Monthly Magazine and Events

Current  priorities of St Thomas -  as agreed by Church Council, September  2004

1.  Evangelism/Church Growth out of love for people and because we need new members.

2.  Worship, including Sunday School, Healing, Prayer and Music.

3.  Witness to Asians through individual friendships and through shared work with the community

4.  Presence, that is letting people know that C of E Christians live and/or worship on the Coppice.

5.  Working with St Paul’s, as we have been requested by the Diocese.

Dear Friends

Lent will be with us towards the end of the month – with Ash Wednesday on 22 February.  As you know, Lent originated with the preparation of new Christians for their Baptism on Easter Sunday.  So priests and people recognised a need for continuing preparation for the continuing Christian Life after Baptism.  We all meet new challenges as our circumstances change. And if our circumstances do not change the Holy Spirit still encourages us to grow in our understanding and in our trust. The name itself, ‘Lent’, simply means the season when the days lengthen but the period up till Good Friday and Easter is the most significant in the Christian Year both for baptism candidates and for all other believers.

This year we are sharing the programme not only with Paul’s but also with the parish of Holy Trinity Bardsley with St Cuthbert’s, Fitton Hill, and Woodhouses Mission Church. Nick Andrewes, Tony Grant and I will each of us be swapping once with both other parishes.  But participants are welcome either to stay in the same venue every week or to chop and change.  Full details are in Nick’s article later in the magazine.

There is a new 'Mission News' out this month. together with Nick Andrewes' observations about Lent, both worth a click.

February dates – in addition to regular times of worship

19th, Sunday, 10.30: D, M, Ke and Ka W update us on their Christian Work in South East Asia.

22nd, Ash Wednesday, 9.30 at St Paul’s: Holy Communion

                                         8 pm at St Thomas’, Holy Communion

24th, Friday, 7pm for 7.30 at the Salt Cellar:  Churches Together in 

         Oldham Annual Meal – more details below.

26th, Sunday, 6.15pm: Worship in Farsi. Led by the Revd Omid Moludy

28th, Tuesday, 1pm – 2.45 at the Vicarage;

         1st Lent Session – The Creation.

29th, Wednesday, 7.45 – 9.30 pm at St Cuthbert’s, Fitton Hill (Tanners  

         Fold, off Fir Tree Avenue): 1st  Lent Session – The Creation.

4th March, Sunday, (evening, time to be announced) at St Paul’s:

         Ist Lent Session – The Creation.

Churches Together in Oldham Annual Meal is on Friday 24 February, 7pm for 7.30, at the Salt Cellar: speaker is Dave Smith of the Boaz Trust, working with those asylum-seekers who no longer have Home Office support. Choice of 2 starters, main courses and desserts. See choices on the table at the back of St Thomas’, and book on the clipboard. £13 payable to Biddy Dawson.

Yours sincerely

                               Andrew Dawson

Learning to be happy with less

by Giles Fraser, Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral until he resigned in the autumn in the dispute over ‘Occupy London.’

I contend that the current financial predicament sets the moral, the political, and the economic at odds with each other.  If I had to grade the three most different political parties in these terms, they would all get the same mark: two out of three. The Conservative Party gets a tick for the political and the economic; the Labour Party gets a tick for the moral and the political; and the Greens get a tick for the moral and the economic.  I am sure my marking will be regarded as subjective, but let’s just call this a parlour game.

The Tories and the Liberal Democrats are right that debt is a huge issue, and that borrowing more to spend more, thus to stimulate the economy, is a way of overloading the national credit card, thereby running the risk of turning the UK into Greece or Italy.  The economy cannot be burdened by servicing vast interest payments on borrowed money.  It is our children who will be handed the bill.  We need to pay off the debt.  That is the economic tick from me.  But the moral failure has to do with the way in which the resulting cuts in public services fall disproportionately on those who are most vulnerable.  The widening gap between rich and poor is morally unacceptable, and results in a dangerously fragmented society.

The Labour Party is better at the equality part.  That is a big tick.  But it believes that economic growth is a magic wand.  Despite the fact that the Left excoriates bankers for their high risk mentality, borrowing off the future is just as risky as betting on the futures exchange. From the Labour perspective, everything in the economy is premised on the necessity for expansion. Tomorrow (26 Nov) is Buy Nothing Day, but the Labour Party could never support  such a scheme because it threatens growth.  The Party wants us to spend, spend, spend.  But this is an economic policy that is premised on the encouragement of bubbles.  And the creation and bursting of bubbles is precisely what has caused so much economic instability.

The Green Party is sensitive to issues of fairness, and suspicious of the overly optimistic economics of perpetual growth, knowing that the latter is unsustainable in the longer term: tick.  But it is never going to get the politics right, because we the voters are always going to want to believe politicians who speak of Eldorado just around the corner.  The Greens opt for a less prosperous and more equal society – but we are generally all too selfish to be content with such a prospect.

I have never voted Green, but surely one of the things the Party is right about is that we are all going to have to learn how to be happy with less.  The message may not do them any good at the polls; yet I cannot help but think it is fundamentally about right.  ‘Church Times.’ 25.11.2011.