Dear People & Friends of St. Clements,
Happy New Year!
And may I also say, “Welcome back!” to the many of you who have been away over the Christmas & New Year period and either have arrived back in Prague or will be doing so this coming weekend.
Our services at St. Clement’s on Christmas Day & New Year’s Day could not have been more contrasting. On Christmas Day morning, we had an amazing congregation of about 110 people of whom only 20% were regular members of St. Clement’s. All the rest were visitors. Nearly all of them found us via our website which in the week before Christmas received 194 hits!
In contrast, on New Year’s Day morning. we had a congregation just of 27 people of whom only 3 were visitors.
As many of you will already know, the New Year weekend was also a very difficult one for Sybille & myself, culminating in our decision on Monday 2nd January, to have our dog Sam put to sleep because of him having developed some serious form of neurological disorder which would be impossible to treat or to find any cure. We are both most grateful for the prayers offered & the many message of support that we have received during this past week. I think we have replied individually to most people who have been in touch but may I also take this opportunity to say a collective “Thank you!” via this message.
Looking ahead to the coming week……
Sunday 8th January – First Sunday of Epiphany – 11.00 am Sung Eucharist
As the Church lectionary & calendar allow us to do, we shall be celebrating the Epiphany, the ‘manifestion’ or ‘showing forth’ of Jesus to the Gentiles, represented by the Wise Men as recorded in Matthew 2. 1-12. Of course officially, that celebration should be today 6th January, but as today is not a public holiday in the Czech Republic, I doubt if many of you would make it to a service even if I did try to hold one! There will be parallel Children’s Ministry and the service will be followed by Coffee Hour in the hall on the third floor of Klimentská 18.
Then on Sunday evening, I will be in Brno for the first of our regular monthly evening services there. I will once more celebrate Holy Communion at 6.00 pm in the Czechoslovak Hussite Church, Nové sady 32a, Brno. I would value your continued prayers for this venture as we seek to establish a satellite congregation in the second city of the Czech Republic. I’m most grateful to Jack Noonan who is going to accompany me down & back on the train & lead the intercessions. If anyone else wants to come then they are of course most welcome to do so. And if you have any English-speaking friends in the Brno area, please tell them about it. See our Brno webpage
Tuesday 10th January
As promised, our regular Midweek Fellowship & Discussion Group resumes on Tuesday evening. 6.30-8.00pm in the small meeting room on the first floor of Klimentská 18. Our first topic will be “The Devil Made Me Do It: Evil in the Life of Faith.” The evening will be led by Rev’d Dr Karen Moritz and as usual, there will be plenty of opportunity for questions and discussion of this interesting & sometimes perplexing issue.
Advance notice that on the following Tuesday 17th January, we will have a visiting speaker, Alexandr Flek, the Chairman of the Czech publisher Biblion. He will speak about the production of Bible 21, a modern Czech translation of the Bible & about all the issues that surround translating the original Hebrew and Greek texts into another language.
Three other things……
Christmas Cards – Thank you to everybody who bought our English-language Christmas cards to raise funds to support St. Clements. If you took Christmas cards to sell, please can you bring the proceeds to Church, together with any unsold packs of cards, and pass all to Steve Entwistle. If at all possible, please try and do this on this coming Sunday.
Practical help for the homeless – We now have two big red wheelie bins in Church in which we want to start collecting items that will be used to both clothe and feed the homeless in Prague.
For the Clothing Bin we need hats, gloves, scarves, socks, shoes/boots and underwear for both men & women. On the outside of the bin there is, in both pictures and words, a clear indication of the items required & not required. Of course the writing is in Czech, which means that I now know that spodní prádlo means ‘underwear’!
For the Food Bin we need tinned goods. Basically, any food item in a tin but NOT sauces, pasta, or other dried goods in packets or plastic bottles. Again, in pictures & words on the outside of the bin, there is a clear indication of what is & isn’t required.
When full, these bins will be collected by the Armáda spásy / Salvation Army and the contents used to help in their work with the homeless in Prague. The bins will be out at the back of Church this Sunday & each Sunday following. Here is a very practical way that we can show some form of social concern for the most vulnerable members of the society in which we live.
Supporting ICS who in turn support us – Don’t forget to save all the used postage stamps from the cards & parcels you received this Christmas. Cut them out carefully with about a 5mm border around the stamp. Then place them in the collecting envelope on the noticeboard at the back of Church. They will be forwarded by me to the UK where they will be sold to raise money for the Intercontinental Church Society who have supported St. Clement’s both financially & prayerfully since 2000. The only used stamps not required are standard British ones with just the Queen’s head which are worth very little because they are so common.
And a final note of thanks…..
……to everyone who used our Amazon link either on my Weekly Messages or via our website. At the end of December, we received our first payment of GBP 31.09 which at current exchange rates is about CZK 930. Not a great sum but it is money we otherwise wouldn’t have received. So please do continue to use the link if you are ordering anything from Amazon. Always first use the link before starting to put items into your ‘shopping cart’.
That’s more than enough for my first Weekly Message of 2012.
Best wishes
Ricky
