Here's my July magazine article for Broughton:
We're
now well into our celebrations for our 950th
Anniversary, although we haven't yet decided whether we
should call it our Nonsemicentennial or Nongentiquinquagintal;
perhaps we'll just stick with 950th Anniversary! We
started the year with our Anniversary Songs of Praise, our Sunday
School wrote a special prayer for the year, we celebrated Broughton
weddings, we had our friends from Regia Anglorum set up their
Anglo-Saxon Living History camp around the church and Broughton
Primary School have made two fantastic banners to commemorate the
year. This month is our Anniversary weekend, with a Summer Fair on
Saturday 16th July and our Service of Thanksgiving on
Sunday 17th July, both of which you're all invited to join
us at. And there'll be more events later in the year.
Broughton Primary
School's production this year is Mary Poppins, the well known story
of a Victorian nanny with magical powers and the adventures she has
with the Banks family. One of the most moving themes of the story is
Mr Banks gradually realising that there is more to life than work.
The tuppence that he wanted his children to invest in the economy and
industry in order to drive forward the technological revolution and
create wealth, could also be spent on feeding the birds or on paper
and string to make a kite. More importantly he realised that his
obsession with work had meant that he'd neglected his family. His
reconnection with his wife and his children seems to be the reason
Mary Poppins comes.
When Regia came in
May, as well as looking at the fantastic camp many people spent time
wandering around inside the church. For some it was the first time
they'd been in the church, others had been in occasionally for
services but had never really looked around. One of the best things
I heard during that weekend was the amount of people who felt
reconnected to the church, they found a new sense of pride in the
building and I think many of them began to see it for the first time
as being 'their' church. This was a theme that Bishop David and I
picked up on at the unveiling of the banners at school; the reason we
asked the school to make the banners was because St Mary's as the
parish church is their church and now, through the pieces that each
of them contributed to the banners, they have become part of the
church too. In the future people looking around the church will see
the children and staff's handiwork.
But St Mary's exists in
the first place to point to a greater reconnection. The Christian
message that St Mary's was built to celebrate and proclaim is that
even though our sin separates us from God, Jesus died so that those
sins could be forgiven and we could reconnect with God. Our fathers,
like Mr Banks, are not perfect, but our heavenly Father God loves us
more than we can imagine and longs for us to reconnect with him.
Maybe this is the year for you to do just that.
