Newsletter

Central Church Newsletter
August 2025

With the holiday season upon us some of us will be planning our getaways either at home or abroad.  Parents with young children will be tearing their hair out trying to keep them occupied for six weeks while those that are struggling will be worried about how to feed their children without the security net of free school meals. Hopefully, there will be help on hand for all of them in some form or another.  Maybe we can do our little bit by upping our contributions to the food bank to include some treats for the children so they don’t miss out. Enjoy your summer whatever you may be doing.

Linda and Malcolm Johnson

SUMMER HOLIDAYS!

Dear Friends

I wonder what your first experiences of summer holidays were.  When I was a little boy, it was normally a fortnight on the Isle of Wight.  My father rented a cottage at Compton Bay on the wild west side of the island. In those days we didn’t have a car so we would travel to Lymington by steam train and then get the ferry across to Yarmouth. We didn’t take cases but packed all our holiday clothes, buckets and spades into a trunk which was delivered to the island in advance. We would go to Newport on the local bus to pick it up. This all sounds ridiculously complicated to modern ears but we had a wonderful time. We knew no different. The cottage was very basic with a loo at the bottom of the garden. We spent our fortnight on the beach collecting shells, or going for country walks collecting wild flowers.

Holidays have changed so much! Some of you will have memories of Trip, the annual holiday of the GWR works when families would be given free train rides to Weymouth, Bournemouth, Tenby, Newquay or Penzance. It must have been a huge logistical effort and slowly and surely with the decline of the GWR works Trip came to an end in the 1980s.

Holidays began their life as precisely that – they were holy days. Employees would work for the whole year apart from those few days of Christmas, Easter and occasional other saints’ days.  It wasn’t until 1939 that workers in this country had a legal right to paid holidays and for many people that was only a week.  By the 1970s it had normally grown to two weeks and, these days, most employees would have at least five weeks of paid holiday. How things have changed!

However, let’s stop for a moment and reflect on the importance of holidays.  We all need time to stop.  We need space to stand back from life and reflect; and amidst it all we need to give God time to speak with us.  Whether we are going away for a weekend or a world cruise, we need the opportunity to look at life from a different angle so that we can see our non-holiday life, our normal daily life, with new eyes.

Whether you are getting away on holiday this year or not, I pray that you will set aside some time to stop and reflect.  We all need our holy days to see life in a proper perspective.

God bless you this Summer.

Yours ever, in Christ

Revd Jonathan Edwards
Transitional Minister

Sunday Services at 10.30 a.m. unless otherwise stated.

Sunday services at 10.30 a.m.

  • 3 August:      Revd Roy Lowes
  • 10 August:    Revd Jonathan Edwards (Holy Communion)
  • 17 August:    Deacon Stephen Roe
  • 24 August:    Revd Jonathan Edwards (Holy Communion)
  • 31 August:    Revd Geoff Gleed

Dates for your diary, held at the Pilgrim Centre unless stated otherwise. (Please phone Jonathan on 07876 234264 if you need Barbara’s address.)

  • Monday 4 August:             Community Cafe, 10a.m. – 1 p.m. 
  • Tuesday 5 August:            Bible Study, 7.30 p.m. at Barbara’s
  • Monday 11 August:          Community Cafe, 10a.m. – 1 p.m. 
  • Thursday 14 August:          Bible Study, 2.30 p.m.
  • Monday 18 August:          Community Cafe, 10a.m. – 1 p.m. 
  • Tuesday 19 August:           Bible Study, 7.30 p.m. at Barbara’s
  • Monday 25 August:          Bank Holiday.  Community Cafe Closed
  • Thursday 28 August:          Bible Study, 2.30 p.m.

Harvest

Our Harvest Service will be held on 14 September and will be followed by a ‘Bring and Share’ lunch.

Thought for the Day – The smallest seed of faith is better than the largest fruit of happiness – Henry David Thoreau

Deadline for September newsletter – Tuesday 26th August 2025.