Compton – Sunday 14th June
There will be no service at All Saints’, Compton on 14th June due to the Compton 10k and Community Fete which is being organised by All Saints’ school.
Story Shop
Our next Story Shop will take place on Sunday 26th April at 4 pm. We will gather at All Saints’, Compton with cookies and a drink. Everyone will receive a warm welcome.
Welcome to Storyshop
On Sunday 25th January at 4 pm, we are inviting families to come to All Saints’ church, Compton and join a family-friendly gathering where children (and grown ups!) can unwind snuggle in and hear a bedtime story. Come just as you are – ready for bed is absolutely encouraged. Children can bring their favourite pillow, […]
Shrove Tuesday
Our children and young families are warmly invited to join us for a joyful Pancake Day gathering on Tuesday 17th February, with stories, crafts, and a great deal of floury enthusiasm. We will be gathering in Compton church, Compton Street. Further details to follow shortly.
Our churches
We would love to welcome all into our churches across the benefice and to prepare a place that you and your family feel wanted, safe and, most importantly, found. Take a look at our monthly service listing and join us at one of our services on offer.
Harvest Services
There will be services across the benefice to celebrate Harvest. Do come along and if you are new to the church, do make yourself known and please stay around for tea or coffee after the service. Services are as follows: Sunday 5th October: 9.30am Family Communion for Harvest @ Otterbourne: 11 am Service of the […]
Institution as Rector for the Rev’d Patrick Webb
It is with pleasure that we have formally welcomed Patrick and his family to the benefice. We hope they will have a very happy ministery with us and pray for them as they settle into our community. Patrick’s first service will be a Benefice service at Hursley on Sunday at 11 am. There will be […]
Vacancy update
We are still working with the Diocese to fill our Benefice vacancy. All three churches are involved in the process and we will provide further updates as soon as we are able.
Benefice vacancy
Following the retirement of William Prescott after sixteen years of service, the Benefice is currently without a rector. Services are continuing as usual, and we are grateful to lay readers and visiting clergy who are supporting us during this period. We must now follow the Church of England process to appoint a new incumbent. The […]
Morning Service for Trinity 16 2024 YrB p19
A radical following of the rule of God (which is what the translated phrase ‘the kingdom of God’ really means) will inevitable lead to risk a confrontation with human injustice and tyranny. In such a confrontation the disciple is inevitably going to suffer, examples can be seen in the news every day. You don’t need two pieces of wood to be crucified, and Jesus’ vision of humane government will not be won and kept without cost. Alexei Navalny is just one of many hundreds of crucified men and women of many religions and none who followed Jesus ‘on the way’.
Magazine letter September 2024
A Nebraska banker whose bank went into failure during the depression came home and told his wife that they were going to lose everything. She said, “what shall we do?” He replied, “maybe we should pray.” She said, “Has it come to that?”
Morning Service for Trinity 14 2024 YrB p17
Freedom – it’s all about freedom. Release from imprisonment, from behind the prison wall; freedom to love. The narrator of the section of the Song of Songs we heard this morning is inside her parent’s property, kept for safety’s sake, kept for the demands of propriety. Her parents will find her a match, they will decide who the appropriate suitors are to be. But she has other ideas – as does her beloved.
Morning Service for Trinity 13 2024 YrB p16
Our Old Testament reading today recalls the consecration of the Jerusalem Temple by King Solomon. The purpose of the Temple, at its best, was as a sacred place of God for all people. However, locating God in one place is problematic; God is both transcendent and imminent, beyond all things and close by.
Morning Service for Trinity 12 2024 YrB p15
It’s very physical this Christianity thing. Sometimes I like to pretend it’s all rather esoteric, and spiritual. But then we read something like that and we realise that Christianity is all about incarnation, about God alongside us… in this world and with this world – a part of this world.
Morning Service for Trinity 11 YrB p14
So we continue the story of David and it is not for the faint-hearted. Still, at least the rape of Tamar has been missed out, as has the successful beginning of the coup d’état staged by David’s third son Absalom. David is forced to run and his cause seems lost. Only through the loyalty of his “old guard” and with much slaughter is the kingdom won back.
Magazine letter for August 2024
The inadequacy of the disciples is a constant theme in Mark’s Gospel, their weakness of faith, their propensity to get the wrong end of the stick, their hope for power and eventually glory, their depressing similarity to the rest of us. And yet Jesus’ never gives up on them, even at the end when they have run away and left him to his fate, his resurrection message sent through the young man in white is addressed to them. “I am going ahead of you into Galilee, you will see me there” – business as usual, back to work, the daily work of living and proclaiming the gospel.
Morning Service for Trinity 10 2024
John’s crowd ask the wrong questions, they are looking for grapes on a gooseberry bush. They think they have seen a miracle, or heard of one, and they want more. Jesus must put them right. He doesn’t talk in physical terms, the physical is only there to reveal the spiritual. He talks in metaphor because there is no other language to use. The food of which he speaks stands for an experience which his hearers have not had and cannot understand.
Morning Service for Trinity 9 2024 YrB p12
There is an awful realism in the Hebrew Bible, it has very few heroes that do not have feet of clay. Or, put another way, its characters are portrayed as real people, not cardboard cut-out supermen. This is true even when it recounts the life of one of the most significant figures in Israel’s history.
Morning Service for Trinity 8 p11 YrB 2024
Today’s reading from St Mark’s Gospel is, at first sight, rather unspectacular. The most dramatic parts of this section of St Mark’s Gospel have been taken out, the feeding of the 5000, Jesus walking on water and the second stilling of a storm. All three of them are covered in next week’s Gospel reading in John’s version of events. But what we have left does have some interest, it’s full of movement if not action, there’s lots going on and it’s all rather evocative.
Morning Service for Trinity 7 2024
Politics – so much is about politics, the exercise of power – how those who have it legitimate their hold on it, and how those who don’t have it seek to win it. Nothing is outside the province of politics, especially anything that can affect the opinions and inclinations of the people.