Notices for the Week of February 10th - 17th
Notices for the Week of February 11th – 17th
This Week at St. Helen’s
Tuesday - 5:30-7pm Pancake Supper
7pm – Church Council Meets
Wednesday 12 Noon – Ash Wednesday Service
7pm – Ash Wednesday Service
Lenten Conversations
Tuesday Evenings at 7pm beginning February 20th
Thursday Mornings at 11am beginning February 22nd
See the notice below for details
Shrove Tuesday Pancake Supper – Come and join us this Tuesday for fellowship, pancakes and sausages. There is no set price but you are invited to make a small donation to help cover the costs. If you have palms from last year please bring them along. They will be burned to use for Ash Wednesday.
Notice of the Annual Vestry Meeting - The parish council has set the date for our annual meeting as February 25th, 2018 following the 10 am service. At the meeting we will receive reports, approve the financial budget, elect a parish council including synod delegates and alternates. The Annual reports will be available to the congregation next Sunday, February 18th. We hope many people will be able to stay for the meeting. Finger food will be served.
Lenten Gatherings at St. Helen’s Please sign up for our Lenten Study which, this year is - Meeting Jesus in the Gospel of John. Have you ever wished to deepen your relationship with God? To experience a warm friendship with God? Maybe even fall in love with God – again – or for the very first time? Our Lenten gatherings will be using a beautiful prayer journal, one for each participant and the gatherings for conversation will be facilitated once each week during Lent. Meeting Jesus in the Gospel of John is a six-week journey into deeper intimacy with God through praying with the words of John the Evangelist. This beautiful 60-page journal inspires meditation on a daily verse from John, encouraging participants to respond through words, images, or however the Spirit leads. You can also subscribe online to receive a daily short video in which a monastic brother from the Society of Saint John the Evangelist shares comments on the daily Gospel verse, having a relationship with Jesus, and possibilities for further reflection.
Lent Resource from PWRDF PWRDF’s Lent 2018 resource is now available as a downloadable PDF. Go to the website below, click on ‘subscribe’ which will take you to a page to choose to download the devotions as a Pdf file or to receive daily devotionals in via email starting February 14, 2018. http://www.parishofvaudreuil.com/archives/9716
Readings for Next Sunday, February 17th – Lent 1
Genesis 9:8–17;
Psalm 25:1–9;
1 Peter 3:18–22;
Mark 1:9–15
Don’t Forget! For updates on what is happening at St. Helen’s go to both our Facebook Page and our website. Current information is put up on these pages each week. The web addresses are: Parish Website: www.sthelensurrey.ca
Parish Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/sainthelensurrey
Saints and Commemorations
Cyril and Methodius 14 February, Apostles to the Slavs, 869, 885 — Memorial On this day we honour the memory of Cyril and his older brother Methodius, who led a Byzantine mission to central Europe in the middle of the ninth century and for their labours have come to be known as “the apostles to the Slavs.” The two brothers belonged to the nobility of the Byzantine empire. Methodius became a senior administrator before he renounced the world and entered the monastic life; while Cyril held several important posts in the household of the patriarch of Constantinople. Because the two brothers were as fluent in Slavic as in their native Greek, the Byzantine emperor chose them to head an embassy to Moravia, a kingdom in central Europe, in the year 863. Moravia had been christianized by Frankish priests from across the Danube, but they insisted that the people accept Latin in worship and Frankish ways in everything else. By contrast, Cyril and Methodius began to build up a native, self-sustaining Church. Cyril invented a script so that the Slavs could write their own language, and he used it not only to translate large portions of Scripture for them but also to develop a distinctive Slavonic liturgy. After three years of successful labour the two brothers left for home. On their way they paid a visit to Rome, where the Pope gave their work his enthusiastic endorsement. Cyril died there, after a long illness, on February fourteenth in the year 869. The Pope asked his brother to return to Moravia as archbishop, and Methodius accepted the post, fearful that the Franks would otherwise destroy Cyril’s work. His fears were well-founded, and only the Pope’s firm support enabled him to continue his work. Even so, after his death in the year 885, the Franks wiped out all that he and his brother had accomplished in Moravia. Nevertheless, their followers found refuge in Bulgaria and from there managed to rebuild the heritage of the two brothers. This heritage has continued to nourish the Slavonic churches in the Balkans and in Central Europe to this day.
Thomas Bray 15 February -Priest and Missionary, 1730, Memorial Today we honour Thomas Bray, an English parish priest who founded two great missionary organizations at the turn of the 17th century: the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Bray’s love of knowledge was first recognized and nurtured by his parish priest, who enabled him to attend Oxford University. He was ordained in the Church of England and appointed vicar of a rural parish, where he developed a comprehensive programme of Christian instruction. In 1695 he became the bishop of London’s commissary for Maryland. Throwing himself completely into the work, he quickly realized that Anglican clergy in the colonies were too few and too poorly supported to meet the pastoral needs of the people. Over the next five years he increased the number of Anglican clergy in Maryland by more than a hundred; he also raised funds to enable thirty parishes to set up libraries. To consolidate and broaden his projects — many of which he had funded out of his own small stipend — he organized the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge in 1698. This Society had three practical objects: to establish lending libraries in England and in the American colonies; to encourage the building of charity schools in England and Wales; and to distribute Bibles, Prayer Books, and religious tracts, especially among Anglican parishes overseas. The S.P.C.K. proved so successful that, three years later, Bray founded the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in order to recruit and support Anglican missionaries and missionary work in America. In 1708 he became rector of a London parish and turned his energies to the needs of the urban poor, schooling for the children of black slaves, and the plight of unemployed people who were imprisoned for debt. He died twenty-two years later, filled to the very end with a zeal for the communication of knowledge, a love for the Anglican way, and missionary concern. From: For All the Saints published by the Anglican Church of Canada
Hymn Highlight this Week Wash O God, Your Sons and Daughters – was written by Ruth Duck, a minister in the United Church of Christ. Many of her hymns are thematically centered on issues of oppression and liberation, environmental and bodily wholeness, and the voice and experience of women. What is perhaps so phenomenal about her writing is that while these hymns make very prophetic and profound statements as to who God is and who we are to be, most of them have been formed with some liturgical context in mind such as the present hymn. “Wash, O God, Our Sons and Daughters,” as the title suggests, was written with the sacrament of baptism in mind. There is a seamlessness of time. The tenses weave back and forth, looking at Christ’s baptism and baptismal practices in the early church, but also recognizing the present event and hoping for the future. Another wonderful feature of this text is that we as the company of believers are included. We are asking the questions, supporting the baptismal candidate, and proclaiming praise to God. Congregants are not merely onlookers, but take part in the process and remember Christ’s baptism, as well as their own. There is a beautiful, mothering image of God in the second stanza, as we ask that God nourish us with milk. The final phrase of the second stanza reminds us of the sovereignty of God—that nothing, not even death itself, is outside of the realm of God, and that we as children of God are ultimately heirs of heaven. The third stanza is a series of acclamations of God as both glorious and mysterious. The hymn places the focus of the baptismal rite on the divine work of God rather than on anything we can do of our own merit, a theological concept that perhaps should be explored and considered more in our day-to-day lives as believers and children in the faith. By Ms Hanna, student at the Perkins School of Theology (edited)