Ecumenical love, and ecumenical truth.
As many of you know I spent last week in Rome at a clergy conference organised by our Bishop, Jonathan.
The conference was our annual chance to come together as clergy under our bishop; to pray together, learn together and share ideas and success from our parishes and to encourage one another in our mission.
We met with many inspiring people from all parts of God’s Church – and especially from the Roman Catholic Church.
In this photograph you can see me with HE The Ambassador to the Holy See (Christopher Trott) and Archbishop Ian Earnest – who has become a dear friend and supporter of St. Anselm.
We also spoke with Cardinal Koch, who is in charge of ecumenical relationships, he shared with us the wonderful concept of ‘ecumenical love and ecumenical truth’. He told us that sometimes we have to sit and have tough conversations about what divides us and sometimes we have to sit and simply share our love for one another and DO things together.
We have all come to Jesus in different ways and yet we all come together on a Sunday and DO our faith together. There is always a reason to disagree, but there is a far bigger reason to find common ground – Jesus.
Fr. Matthew
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We have a PCC meeting next week (30th April) where I am hopeful we will be able to go through our annual accounts ahead of our APCM on the 21st May.
It’s that time of year to consider your giving to support the work of the church. To give you an idea of the increase in costs we are facing – our monthly electric bill is now over £1250 – quite a lot more that we receive via the envelopes and plate collections on a Sunday. This is not sustainable and whilst our commercial activities are starting to pick up some of this deficit we must look to being able to fund ourselves.
If you currently give via the envelope scheme, please consider increasing your donation each week to help cover our costs.
If you would like to sign up for Parish Giving (which is a wonderful way to support St. Anselm and helps us claim more money from the government) please go to www.stanselm.co.uk/giving or call the Parish Giving Team directly on 0333 002 1271 quoting our parish number, which is: 230 623 503. It’s super simple to set up and keeps you in control of your donations.