Christian Aid

We are now planning to make Christian Aid the focus for our next First Sunday Thing at 10.30 a.m. on Sunday 2nd May. There is a lovely image in one of the set Bible readings for the day that God's new creation will be like 'a spring of fresh water welling up to eternal life', and this is the image we shall use.

Christian Aid Week follows in May, and people from St Michael's and St Nicolas' will be involved in the annual sponsored crossing of the Humber Bridge on Saturday 8th May and in door-to-door collecting in the week after.

We will be meeting in St Nicolas', Great Coates for this service on the first Sunday in May and on the first Sundays through the summer.

Planning for May and June

The group which plans each First Sunday Thing will be meeting in St Michael's at 10.00 a.m. on Saturday 17th April, and anyone is welcome to join in.

Good Friday

We will not have a First Sunday Thing on Sunday 4th April - it is Easter Day and we can't find a way to fit it in around the services of Easter Communion in each of our churches. But there will be the annual parish Good Friday Activity Morning from 9.45 until 12.15 on Friday 2nd April when St Michael's shoudl be full of people of all ages instead.

Prayer links

And here are some of the links in the prayer chain made at the last First Sunday Thing to link together the things for which members of the congregation wished to pray. It is still in St Michael's, and is still being used to prompt the prayers we offer there.

All Bishops

Everyone who came to the service yesterday had a chance to make a Bishop's hat for themselves, and a few of them wore theirs. Here are three of them.

Celebrating Edward King

Next weekend is a major celebration for the diocese of Lincoln with the centenary of the death of the holiest and most loved Bishop we have had in recent centuries. The Bishop King Learning Centre (our former Bishop Edward King Church) on the Willows is named after him.

The Archbishop of Canterbury will be at a huge service in the Cathedral on Saturday (to which a number of people from the parish are going) and he will be visiting other parts of the diocese over four days (including coming to Grimsby).

Our First Sunday Thing at 10.30 next Sunday will be our celebration in this parish, and we are putting together a trail to discover things about what made him such a special person that all this fuss is being made a hundred years after his death.

Weaving a rainbow

This is the operation under way yesterday. We were not thinking about Noah and the rainbow which signified God's promise to him. We were thinking about the rainbow over God's throne in the vision of heaven in Revelation.