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Worship on Sunday morning - 23rd August
Church services this Sunday will be held at 10am and at 11am. Seating is limited on account of Coronavrus restrictions, but in the last two weeks no-one has been turned away for lack of space. Please remember tp bring a face covering, which is now mandatory for congregations in churches in England.. Our services will be led by Mrs Hannah Chun.
The lessons will be Exodus 1:8-2:10 and Matthew 16:13-20
Deacons on duty are Selamawi Zere and David Jones.
Stewards on duty are Malcolm Booth, David Jones, Caroline Blackburn, Charlotte Atkinson and Fiona Jones.
The organist is Stephen Haylett, B Mus, ARCM, ARCO.
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Worship at home on Sunday 23 August
Please see this page of the church website and join in worship at 10.00am led by Mrs Hannah Chun online.
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Christian Study - At this page on the church website you will find links to both the Junior and Adult webpages from Roots on the Web, a resource used by some departments in Junior Church.
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Stewarding on Sunday mornings
If you've been in church in the last couple of weeks, you will have seen that we've changed our stewarding arrangements. We now have a steward stationed at the Cheam Road entrance to offer a welcome, keep an eye on the hand sanitiser and any queue, and admit people to the church in a controlled way. A second takes test and trace information. The third offers service sheets, supervises the offering and directs people towards their seats. A fourth ensures that individuals and groups are seated in accordance with distancing requirements. All help with the changeover between services, making sure that the church is cleared and prepared before a new congregation enters.
All this is rather different from what we're used to - but it seems to be settling down. Now that new duties have been defined and tested, we are looking for additional stewards to spread the load.
If you could help with any of these tasks, David Jones would be pleased to hear from you. Please contact him either by email at dej7ld@gmail.com or by phone on 020 8643 5438. (Please be ready to give your name, as a call screening service is in use.)
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Coffee and Chat
As we come out of lockdown, our church services will remain unable to include an opportunity for chat over coffee. So the Coffee and Chat group, which has been meeting via Zoom after the recorded service each Sunday, is now going to continue on Zoom during August on Tuesday evenings at 7.30pm.
If you would like to join some familiar faces you would be welcome. Please contact John and Deborah Wroe 020 8642 9064 or john.p.wroe@gmail.com.
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Dial a service! If you know anyone who would like to be able to listen to our recorded services, but who doesn't have internet access, we now have a solution for them too - please let them know! Simply phone 020 3319 1332 at any time and listen to hear a recording of the most recent service at Trinity. The cost is that of a local call, which for many people will be free.
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Call after 1.00pm on Sunday by which time that morning's service should be available - note this timing will change once services are again being held in the Trinity building..
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When the wrong materials end up in recycling waste, it’s much less likely that the materials will be recycled, meaning that sadly they could end up in landfill, along with any other waste they’ve contaminated. Here's how to ensure your empty bottles, bags and boxes do actually make it through the recycling process.
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- Rinse food packaging: Traces of food (unless it’s just a grease stain) can contaminate the recycling system, so you should always rinse tins, pots and packaging prior to popping them into a collection box.
- Remove tape: You should remove all sticky packing tape from cardboard before placing it into a recycling bin.
- Tin can lids are recyclable if you pop them inside the clean, empty tin, and aerosol cans, empty or not are recyclable . You can also leave paper labels on tins as these will be recognised and dealt with separately.
- Detergent and cleaning product bottles are recyclable, and you can leave any triggers in place.
- Plastic bottles: These should be emptied, rinsed, squashed and have lids put back on ready for recycling – this is because loose lids are often too small to be detected in the recycling process.
Sutton Council has a handy A-Z of recycling here
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The Summer Supplement - 1620 and all that
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The River Dart rises on the massive Dartmoor in Devon and flows south, meeting the salty waters of the steep-sided estuary at Totnes before entering the English Channel at Dartmouth. Nowadays, Dartmouth is regarded as one of the pretty coastal villages in the South Hams area, but whether it had the same reputation in 1620 is not recorded (or if it is, I have not found it!). I do hope that the passengers on board Mayflower and Speedwell had an opportunity to stretch their legs and enjoy the late August sunshine during the 10 days or so (approximately 23rd August to 2nd September) when their craft were at anchor and yet further repairs were being carried out on the smaller vessel. The leak on the Speedwell which had been attended to in Southampton had opened up again - some reports blame too much sail which put undue pressure on the mast and hull - but, whatever the cause, the captains of the two ships had felt it necessary to have further repair work carried out.
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Whilst we wait for the Pilgrims to sail from the sheltered, deep-water harbour at Dartmouth, I thought I would give a few notes about one of their number, William Bradford (1590-1657), who became Governor of the Plymouth colony in present-day Massachusetts no fewer than 30 times. He is the inspiration for the Pilgrim figure in the statue in Rotherhithe which I mentioned two weeks ago. His home was Austerfield, one of a string of three villages on the borders of Nottinghamshire with Yorkshire spread over no more than 10 miles, and all just a mile or two to the east of the A1 trunk road between Newark and Doncaster. Along with Scrooby and Babworth, these villages were home to groups of Separatists who formed the driving force behind the Mayflower story. They are within a short walk of the River Idle, which rises near Sutton-in-Ashfield (near Mansfield) and in Bradford’s day would have run northwards to join the River Don somewhere to the east of Doncaster. During the reign of Charles I (1625-49) the course of the river was diverted such that it now flows to the east and is a tributary of the River Trent, joining it at West Stockwith. The diversion of the Idle was only a part of a major scheme to drain the Hatfield Chase wetlands, an area just to the east of Epworth, although not many commentators link the Pilgrim Fathers with the history of the Methodist church in this way! No pictures available of the Idle in the Mayflower years, but one of its present-day course indicates a much less dramatic landscape in Nottinghamshire than you get in South Devon.
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St Wilfred's, Scrooby; All Saints, Babworth (both 15th century) and St Helena, Austerfield (11th century)
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Bradford had been orphaned at the age of seven, but being of an independent mind, would, in defiance of his uncles’ wishes, walk to the parish church in Babworth to hear the sermons of a Rev Richard Clifton (or Clyfton) who preached of finding truth in passages from the Bible and the virtues of simple but sincere forms of worship. Bradford would also visit the very grand Scrooby manor house, home to William Brewster, for meetings of the Separatists under the leadership of Rev John Robinson. In 1607 Clifton was, unsurprisingly, excommunicated from the Church of England on account his outspoken views and joined with Rev John Robinson in the leadership of the Scrooby fellowship. In those days, the Great North Road passed through Scrooby and so was a place of considerable more importance than it now enjoys.
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There is a well-documented history of the attacks from the established Church of England on the Scrooby congregation in the early years of the 17th century and of their first, illegal and unsuccessful flight, by ship, to the Netherlands in 1607. The 18-year old Bradford organised the second attempt in 1608, although that was not without its own misadventures. The men had travelled overland to a rendezvous with their ship at Immingham Creek in the Humber estuary, the women by river, bringing the luggage with them. The women’s boat got stuck in the mud, a crowd of armed men was intending to arrest the men who managed to scramble aboard the ship.
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In the confusion, the captain put to sea. This left the men without possessions or spare clothes and the women without their menfolk or money. A perilous passage took a week to reach Amsterdam where Bradford was arrested, on a tip-off, as being a fugitive from the English courts. However, the Dutch authorities released him when they realised the true nature of his escape from England. Meanwhile, the women had also been arrested, but without money or anywhere to live were released and were allowed to make their own way to Amsterdam.
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Ten years after the Pilgrims’ landing at Cape Cod, Bradford started work on a journal which became known as “Of Plymouth Plantation”. The 270-page manuscript was lost during the American war of Independence (1775-83), but 269 pages of it were “discovered” in the library of the Bishop of London some 100 years later. After years of inevitable wrangling, the Brits eventually agreed to return the precious piece of heritage to America, and it was duly handed over in a ceremony in Boston, Massachusetts in 1897.
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Feedback
We would welcome your feedback with ideas, suggestions for improvement, constructive criticism and questions - simply reply to this newsletter.
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