Vicars letter

November 2021

Click for the Vicars letter from October 2021

Let's help normality get the better of madness

Another little bit of normality has returned to the village: an incredibly joyful village fete in support of St George’s and a lovely Harvest Festival with a beautifully decorated church. We could not have been blessed with any better weather than we had on the day of the fete and the number of people that turned out was amazing. The feel of the event was just wonderful; just seeing people having fun together as families and with friends made all the hard work so worthwhile. So I add to Tracy Claridge’s words of thanks elsewhere in the magazine to everyone involved, and say thank you to Tracy for all his efforts in making this a great community event.

We were also blessed by receiving a wonderful amount of food donations from the primary school and the church-family for the harvest service. All of the food has been passed on to Nourish in Tunbridge Wells to support local families, and we will be continuing this community support by collecting for Nourish throughout the year, not just at harvest time, as the need is there all year round.

Another bit of normality returning is in the church service pattern. From the beginning of November we will be returning to an 8am Communion service at St George’s every Sunday, and a 10am service at St George’s every Sunday. We will also be reintroducing the monthly choral evensong service - at 5pm on the first Sunday of the month - which will begin in January. We are also planning for a normal Advent and Christmas this year, with carol services, crib service, and a ‘midnight’ service (all of this, of course, subject to any Government restrictions and also local Covid rates). I am also thinking about how we can ‘do church and be church’ in a more effective way for young families. If you have ideas that you’d like to share, please, please get in touch with me.

There are the good things of normality slowly returning, but there has also been the madness of the bow-and-arrow attack in Norway killing five innocent people; and the killing of an MP, David Amess, in a knife attack as he undertook his constituency work of serving others. A decent man simply holding a face-to-face surgery, in a church, to try to help people in need. What has gone wrong within society that things like this happen? The time has come to stop thinking, ‘I can’t do anything about this sort of thing’. We can all play our part. We can all play a part in our society, in our local community, by modelling tolerance and respect of other people. We can all live life valuing all human life, valuing our planet, valuing one another, valuing our community. Let’s get back to the normality of this way of living, and away from the madness of being so self-centred that we end up permanently damaging the society in which we live.

Revd David Commander, Rector

T: 01580 240658 E: david@dc-uk.co.uk