Thank you to everyone who helped to make the Christingle service such a wonderful occasion.

Did you know that every Wednesday morning we have a service at St George’s particularly aimed at parents with their babies and small children? 
All through the year we serve fresh coffee, tea, squash and biscuits (sometimes cake!) from 9am in the meeting room.  There are toys for children and its a chance for parents to have a chat and a catch up over a coffee.
At 9.30 we hold a very informal service in the kids corner of the church, where there are more toys as well as baby mats and colouring things for the children, musical instruments to play during the songs, and fruit for children during communion.  Its very low key, and very friendly.  Just …

Harvest Festival is on Sunday 7th October. 
Do come along to the family service at 9.30 where we give thanks for God’s good gifts and nature’s bounty.
If you would like to bring a harvest gift, we are requesting tinned, packet-ed or dried goods, rather than fresh produce, as all harvest donations are going to the Food Bank this year.
 

This week children are returning to school or starting for the first time, students are packing for university and families are getting back to ‘normal’.   And more generally the lull of the summer (or the child-entertainment-bootcamp, perhaps) is drawing to a close as a new term and year begins.
A group of about 30 or so from St George’s have just returned from a 4 day walking pilgrimage to Hereford Cathedral.  So for a few days, life took on a different sort of pattern.   We walked during the day and slept on church floors overnight.  Days began at 6am with tea, followed by breakfast and packing up, then a communion service before embarking on the …

The story is told of eleven-year-old Robert who hadn’t done his homework and wasn’t at all prepared for his written test in geography. He struggled through the exam, doing a lot more guessing than he should have. That evening he began to worry. What if too many of the answers had been wrong? What if he failed the test? That night, as he said his prayers, he suddenly blurted out a nervous postscript: ‘And please God, make Paris the capital of Sweden.’
Sometimes our prayers can be rather like this – we want results from God; we want God to sort things out for us and for others, and so although we know it is ridiculous to …

Last week was a busy week in the life of St George’s.  The church was filled with interactive prayer stations to celebrate the international week of prayer ‘Thy Kingdom Come’.  We had (amongst other things) a labyrinth, a sheepfold, a vine and a bread buffet complete with giant pretzel! 
The church was full of people too, it was open all day, every day, with visitors from other churches in the area coming to see what was going on, plus groups from Falkland School and parents and grandparents stopping by after school and preschool.  Lots of people came to visit who would not normally cross the threshold.
Each day at 2.30 the north transept was transformed into a …

A Reflection on Coming Home…
When I first came to live in Wash Common in June 1975, with Christopher and two small daughters, shopping meant a trip to Newbury or a visit to the Post Office store on Essex Street, the mostly pre-fabricated church hall was inclined to leak when the weather was wet, and St George’s church building was glorious in high summer, having been designed by an enthusiast for Italian architecture, but chilly for most of the year unless you sat tight up against one of the wall heaters, and even then your feet might freeze.

So Wash Common neighbourhood and church community became “home” for almost thirty years; the place where our family increased to …

Celebrate our wonderfully mysterious, dragon-slaying patron saint, St George, at our Patronal Evensong on Sunday 22nd April.

The history of St George is shrouded in legend, but the story goes that the fiesty young knight was riding through Libya when he encountered a fearsome beast living in a swamp on the outskirts of a city.  The beast, having eaten all the livestock in the vicinity, was requiring regular meals in the form of one city-dweller per day.  In order to keep the hungry beast from rampaging and helping itself, the citizens would draw lots to determine who should be sacrificed.
St George rode into the city on the day that the King’s daughter was about to be fed …

Our Lent Groups this year are using the national Church of England lent course ‘Let Your Light Shine’.
#LiveLent – Let Your Light Shine, takes you on a six week discipleship journey through the Gospel of John, exploring what it means to be a witness.
If you would like to join a lent group, its not too late, please contact Kathy Winrow via nurture@st-george-newbury.org.uk
Daily prayer guides are available from Kathy Winrow for £2 each.  These can be used alongside a lent group or independent of them.
 
 

John 1.43-52
Introduction: Season of Epiphany
Here we are at the beginning of a new year. The whole year lays before us, indeed the whole of the rest of our lives lay before us. There is a saying isn’t there, when contemplating change, about treating each day as the first day of the rest of my life. What do we want that to look like?
Sometimes, the decision is a difficult one. For some, life may have changed for the worse and there is a mourning for what has been lost. I acknowledge that. But for most of us there are aspects of our life we would like to change; things we would like to do, or know more …