Bible Readings
The bible readings for the week beginning 10th August are: Isaiah 1:1, 10-20, Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16, Luke 12:32-40
Vacancy update
We are delighted to announce the appointment of our new rector. Rev. Patrick (Patch) Webb To be appointed Rector of Compton, Hursley and Otterbourne Patrick Webb grew up in the New Forest, Hampshire. He initially trained as an A-level Sociology tutorbefore becoming the youth leader at his family church in Lyndhurst, where he married Verity-Rose […]
Vacancy update
The advertisement for our vacancy has now been published in ‘The Church Times‘. The closing date for applications is 5th February at 12 noon with interviews scheduled for 25th-26th February. Please continue to pray for everyone involved, who is working hard, so that we will be successful in our search for a suitable candidate to […]
Magazine letter for July 2024
The historically literal reading, or misreading, of this creation story has overwhelmed the subtleties of the original and its careful placing after the account of the first seven days. It is only within the context of God’s good creation of all things that this story of mankind’s place can be understood.
Magazine letter for June 2024
We make up our minds about something and often we only change them with great reluctance. Our present opinions are shaped by our past opinions, what we think now, we so often thought then.
Magazine letter May 2024
May 26th is Trinity Sunday, not a festival many will be marking I fear. It lacks the fairy lights of Christmas or the chocolate of Easter. But in its way it is a significant day, marking the contribution of Christianity to mankind’s understanding of the nature of God; not a topic now of general conversation, but it was not always so.
Magazine letter April 2024
‘Then they went out and ran from the tomb, for terror and bewilderment had seized them. And they said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.’ Mark 16.1-8. So ends the Gospel of Mark, to many a short and unsatisfying end to the Gospel – the Greek even ends on a preposition (very bad Greek!). Several other later endings were added by other hands but Mark’s true account ends here with the women too afraid to speak of what they saw.
Magazine letter March 2024
We are a good way into Lent by now, our 40 days of fasting, or what passes for fasting these days, usually the giving up of some self-destructive habit, like sugar in your tea or chocolate biscuits. All very useful but hardly a wilderness experience! I suppose we’ve lost our sense of urgency in the conduct of our spiritual lives, we don’t generally tend to think in terms of ‘doing battle with our lower natures.’ Such language belongs to an age of hand to hand combat.
Magazine letter February 2024
In our increasingly secular world any kind of ‘organised religion’ is regarded as something strange and peculiar. People instead claim to be ‘spiritual’. Which rather sounds to me like claiming to be able to swim without getting wet! Religion is the embodiment of spirituality, it is what gives it shape and purpose, and allows the experience of generations to be shared and learned from.
January Magazine Letter
This poem by Al Zolynas seems appropriate when there is so much to cause us concern this new year, from the ever present threat of global warming to the dreadful wars in both Israel and Ukraine, not to mention the endless conflict in Iraq and Yemen.
Magazine Letter for December 2023
December 3rd is Advent Sunday. The season of Advent is all about waiting. But there is more than one sort of waiting – there is the kind of waiting when you know something’s going to happen and you know when it’s going to happen. Like Christmas, we all know when it is so we know how long we have to wait; and there are things that you wait for that you don’t know quite when they going to happen just that they will. Like catching the ball, you know that someone’s going to throw it to you, but you don’t know quite when so you have to stay ready, just in case – fielding in cricket is exactly like that. And we all know that life is like a game of cricket.
Magazine letter November 2023
I write this on 19th October, given the need for submission deadlines it has to be rather ahead of publication date. Usually such a lead time would be no difficulty, none of our three parish magazines is designed to convey national, let alone international news – and certainly not the Rector’s letter. Yet as the world stands at the moment I can’t help thinking that the context of all our thoughts is desperately subject to change in disturbing ways.
October 2023 Magazine letter
There is a parable that could have been written specially for a post-Covid church. It goes…
‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”‘
Magazine letter for September 2023
There are many opinions on prayer, but long gone is the idea that it matters what the proper physical attitude is. In fact, it is probably true that prayer is little thought of at all, even by those who do it! We who do pray tend not to think too much about the why or the how, we pray because we pray, for us to stop praying would be like removing a leg from a three-legged stool. Do we get answers to our prayers? It would be impossible to say empirically, but then it is not at all about getting answers.
Magazine letter for August 2023
This is the month of the great British get-a-way. The children have broken up and the family holidays begin. Whether it is to accompany a long flight, or for something to do by the poolside – many of us will take a novel to accompany our travels. I love stories, I can’t get enough of them – short stories, long stories, stories with a moral, stories without a moral, stories on the radio, stories on television, stories in a book. I don’t think I’m alone, human beings just respond to stories, made-up sequences of events, made-up characters, pure invention or supposed reality, it doesn’t really much matter, we just like stories.
Magazine letter July 2023
Despite being in midsummer there are many reasons to be feeling low. You only have to listen to the news to become depressed about the state of the world and the nature of mankind. Psalm 77, for example, makes that very clear, but also suggests a remedy. Read it for yourself, it’s not long – just type Psalm 77 into Google if you haven’t a Bible to hand.
Magazine letter June 2023
As I write, parts of northern Italy have been struggling under almost unprecedented levels of floodwater. We can recall the appalling floods in Pakistan last year, and in other places across the world in recent years.
May Magazine Letter 2023
Easter has long passed by the time you read this, but the church has not done with it so quickly. The chocolate eggs may be just a sweet memory, but there is an endless amount of thinking that will happen before we stop calling the Sundays after Easter ‘Sundays after Easter’. Death and resurrection are all around us, we so often see the former, but we sometimes need to be reminded of the latter.
Magazine letter April 2023
Holy Week – Easter is not a one off event, it is not like Christmas, it is inseparable from what went before. The services of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday are an essential part of what makes Easter so special. Without any one of them the story is incomplete.
Magazine letter for March 2023
The earthquake in Turkey and North Syria has stopped us in our tracks. So many of the worries and concerns we have suddenly seem so small in comparison to the plight of the many people who have lost everything and who just don’t know where to start to bury their dead, let alone begin the process of rebuilding their lives.