After the great celebration of Easter Day, the Church calendar carries on through the seven weeks of the Easter season to Pentecost, each Sunday gospel witnessing to the experience of the first disciples of the risen Lord, through the Ascension to St Luke’s story of the gift of the Spirit. Together, the disciples are gifted with the resurrection appearances, with his ascension into heaven, and with the Spirit.
I often wonder how Jesus felt as he entered Jerusalem at the beginning of what we call Holy Week.
He was met by triumphant crowds who saw him as the person who was to save his nation from domination by the Romans. Yet as the week went on we saw a man who shrugged off the adulation of the crowds, spent time with his friends, sought refuge outside the city for peace and respite and then gave the Passover meal with his closest a new and everlasting meaning. It did not end there as he was tried and in some people’s eyes found guilty and cruelly executed.
This year Salisbury celebrates one of the most remarkable stories of medieval England. It’s the story of the Cathedral that moved.
In 1220 the consecration stones of a new Cathedral were laid and anointed, only 2.5 miles from the site of the existing Cathedral. Bishop Richard Poore and his clergy had determined that the hilltop of OId Sarum was no longer an appropriate place for their foundation. So, with breath- taking audacity, they moved it to the plain below, where five rivers meet, and where it has stood ever since.
I always marvel at the number and variety of Christmas services and events that happen across our nine Anglican churches. This year I found myself wondering: Would it be possible to go to one Christmas event in each of the nine churches?
I read with sadness of the death of the Revd Tony Wheeler, whose funeral was on Friday 7 September 2018.
When I first started working on the Dorchester Benefice Magazine in June 2012, I didn't know Tony, but I did enjoy reading the articles which he would regularly submit to the magazine.
One Sunday in July, at a service at Winterbourne Abbas, we marked ‘Rural Mission Sunday’, the theme of which was ‘Everybody Welcome!’ Rural Mission Sunday is an opportunity to celebrate the life of the rural church and is promoted by the Arthur Rank Centre (a Christian organisation that supports ruralministry). The theme of hospitality was chosen long before the seismic national and international events of the last year unfolded but it now seems particularly pertinent.
