October sees us celebrating harvest (and everyone at St Peter’s is welcome to the St Anne’s harvest supper on Saturday 13th October at 6.30pm!), which is many people\u2019s favourite festival of the church year.\u00a0 It\u2019s a relatively recent addition to the church calendar, being a Victorian invention.\u00a0 The inventors of the harvest festival were drawing on the Old\u00a0 Testament festival of \u2018first fruits\u2019, and perhaps also on the Mediaeval feast of \u2018Lammas\u2019 (a corruption of \u2018Loaf-Mass\u2019), which was celebrated near the first of August, at the wheat harvest, when the first grains of the year were milled into flour, baked into bread, and brought to church for a blessing.\u00a0 But the Victorians decided to celebrate harvest in the autumn, as fruit and vegetables put forth a last abundance before everything slows down for winter.<\/p>\n
Over the past few weeks, I\u2019ve been almost overwhelmed by the productivity of the vicarage garden – especially by the wonderful and slightly terrifying bounty of plums.\u00a0 Many jars of jam have been made, although I didn\u2019t entirely manage to keep up with the tree\u2019s production – it would have been nearly a full time job to do so!\u00a0 But I felt a responsibility to make as much use as I could of the fruit which God\u2019s had blessed me with. It\u2019s a blessing, but there were moments when I wasn\u2019t sure I wanted that blessing!<\/p>\n
God gives us abundantly of his love, in our creation and in our redemption and in the presence of his Spirit among us.\u00a0 I wonder, how often do we stop to dwell on this?\u00a0 And how do we respond?\u00a0 Of course, God\u2019s grace is a free gift – but it demands a response from us too, not because we need to earn God\u2019s love, but because we shouldn\u2019t waste the grace and love poured out on us.\u00a0 Sometimes, we might perhaps feel slightly overwhelmed by this.\u00a0 But God does not over-burden us – he calls us to live lives of faithful love, sharing that love with others.\u00a0 We\u2019re called to bear the fruits of love and holiness – and it\u2019s in doing that, that God\u2019s gift to us come to its full harvest of joy.<\/p>\n
This month will also see the launch of a six week study course that we\u2019re inviting people from across the benefice to participate in, called \u201cLifting the Lid.\u201d It aims to equip churches to support people affected by mental health issues.\u00a0 It\u2019s being held in Outwood church on Tuesday evenings.\u00a0 (Tuesday evenings at St Mary Magdalene church, Outwood at 7.30pm)\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n
As many of us have become increasingly aware, there are lots of people known to us who are going through hard times mentally; it\u2019s my prayer that this course will help us to offer a little bit of support. It\u2019s not just an us and them thing – some of us have dealt with or are dealing with the issue for ourselves, and this course should give us all a bit more insight into positive ways the church can make a difference.\u00a0 Blessings,<\/p>\n
Rev Joanne Kershaw, Priest at St Anne\u2019s, Wrenthorpe<\/i><\/p>\n
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October sees us celebrating harvest (and everyone at St Peter’s is welcome to the St Anne’s harvest supper on Saturday 13th October at 6.30pm!), which is many people\u2019s favourite festival of the church year.\u00a0 It\u2019s a relatively recent addition to the church calendar, being a Victorian invention.\u00a0 The inventors of the harvest festival were drawing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1005,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Phone_number(s)":"","email_address":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-letters","category-more-pages"],"mb":[],"mfb_rest_fields":["title"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1108"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1109,"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1108\/revisions\/1109"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nwbchurches.org.uk\/stanley\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}