Nongentiquinquagintal-istic celebration focus (even though the sound of it is something quite atrocious!)

Here's my July magazine article for Broughton:

We're now well into our celebrations for our 950^th Anniversary, although we haven't yet decided whether we should call it our Nonsemicentennial or Nongentiquinquagintal; perhaps we'll just stick with 950^th 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 16^th July and our Service of Thanksgiving on Sunday 17^th 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.