Tag Archives: Sonning Deanery

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Official

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So I’m now officially the Churchwarden for St James Finchampstead, and all the associated responsibilities that entails.

I was sworn in, along with my fellow Churchwarden at a service in St Mary Minster in Reading. Officially this wasn’t supposed to be our service, this was the service for Churchwardens in Bradfield, Newbury and Reading Deaneries – Sonning Deanery was allocated the Windsor service on Thursday, however quite apart from clashing with choir practice, Reading is a lot easier to get to after work than Windsor! We needn’t have worried though, as when they asked the Sonning Churchwardens to stand it seemed like a large number of other people had had the same idea. We spotted the wardens and clergy from California and Crowthorne, and were sat next to the group from Wargrave. Indeed we weren’t the only additions, there were wardens from Maidenhead, and we even had a lone representative from Witney Parish in the Oxford area. Interestingly the warden from Witney was Douglas Hurd – well Baron Hurd of Westwell now. He was MP for Witney until 1997 – a seat now held by David Cameron.

Anyway, the service itself was fairly straightforward consisting of two hymns, Taizé style prayers accompanied by the choir of St Mary’s Thatcham, and of course the admission of Churchwardens. The formal part of the admission consists of repeating an oath read out by the Diocesan Registrar, and then is followed by the Bishop of Oxford’s Charge, which is effectively the sermon. In this Bishop John spoke about his hopes for the Diocese, using Philippians 1, 3-11 as his text. Oh and despite having a broad range of churches represented we used the modern Lord’s Prayer (as was used at the inauguration service) rather than the old cop-out of defaulting to the modified-traditional version. After the service was a chance for everybody to meet Bishop John and our fellow Churchwardens.

Bishop John’s sermon was a good one, and he had a nice mix of serious points and laughs to get his ideas over. He challenged us to make our churches welcoming and open to all which pleased me. We got a chance to chat with him after the service too, as Rev Richard has actually managed to book him twice to come to St James already, and he’s only been in the post for a matter of weeks! Having said that we’ve had Bishop Stephen along twice in the past year, so it will be nice to welcome Bishop John along too. Bishop John certainly seemed to be making a conscious effort to try and talk to as many people as possible, and when I mentioned that we would be in Taizé at the same time as he and the Oxford Pilgrimage is there he said it would be good to see us at the service on the Sunday morning before they leave. All in all it was a great evening, now the hard work of being Churchwarden begins!

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Sonning Deanery Youth Day

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Redefined 2

As you may have been aware, this weekend was to have been the annual Sonning Deanery Youth Residential Weekend, Moving On. However, about a month ago, we took the decision to cancel, as we just weren’t getting the level of applications we needed, and were heading towards a sizeable loss for the whole weekend.

However, although we cancelled the residential weekend, Mike Buckland at Wargrave decided to still bring the Exalt team down, and to organise a youth day at Wargrave, with two free sessions during the day, and a free performance in the evening. Unfortunately from a St James point of view, although we had the largest contingent of young people from all the Churches booked to go on the weekend, that didn’t translate into interest in the youth day. Indeed we suffered a bit from the classic ‘group think’ problem when working with young people, that if one or two key people decide not to do something, everybody else decides not to come along too. The young people were able to come to as many or as few of the sessions as they liked, and looking at the list we had about 25 people through the doors during the day, with a number coming to all three sessions. In terms of St James, there was no official contingent, however we did have one person who came along with friends from school who attended one of the other Churches.

Although we didn’t need to go along to look after our youth group, we decided to go along to the evening session, which as always was a good show, and also a chance for us to catch up with the other youth leaders from around the deanery.

Exalt have been through another evolution in terms of their structure, so whereas the last time we saw them back in 2004 they were a five member group, they now work under two names – as the three member Exalt Ministries when doing Youth Work, and as a duo called Redefined when performing. In terms of the team, the only face from the previous team is Holly, a singer and dancer, and she is joined by Deano a rapper and break dancer for Redefined, and a professional Youth Worker, Colleen, all the way from Nova Scotia, for the Exalt Ministries sessions.

The actual session was fairly similar to previous years, with games, discussion and workshops, and then the songs. Certainly they seemed to go down just as well as in previous years, and as before many of the young people were around chatting to the team for a long while after the end of the performance. However what was interesting is that many of the people who came today, weren’t booked on the weekend, and yet many of the people who were booked on the weekend, such as those at St James, didn’t come today. From what we’ve heard, what we had today were more generally the older young people who had attended Moving On weekends before, who were essentially fans of Exalt, and the younger young people were booked on the weekend primarily because it was a sleep-over. What we seem to have lost is the momentum – the older ones who keep coming back to see Exalt, and the younger ones who initially come for the sleep-over aspect, and then keep coming back. So in general the day was well recieved from those who attended, it’s more a question of getting the interest from others in order to get the kind of numbers we need to make these things viable, and more especially the interest from adults in the Churches who are willing to put in the time to help out.

After the problems this year, and the abortive attempt to organise a weekend in 2005 (the 2006 weekend was largely put together as a response to young people upset that we didn’t do a weekend in 2005 – and yet many of them didn’t sign up) we are looking to have a proper ‘Where do we go from here’ type meeting with both the youth leaders, and the Deanery Synod who stump up the money, so hopefully this won’t have been a swan song for Deanery Youth events.