On gratitude and grief

Alice Ormondroyd, with Cain, Arthur and Robin, are leaving us on 24 May, at the end of Alice’s time with us as our Ordinand. They’re moving to Kensington, where Alice will become Assistant Curate at St Mary Abbots. Alice writes about her three years of ministry here with us, and about saying goodbye in these strange times. 

Goodbyes are strange aren’t they? They are especially strange in this time where we can’t do normal goodbyes: we can’t have a leaving party, we can’t hug our friends, we can’t take photos to remember our time together. Departures and arrivals are an enormously important of what it means to be human and so we have to think particularly creatively about how we do this. My heart goes out to those who have lost loved ones to Coronavirus without having been able to say goodbye as they would have wanted to. But all of us I think have a sense of grief at this time about the goodbyes we didn’t get to say to the people we love when we last saw them - because we didn’t realise it would be the last time we saw them for quite some time.

On May 25th our family will leave Shepherd’s Bush which has been our home for the last 10 years: it’s where Cain and I met, were married, made our first home together, had our two children. We will leave without the chance to say the goodbye we expected, and yet will leave with the utmost gratitude to God and the community here for all the blessings this neighbourhood has given us. So, as I leave, a little reflection on gratitude amongst our grief.

Cain, Arthur and I arrived at St Saviour’s in September 2017 when I began training for ordination. At this time, Chris had decided to start the 11am morning service so it was a really interesting time to join the church. Right from the start there was a strong sense of welcome, and am eagerness from the congregation to offer us hospitality. There are so many highlights, so here are just a few things we will treasure from our time here.

I am so grateful for the friendship and fellowship from the Mums and Tots group that I led whilst Lizzie was on maternity leave, and then Lizzie and now Lauren lead. It has been such a unique space in the week where mums and their little ones come and make genuine friends, supported by the wonderful hospitality of Roey Jenkins. It has been wonderful to see the group evolve and change and be a safe space each week for local families.I will also treasure memories of the Bible study group I led for the first year. It was so wonderful to meet together to study the Bible, and to share stories of God’s work in our lives.

There are so many gifted musicians at St Saviour’s, and I will also treasure memories of singing with others, especially at Christmas when each year we have formed a choir and been joined by instrumentalists for our service of Nine Lessons and Carols. The way in which we have journeyed through Lent to Easter each year has also been something I have loved being part of, and I have wonderful memories of marking Holy Week and then Easter with our annual donkey procession to the park.

I will also treasure the time spent shaping and developing our ministry with the children. There has been such a fantastic team of leaders and their faith and creativity has been so inspiring – no wonder numbers have grown and we are now seeing many more families at the church and provision made for older children as well as pre-schoolers. We will really miss being part of the Junior Church community and will continue to pray especially for this wonderful ministry.

Finally, a thank you to all of you for your words of encouragement and practical acts of service to us as a family. Commencing training with a young child and then having another baby part way through training has been formational in so many ways, and there have been times where I have been so exhausted and felt really vulnerable, but we have been so blessed by real love and care from the community. I will never forget the day that Robin was born and Cain and Arthur set off for the 9.30 service leaving me and the midwife at home, only for Cain to dash back at 10am to be present for the birth which happened just in time to be announced at the beginning of the 11am service! In the weeks that followed we were showered with gifts of food, flowers, cards, toys, and clothes. I think it shows how special the community is that we seek to share our lives with one another, offering love and service in the name of Christ. As we move into a much bigger church I will miss the intimacy of the community here at St Saviour’s.

I have been appointed as Assistant Curate at St Mary Abbots Church in Kensington, and we are moving to our new home next to the church on May 25th. I will be licensed as a Lay Worker at the beginning of July as I begin ministry there over the summer ahead of being ordained deacon at St Paul’s Cathedral on September 26th at 5pm. We hope that many of you will be able to join us for that service, and we plan to return to St Saviour’s in the autumn for a proper chance to say goodbye. 

With love in Christ

Alice, Cain, Arthur and Robin

Thanks from Alex and Rachel

St Saviour’s recently started to support Alex Cama (who was until recently one of our residential Young Franciscans) and his fiancée Rachel Burton in their pioneer mission work in Northolt. Alex and Rachel have written to say thanks and to bring us up to speed on their work.

Dear St Saviour’s Church: We are writing to say a huge thank you to you as a church for agreeing to accept us as your official mission partners. When we discussed the possibility with Father Chris, it was something that appealed a huge amount for a number of reasons.

It is great to know that we have a church family who are behind all that we are doing as missionaries; praying for and encouraging us. We are also excited that we can come and share our missional experiences with you and encourage and equip you in mission, drawing on our practical experiences, as well as our studies of pioneering (Rachel is studying Pioneer Mission Leadership with CMS and Alex studied the same last year with the Diocese of London School of Pioneers). It is also a blessing that when we come back, we will know a very good number of you because of our roles in leadership of the dispersed Young Franciscans.

For those that don’t know us, we are Alex Cama and Rachel Burton, an engaged couple (to be married in May if Coronavirus allows!) who will be living and ministering not too far away in Northolt. Alex worshipped at St Saviour’s last year while he was a residential Young Franciscan (YF) living with Charlie Wheeler and Miriam Brandon. And Rachel has met some of the St Saviour’s church family through Alex and her involvement with the YF since she joined last October. Find Rachel’s blog website here.

We are both going to be engaged in incarnational, pioneer mission on the Racecourse Council Estate, Northolt, where we feel called to live, and where there has unfortunately been very limited Christian presence for a good number of years. Alex will also continue his work as an evangelist/missionary in Wormwood Scrubs and Pentonville prisons and discipling ex-offenders, both of which started when he was a residential YF just around the corner from Wormwood Scrubs.

Rachel will also continue her Christian addiction recovery work at Yeldall Manor that she has been doing for 10 years now. We are also both extremely excited to be taking a lead with the dispersed Young Franciscans. We thoroughly look forward to leading the community in being contemplatively prayerful and missional, as we journey together in making Jesus known in the way of St Francis.

We both love being on and thinking about mission, so please do get in touch if you would like to discuss anything missional, or anything else for that matter, really! It will be great to be in touch with you, knowing that we are praying for each other.

We will also be coming to speak at church before too long, so we look forward to spending some time with you then. In the meantime, stay safe during this very strange time in our history.

Peace and all good

Alex & Rachel

Luke in Lent, Luke in lockdown

For Lent this year, we focused on the Gospel of Luke. We invited people to write a short reflection on each chapter of Luke, so we could spend 24 days thinking and praying our way through Luke’s amazing Gospel.

Twenty-four people took part, and each day through Lent, Alice posted each person’s reflection on the church WhatsApp group, while Judaline emailed a digest of the readings every few days. We’ve now gathered all the reflections together into a PDF booklet which you can download on the link below. Thanks, everyone, for taking part, and for nourishing us through Lent.

Download the Luke in Lent booklet

We also met together every Tuesday evening in Lent simply to read through the whole of Luke. We started out by meeting in the church chapel, but after 17 March, when everything was locked down and we weren’t able to meet physically any more, we met online instead, reading through the chapters of Luke on Zoom.

It was a wonderful experience, and more people joined in on Zoom than had been able to come to the chapel. We’re looking forward to doing more Bible reading as the lockdown continues.

Annual Parochial Church Meeting postponed

Our Annual Parochial Church Meeting (APCM) was scheduled for this Sunday, 29 March, but we’ve been advised by the diocese that it cannot now go ahead during the coronavirus pandemic. We were hoping to be able to hold the meeting online, but there is apparently no legal precedent for an APCM to be conducted digitally. We hope to be able to meet for our APCM later in the year.

The documents relating to the APCM are below:

APCM Report 2019-20
APCM 2020 meeting agenda
APCM 2019 minutes

How we're offering services, prayer and support in this time of coronavirus

Revd Chris Lee, our vicar, writes: The government has called for non-essential travel to stop, social venues to be avoided, and public gatherings to discontinue. In parliament it has been made clear that this includes public worship. The Church of England has called for churches to put public worship on hold and become ‘a different sort of church’. In light of this, we at St Saviour’s are taking the following steps:

No Sunday services – Sunday Services will not be taking place at our church building on Sunday mornings, as from this Sunday, 22 March. We will, however, be doing an online streaming service at 10am on Sundays through a live video app called Zoom, which is available for free on computers and smartphones. We’ll provide a link on WhatsApp and by email for everyone who wants to take part. If you’re not already on either of these, please contact us.

Church open for personal prayer – Update on 22 March: Our church is no longer open for personal prayer.

Care group for older people – We are currently setting up a care group. This is made up of church members who will adopt an older member. They will call them daily for a chat and see how they are. If they need practical help they will do that. We have set up code words for each older member so they know the person contacting them is from the church.

Tuesday night Bible readings – We are currently in the middle of reading our way through the Gospel of Luke on Tuesday evenings. We’ve been meeting in the chapel, but we will now be meeting online, via the Zoom app, from 8 to 9pm.

Help with the Zoom app – We have helped some of the older members of our congregation to download and set up the Zoom app, but if you need help with it, please see our Using Zoom page.

Sermons online – We will also be making our sermons available on this website.

YouTube – We are looking into best way to offer live services through platforms such as YouTube.

Please check back on this website for further details as they become available.