak with confidence of the three worlds and how Jesus is the saviour that links all three. With blessings Father Daniel 7 MALBOROUGH CHURCH What do we have to say at this present time!!! These are very extraordinary circumstances we are living in and the hope is that you are all keeping fit and well and observing the 2m distancing and all the other regulations. Hopefully, this will help to get us back to some form of normal life in the not too distant future, but this could be a very different world we will be living in. We are endeavouring to keep the congregation up to date with a Weekly Update, which includes a Sunday Service which Fr Stephen has kindly put together along with hymns and our prayer list. If there is anyone that needs to go on our prayer list please let me know so that they can be included. The idea of the Sunday Service sheet is down to Pauline (Rendle) and our thanks must go to her for discussing this with Fr Stephen and getting it up and running and to Gill (our organist) for choosing the hymns. The actual production of it then comes down to me but as we have so many of our congregation on e-mail, this makes life so much easier. Trevor keeps his exercise up by delivering the one or two that remain. This last week we have been able to include Bob & Trixie on e-mail and also Keith & Mary Rushton from Macclesfield who spend the summer with us and join our congregation. During this pandemic, we are truly indebted to Fr Stephen and Fr Daniel for being able to keep our services going on a daily basis through the wonderful world of technology.