Food, Song and Vocations

Revd. Canon Philip Ritchie & I before our Vocations Service

Jack & June with their sumptuous buffet

 Chapel End Savoy Players

We have had a busy but valuable weekend at St John's Seven Kings. Yesterday we had an excellent fundraising event featuring the Chapel End Savoy Singers performing a programme of songs from musicals and Gilbert & Sullivan and a sumptuous buffet prepared by church members Jack and June Weedon, both of which were greatly enjoyed by all who came. The event was ably organised once again by our Social & Fundraising committee.

Using our gifts and talents in the service of God and the mission of the church was our focus today in a Vocations Service organised as part of Stewardship Month at St Johns. Philip Ritchie, Lay Ministry Education Co-ordinator in the Diocese of Chelmsford, was our preacher and spoke about the sense of inadequacy that characterises those whom God often calls, using the final episode of Rev as an example having seen Tom Hollander at Greenbelt. Philip encouraged all of us to say yes to God's call in our lives despite our personal sense of inadequacy. We then gave our congregation the opportunity to explore ministry and volunteering opportunities in the Church and community with representatives of children's, lay, ordained and youth ministries in the Diocese, Christian Education Project, Downshall Pre-School Playgroup Trustees, Gideon's International, Redbridge Night Shelter, Redbridge Street Pastors, Redbridge Voluntary Care, SKNPRA, TASK, various workplace ministries, and various ministries at St Johns.

We prayed together: Lord, my God and my loving Father, You have made me to know You, to love You, to serve You, and thereby to find and to fulfil myself. I know that You are in all things, and that every path can lead me to You. But of them all, there is one especially by which You want me to come to You. Since I will do what You want of me, I pray You, send your Holy Spirit to me: into my mind, to show me what You want of me; into my heart, to give me the determination to do it, and to do it with all my love, with all my mind, and with all my strength right to the end. Amen.

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Larry Norman - I Am A Servant.