Once more, this has become an End-of-Week Message rather than one of the Midweek variety. I shall try to get back to the middle of the week, next week.
This Sunday 24th January at 11am – Sung Eucharist for the Third Sunday of Epiphany
Our Gospel Reading this Sunday tells of Jesus’ first sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth. You’ll find it in Luke 4 v14-21 which you might like to read yourselves before coming to worship. There will be Sunday School this Sunday, led by Sue Anderson and Coffee Hour following-on after the service in Klimentská 18.
Sunday 31st January at 11am – Sung Eucharist for the Feast of Presentation of Christ in the Temple
Strictly speaking, we should mark the Feast of Presentation or Candlemas, on 2nd February, forty days after Christmas Day. But I doubt if that many of you would choose to turn out on a cold dark Tuesday evening in February! Therefore, we are allowed to celebrate it two days early. The service will recall the events described by Luke in Luke 2 v22-40, when Jesus was presented back to God in the temple and his mother Mary received the rite of purification.
On Sunday 31st January, our preacher will be our Archdeacon Patrick Curran from Vienna. Patrick has the extremely difficult job of combining being Chaplain to the Vienna Anglican Chaplaincy with also being Archdeacon of the Eastern Archdeaconry of the Anglican Diocese in Europe. He tries to visit each of the Chaplaincies in the Archdeaconry, once every three years. He was last with us on Tuesday 28th October 2008 for my licensing, but this will be his first Sunday visit since the time of my predecessor, John Philpott. There will be a Soup & Sandwich Shared Lunch following the service, giving people the opportunity to meet Archdeacon Patrick. More details on about the lunch this coming Sunday & in next week’s Midweek Message.
Can you help?
I mentioned in last week’s message, our need for one or two more people to offer help with teaching in our Sunday School. That need still exists! If you would like to know more about what is involved, the teaching materials we use etc, then please speak with me or with Veronika Newkirk.
You will also know from our weekly bulletin and from our website www.anglican.cz , that we have a Prayer Chain of people willing to pray for any issue of concern that individuals might have. These days, the membership of the Prayer Chain has become rather small. I would welcome to add to the Prayer Chain anyone who would be willing to commit themselves to regular prayer and able to be completely confidential. If you would be willing help in this important work, please speak with me.
Chaplaincy Finances
At their meeting last Sunday, your Church Council was able to look at the draft accounts for the year 2009, thanks to some very quick work by our Treasurer Peter Broster. As you will know from the statement that appears on the back of the weekly Bulletin, it costs about 25,000 Kč per week to run St. Clements, or 1,300,000 Kč per year. The good news is that it cost slightly less than that in 2009 – to be precise 24,700 Kč per week or 1,288,000 per year.
However, the bad news is that we only got in 18,600 Kč per week in 2009, or 975,500 Kč for the whole year. This is a considerable improvement on the 2008 figure being up by 3,325 Kč per week or 173,000 Kč for the whole year. But it still left us with a shortfall of 312,500 Kč which has further eaten into our reserves.
Putting all of this into simple terms, in order to break even in 2010, we need to increase our weekly income by just over 6,000 Kč per week. If we fail to do this, then by the end of 2010, there will be no reserves and the Chaplaincy will no longer be able to function in its present form.
Due to this ongoing deficit, your Church Council has decided that it will review our financial situation in six months time, to consider necessary emergency measures. The only one that is really open to us is to sell the Chaplaincy Flat and realise our only asset. This would be a very drastic backward step but, unless we increase our income, then it may well be one that we are forced to take.
Your Church Council will write more formerly about all of this in due course but they were keen that the seriousness of our situation be made known now rather than waiting to the Annual Meeting which is provisionally scheduled for Sunday 14th March. However, particularly if you are relatively new to St. Clement’s and do not currently give either by regular standing order from your bank account or through the dated envelope scheme, please act now. The details you need to set up a standing order are;
Please make your standing order payable to the Volksbank Account Number 4030019472/6800 in the name of Farní obec Starokatolické církve pro věřící anglického jazyka v Praze and put your name in the message field so the Treasurer can identify your payments for tax purposes if you are a Czech taxpayer.
If you would like a set of dated stewardship envelopes which you can place in the collection basket each Sunday, then please speak with me at Church on any Sunday as we still have several sets for the current year sitting in the vestry.
I leave you with one other thought which came out of our discussions at last week’s Church Council meeting. We agreed that it would be so much easier to raise the necessary money that it costs to run St. Clements, if we had twenty more regular worshippers. There would be very little increase in costs and the burden would be more widely shared. Therefore, who do you know who might happily start worshipping at St. Clements if you only invited them? In this respect, may I thank several of you who did respond to my challenge in December and brought a friend or relative to the Carol Service. Why not try inviting them to come regularly on Sunday too?
Finally……
Thank you to everybody who has replied to say they will be attending our ‘100th Birthday Party’ on the evening of Friday 26th February. Thank you too, to the small number of people who have advised that they can’t attend because of previous commitments. But that still leaves a large number who haven’t responded either way. We are currently sorting out a venue but it would help to know more clearly the numbers we are looking at. Someone did say to us recently that they weren’t sure if they were invited. Why that should be left both Sybille & I completely mystified. Our invitation is to everyone at St. Clements. Just hit the reply button to let us know.
Best wishes
Ricky
