St. Mark’s Young People: 2015

This blog entry was originally posted by Fr Keith Hebden when he was our Associate Priest

Not just the ancient prayers and scriptures: this week St Mark’s Church, in the heart of Mansfield, have been using articles from the Chad to help them pray for the local area.

“Like all Churches, we regularly pray for the well being of our community,” said Revd Keith Hebden, “but at our all-age-led service we wanted to do something a bit different”.

Around 60 news articles and some obituaries were cut out from last weeks newspaper and shared out among the worshippers to discuss and to pray about: everything from fundraising events to violent crimes, to local politics got prayed for before the articles were placed in a large heart shape to represent God’s love for the world.

Picture: some of the young people at St Mark’s with ‘Chad Prayers’ placed at the altar table.

St Mark’s in the news: 2015

This blog entry was originally posted by Fr Keith Hebden when he was our Associate Priest

St Mark’s is in the news again. About six months ago, I was offered a monthly column in the Chad which I’ve used to highlight the work of some of the voluntary groups in the town but more recently particularly to talk about St Mark’s Church.

This month it was a column on our status as an Inclusive Church and what that might mean for us; this went into print last week.

This week we were back in the paper as members of the local Citizens UK alliance “Maun Valley Citizens”. It’s great to be able to celebrate our commitment to justice and God’s reign in the public square.

Thank you Joan! 2015

This blog entry was originally posted by Fr Keith Hebden when he was our Associate Priest

Today the young people at St Mark’s wanted to say a big thank you and ‘good bye’ to Joan Fletcher who has been leading their Sunday morning sessions for many years but has retired. They sneaked in to bake cakes on Saturday evening, ready to surprise her.

Here’s what Tristan, one of our young people, had to say:

“Joan is one of the nicest women I know. She is amazing, everything that she does is to perfection and the young people at St. Marks know how much and what she did for the St. Marks Young Lions, to have to say goodbye is something really hard for the Young Lions to do.

As a leader of a Youth Group at St. Marks I know how hard it is to try and get people to listen to you and how hard it is to try and organise trips and stuff, but Joan did it.

Every time Joan arranged something for the Young Lions you can almost certainly say it is going to work really well and that it is going to run smoothly.

Joan we all just want you to know how special you are to us, and that we will miss you very much. Your lessons always seemed to be fun and when there was a lesson that didn’t look that modern then you tried to change them to try and get the lesson so that we would enjoy it.”

Thanks Joan!