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 […]
CHO Tots
Just a quick reminder that the baby and toddler group meets every Wednesday in term time from 10-11.30 am in St. Matthew’s church room. Everyone is welcome to come along.
Otterbourne Christmas Fair and Quiz night
The annual Christmas Fair will be held in Otterbourne Village Hall on 30th November from 12 noon until 3 pm. Further details will follow nearer the time. In the meantime, we would welcome donations of soft toys, bottles, cakes and festive chocolates. If you are willing to volunteer to help out on the day, please email the Administator at: administrator@chobenefice.co.uk
In the evening, there will be a quiz night with a ‘Fish and Chip’ supper starting at 7 pm.
Coffee morning
We will meet on Monday 7th October from 10-11.30 am in St. Matthew’s church room, Otterbourne. Come along for tea, coffee and cake. Everyone is welcome to join us. Any donations received from the morning will be sent to the Basics Bank.
Harvest Festival
We shall be holding our Harvest Festival services in all three churches in the benefice. The Family Communion service with Harvest at St. Matthew’s, Otterbourne will be held at 9.30am on Sunday 6th October and All Saints’, Compton will be joined by Compton School for the service at 11.00am. All Saints’, Hursley will be celebrating […]
ALL SOULS COMMEMORATION
On Sunday November 3rd at 6.00pm in St Matthew’s Church we will be holding our ALL SOULS Service when we remember and celebrate the lives of those we have lost and see no more.
It is a short informal and quiet service of reflection.
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’.
Harvest Songs of Praise
On Sunday 6th October at St Matthew’s we will be holding a SONGS OF PRAISE FOR HARVEST at 6.00pm and you are all very welcome to come and sing the popular Harvest hymns and share a glass of wine with us in the Church Room afterwards.
Our Rector will have retired by then, but it is very important that we continue to meet an worship together. We look forward to seeing you.
Farewell to William
On Sunday 29 th September, we will be holding a Benefice Service as a farewell toWilliam at 11am in St Matthew’s, Otterbourne. All are welcome to attend as wewish William well as he starts his retirement. Please stay on after the service fordrinks and nibbles.
Coffee morning
Our monthly coffee mornings will resume on Monday 16 th September from 10 – 11:30am. Everyone is welcome to join us in St Matthew’s church room. Come along for tea and coffee; cakesand biscuits. Any donations received ths month will be in aid of St Matthew’s Church.
Baby and Toddler Group
The benefice baby and toddler group will commence again between 10 –11:30am, on Wednesday 11th September. Babies and toddlers with parents,grand-parents or carers are all welcome. It is a chance for your children to play andlearn to socialise, while you have a hot drink and a chat. There will be a biscuit forthe children, along […]
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.