Dear People of St. Clement’s,
I’m sorry that what is normally my Midweek Message has this week become my End-of-Week Message. There is a good reason for this in that I have been waiting to finalise details of the recording of the service for BBC Radio 4 celebrating Good King Wenceslas/Sv. Václav next Wednesday evening so I could pass these on to everybody via this message. Things only became clearer first thing this morning. The up-to-date details are below. However, before that, a reminder about our worship this coming Sunday.
This Sunday 21st November 2010 at 11am – Family Eucharist for the Sunday next before Advent/Christ the King.
This coming Sunday is the last Sunday of the Church’s Year – the following Sunday marks the beginning of Advent. The theme of our lectionary readings is Christ the King. Of course Christ’s kingship and his kingdom are very different to normal human expectations. The Gospel reading set for Sunday is Luke 23 v33-43 and recounts the events of the first Good Friday. It is the story of the penitent thief who asks Jesus to ‘remember me when you come into your Kingdom’. There will be no Sunday School so I intend to seek to make the service both ‘adult and child friendly’! There will be Coffee Hour following the service on the third floor of Klimentská 18.
Wednesday 24th November from 7pm – Recording a service for BBC Radio 4 celebrating Good King Wenceslas/Sv. Václav
As I wrote in detail in last week’s Midweek Message, I been asked by The Rev’d Canon Stephen Shipley, Senior Producer for BBC Religion & Ethics, to help with the recording of a 40 minute act of worship which is to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on the morning of Sunday 26th December – the Feast of St. Stephen the Martyr. This regular broadcast on Sunday morning each week on BBC Radio 4, attracts an audience of around 1.7 million listeners.
The idea is to base the service around the carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’ who as we all know, ‘looked out, on the Feast of Stephen’. Whilst we will have the musical support of the Czech choir Naši pěvci, we do still need a congregation to help sing two other carols in English, together with the Czech carol ‘Narodil se Kristus Pán’. I do now have the readers and intercessor that I asked for in last week’s message and I’m most grateful to them & to others who also volunteered.
As you will see from the heading of this piece, the time I need the congregation to be in Church is now 7pm (not 6pm as previously advised). Getting a schedule sorted out with radio technicians, the choir & their organist, the BBC producer etc., is what has delayed me writing & sending out this message. So please, I need as many congregational members as possible to be in Church at 7pm next Wednesday. Talking to Stephen Shipley the BBC producer, he thinks it shouldn’t take longer than one & half hours to complete the recording so you should be free to leave by 8.30pm.
Stephen Shipley was keen right from the outset of our discussions, that we have two different voices involved in leading the service as well as different readers and an intercessor. He was also quite keen that one of the voices be English spoken with a Czech accent with me speaking English with my British accent as the other voice. I’m sure many longer standing members of the congregation will be very pleased to know about the solution we have come up with. The other voice will be Rev’d Petra Hanova (now Rev’d Petra Elsmore), a Czech former member of the St. Clement’s congregation who went forward to train for ordained ministry in the Church of England. She is flying to Prague from her home in Liverpool, both to visit her family here as well as taking part in the recorded service. I’m sure all of you who knew Petra will enjoy meeting her once again.
I’m sure that recording this service will be both fascinating and fun, as well as providing good publicity to a wide English-speaking audience of the existence of St. Clement’s. Come & join us next Wednesday evening if you possibly can.
Forum
I’m very pleased to say that our Forum on www.anglican.cz has taken off. My thanks particularly to Gordon Truefit who has started the ball rolling with some interesting discussion around last Sunday’s reading from 2 Thessalonians 3. Therefore a reminder from our Webmaster Sybille, as to how the Forum works & how to be part of it.
The forum is located at http://susanaj10.sg-host.com//forum/ and consists of two parts. One is the publicly visible one, the one you see when you are not logged in. There is also a members only area available, that is only visible for members of St. Clement’s when they are logged in. The reason for setting it up like this is to a) provide basic information to guests whilst b) avoiding problems with spammers and maintaining a certain level of online security and privacy for everybody. To sign up go to http://susanaj10.sg-host.com//forum/index.php?action=register What happens next is that I will have to activate your account (that is in order to prevent spammers from posting) and then you are good to post. If I or Ricky ‘know’ your email address, you will be also get access to the members only area. If you are using an email during registration that is unknown to us, please drop us a note in order to achieve the same.
That’s all this week. I hope to see many of you both on Sunday & next Wednesday.
Best wishes
Ricky
