St. James' Church, Westgate & Garlinge may2001mag

(Note: For Services and other information see dedicated pages elsewhere on website)

Over the last year and more our nation has witnessed a series of major national problems and disasters. In particular there have been the high profile train crashes with significant loss of life. There has been drought followed by prolonged flooding, bringing misery to many thousands. In addition to this, the already hard-pressed farmers have had to face the problems brought by BSE and now the devastation of foot-and-mouth disease. How should we react to these things?

First of all, we would do well to remember that whatever we have faced, it is nothing compared to the problems besetting some other parts of the world, where famine, disease and loss of life through flooding are almost commonplace.

Secondly, the Bible teaches us that such natural disasters are warnings, making us stop and think. And so, we must be prepared to ask the right questions – in particular, what is God seeking to teach us through these things. Yet, these are precisely the questions the leaders in our nation seem unwilling and even incapable of asking. Only recently in the House of Commons, the Prime Minister refused to endorse the call for a national day of prayer, in response to the foot-and-mouth crisis. It has been claimed that "man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God as a working hypothesis". This is clearly what most of our national leaders believe, and, as a consequence they are not able to ask what God is doing at the present time.

Sadly, it also seems that many of our church leaders are either unable to voice awkward questions or have so little spiritual authority that no one listens when they speak.

On the face of it, we as a nation have much to be thankful for. There is considerable material prosperity – and when asked, many people consider themselves to be happy. But knowing the mind and will of God in Holy Scripture, there is much to be concerned about and ashamed about. We must as a nation give thought to God and His purposes. We must as Christians call people to repentance – to recognise that we have strayed from God’s ways and that the consequences of such rebellion are severe.

It is high time people began to ask where we are heading as a nation. It is time to ask what is God saying to us through the problems we have been facing. It is certainly time that we as a people repented of our godlessness and turned to God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. When Jesus was asked a question about the people on whom the tower of Siloam had fallen, he challenged his hearers with this sobering statement – "Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish"(Luke 13v5).

We extend our prayers and sympathy to the relatives and friends of those committed to God’s care:

Tapes of the sermons preached on Sunday mornings and evenings in April are available on request from Nigel Hadley (Tel: 831067) as usual.

THE INDUCTION OF THE REV J. CHEESEMAN, HOLY TRINITY CHURCH, EASTBOURNE, FRIDAY 29^TH JUNE 2001.

I would be most grateful if those who have booked a seat on the coach could confirm their commitment by letting me have their £6 either at the evening service or put in an envelope with your name, and given to Roger Clarke (Churchwarden) as soon as possible. Thank you.

The coach will leave St James’ Westgate at 11am with a "comfort" stop only on the way to Eastbourne. As the time of arrival will be approximately 1.45-2pm, I suggest a packed lunch is taken. The afternoon is free to paddle, take a swim, visit the shops etc.

The induction service is at 7.30pm and refreshments will be provided afterwards. The coach will then leave Eastbourne at 10pm sharp with no stops on the way home.

Grateful thanks to all who joined in the signing the protests at discrimination against Christian broadcasting first on behalf of United Christian Broadcasting and then the threat to Premier Christian Radio.

More than one person has found helpful UCB’s free copy of "Word for Today". If you wish to receive future free copies posted direct together with their prayer news letters, please contact me.

By the time you read this you or your head of household will most likely have filled in your Census return – 29^th April is Census Day! Every 10 years since 1801 an official census has been held in this country. Its form and length has altered over the years, the early ones were just the numbers in each household of the parish, with perhaps the name of the head. By 1851 more information was needed – marital status, occupation, place of birth and age. At the time of writing, I’ve no idea how many pages of questions we will have to answer this year!

1851 also saw the first and last Religious Census to be held in this country. Concerned about the growing population, especially in the towns, the Government decided it needed to know whether there was adequate provision for the entire population, should everybody decide to attend a religious service at the same time. The plan caused a great deal of controversy, both before and after the event. Many clergymen, especially in the Established church did not send in their returns, after all, low attendances could be seen as a criticism of themselves. It was alleged that some non-conformist ministers offered tea after the evening service in order to attract more people! It was Mothering Sunday and many people were away visiting their families, the weather was bad, it was the middle of lambing season – all these were criticisms as to why this particular census was not a good idea. It also asked for the number of attendances, not the number of people and therefore took no account of those who attended 2 or 3 times a day.

Clergymen were given a form (different ones for the Church of England and ‘other places of worship’) on which to record information about the age of the building, where it was situated, the number of sittings, how many were present at each service on that day and the average attendance over the last 12 months. More than two years after the Census, Horace Mann, the Government agent responsible for analysing the returns, reported that approximately half of the population attended a religious service on that day. Except in the large towns, most churches were of a suitable size for the population they served. In the towns, especially the slum areas, although there was insufficient seating for everybody, churches were half-empty. Overall the census results were of great concern to the authorities. Besides showing widespread non-attendance, it was obvious from the statistics that much the same proportion of the population attended a dissenting chapel as went to the established church. Indeed in some areas, such as Cornwall or the industrial towns, the Church of England was in the minority.

In Kent 24 different denominations were represented, with a total of 997 places of worship. Nearly half (479) were Church of England, about a quarter (260) were made up of the various Methodist connexions and a further tenth were Baptist (107). Although these figures show that there were more non-conformist places of worship, than for the Church of England, their chapels were usually smaller than parish churches. Within Kent, the number of ‘sittings’ i.e. space for a person, in the established church totalled 194,948, while for all other places of worship there were 107,535 sittings. At the time the population of the county was 615,766. (Remember this was the ‘old’ county, parts of which are now in Greater London).

An interesting point about Dissent in Kent is the number of small sects that flourished often in isolation. In fact there is a total of 24 un-named ‘Isolated Congregations’ in the returns. They must have been very small communities when one considers the size of some denominations that are named. Who were the ‘New Church’ with a single congregation of 70 in the Medway area? The French Protestant Church, listed in the Blean District was the smallest named congregation (30) in the county. I particularly like all the different names in the Methodist and Baptist connexions. What was an undefined Baptist and how different was General Baptist from a General Baptist New Connexion? Again, why were there so many different Methodist Groups? Did a Bible Christian worship differently from a Primitive Methodist? Also, another interesting fact is that Methodism saw itself as part of the Established Church, not as competition and, unlike the Old Dissent (i.e. Baptists), did not hold its meetings at the same time as church services. In fact, many Methodists attended both the parish church and Methodist meetings.

In 1851, Margate was one of ten towns in the county with a population of over 10,000 and was one of three where attendances at non-conformist places of worship out-numbered those in the Established Church. The Roman Catholic chapel had been ‘erected principally for the benefit of visitors’ and had only 150 seats compared to the church in Ramsgate with 500. The churches and chapels listed for Margate are as follows (with sittings) – St Johns (1250), Holy Trinity (2000), Independents (360), General Baptists (710), Society of Friends (90), Independent Calvinists (30), Wesleyan Methodists Hawley Square (1200), Wesleyan Methodists, Garlinge (150), Wesleyan Methodists, Northdown (40), Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion (650), Roman Catholic (150). Attendances for morning services varied greatly from 922 at St John’s to nil at Garlinge Methodist! They did have Sunday School and a total of over 100 attended in the afternoon and evening. Hawley Square Methodist attracted 467 in the morning, 117 in the afternoon and 422 in the evening, while only 8 Quakers attended their Meeting House.

It is interesting to note that of these 11 places of worship, Holy Trinity was destroyed by enemy action in 2^nd World War, the Methodist Church in Hawley Square is unused and that in the Northdown Road is now Greek Orthodox. Does anyone know where the Quakers met, or the site of the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion chapel?

In conclusion, the figures show that in the major towns of Kent attendance at a place of worship was reasonably high when compared with the national average, although buildings were not full. What would a similar survey show today?

As I am saving to go away again in late August/early September, this time for an initial 3 months, then hopefully a lot longer depending on the granting of a work permit, I thought it may be of passing interest to a few of you what I got up to through late July and August last summer in Tanzania, East Africa.

For some time now, I have been debating whether or not I want to be working abroad helping people less fortunate than ourselves in extremely deprived areas of the globe. When the chance to spend nearly a month in one such area arose, through the Church Mission Society, I jumped at it, viewing the opportunity as a potential stepping stone to my future.

I flew from London (Heathrow) via Entebbe, Uganda (to refuel) to Dar es Saleem, Tanzania where I waited at the airport for an internal flight to Kilimanjaro International Airport. From there it was a cramped bus ride to Arusha, my home for the first week.

Arusha, according to those in the know, is considered to be a typical African city. It has one main street on which you find beggars, madmen – high on drugs, a huge amount of "in-your-face" poverty, a number of Masai men, batik salesmen and mobile street traders tempting to con the odd tourist. There is an overpowering stench everywhere of human waste lying in the street with nowhere to go. This smell increases significantly as you turn off the main street and enter the slums. Here AIDS is rife affecting 4 out of 10 women, children play in and around their own bodily waste. They live and die in absolute squalor.

I am reliably informed that in the wet season the whole area is buried, knee-deep in mud – luckily our CMS group arrived when the sun was shining. We were working in and around the people mentioned above through teaching in schools, farming and a number of outreach projects within the community organised through the local church and their ‘youth’ (the name given to younger members of the church ranging up to the age of about 35-40). We were to become extremely good friends with the youth of Christ Church, Arusha over the next week sharing in our cross – cultural experiences of God and His Church. I believe our CMS group all learnt a lot from these African Christians. The initial belief "we’re here to help" was rapidly replaced by "we’re here to learn".

These people’s lives were intensely centred around God from the moment they woke up to their eventual sleep. How often do we forget God in the rapidly moving pace of our daily lives through the hustle and bustle of our work?

Before I forget, I cannot neglect to mention that there are two types of time in Tanzania – normal time, by the watch and time according to when the sunrises. For example, 6am sunrise = 7am is one o’clock. So you much check which system you are using for meetings – I say this but in reality, time is of little consequence in Tanzania. Often I had agreed a definite meeting time with my Kiswahili speaking, East African brothers and sisters only to arrive on time and wait four or more hours for them to show up. By the end of my first week, I had settled in beautifully with African culture. I removed my watch, put on some baggy clothes, and walked around at a snail’s pace, showing my face at meetings fashionably late by three hours, only to discover that I was one of the first to arrive!

If I make the African lifestyle sound easy-going, I don’t mean to. It is anything but.

The people I encountered on my travels laboured extremely hard for little, if any reward. A Christian friend of mine named Hope worked fifty hours a week as a waiter in a posh Indian restaurant for £8.50. Admittedly, this could get you further in Tanzania than in Great Britain, but the point remains – people slave away, day in, day out, fifty two weeks of the year just to put food on the table and provide a shelter against the rain during the wet season.

On countless occasions, I witnessed extended families of up to ten people, sheltering underneath corrugated iron/wooden sheds with little or no protection from the elements.

Christ Church serves its community in a positive, pro-active, hands-on manner. Sunday has the usual mix of services except that there would seem to be more of them, and they would go on for much longer; there is no consistent length of service. They will finish when they are good and ready. I arrived at 8am to find people already worshipping, paused at 11am for two minutes, for a change of language (Kiswahili to traditional Anglican service using Mission Praise), then continued until 2pm.

As money was scarce, people would bring other items for the collection to be auctioned off to the highest bidder immediately after the service outside the Church – cakes, live chickens etc. It made me think long and hard about what I give to God and at the same time, keep for myself. In Western society everything appears to revolve around the individual – selfish thoughts and feelings, selfish actions. We are so caught up in our own little worlds that we lose sight of what is really important.

Here is a man who has not much more than the shirt on his back producing a chicken for the Church. That, as yet uncooked, bit of poultry represented all that he could offer without walking home semi-naked. People who had practically nothing would delight in giving everything to God, putting themselves totally at His mercy. Just imagine people turning up at Church on Sunday and allowing their brand new car to be auctioned with the proceeds going to the Church, or flogging off the big house in favour of the minimum flat which is more than adequate for their needs with the remaining cash being distributed amongst those less fortunate than themselves.

In this respect, I believe we have a lot to learn from our Christian brothers and sisters in Africa.

You may well be thinking, "but it’s easier to part with everything when you have nothing in the first place". You could be right, but it may also be said that you cherish what little you have that much more. These people also give up most of their free time in the service of God within their community – the slums, helping in schools, AIDS victims, comforting, work with drug abusers etc.

How often do we see people moping around feeling sorry for themselves over such petty, trivial issues. Out in Tanzania, I encountered countless hundreds of parentless children, plagued by AIDS, starving and homeless, and adults with similar ailments, all smiling cheerfully safe in the knowledge that "if God is for us, who can be against us?" Roms 8:31. It is extremely difficult not to be touched by the joy and happiness emanating from these humble people. They were true believers in my father’s favourite verse in Romans 8:28. To be continued in next month’s magazine!

It is becoming increasingly difficult to find the words to express our amazement and thanks to God for the continued success of the Saturday Shop. On a relatively quiet morning, the Saturday Shop in April somehow managed to dredge up the magnificent total of £233 – a truly wondrous result. Thanks as ever to Anne and all her helpers.

The May Saturday Shop includes our annual plant and vegetable sale – an ideal opportunity to get your gardens off to a flying start for the summer.

John and Joy’s last Sunday with us will be the 17^th June followed later in the week by a Farewell Barbecue on Wednesday 20^th June in the Church grounds. More details next month.

JESUS SAID: "Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces." Matt ch.7v6.

Notes to the Meeting of the 2000/01 PCC of St James’ Church, Westgate and Garlinge held at the Church Centre on Tuesday 27^th February 2001 (Note this info available in printed magazine only - Web Ed)

On the evening of March 21^st our Christian Encounter meeting was especially interesting – after a delicious meal of chicken and apple tart, John conducted a ‘Face to Face’ with three members of our congregation! Each person had questions on their faith and how they became faithful Christians not just Church Attenders!

Melanie Rudzki was the first to be interviewed – she is a young French girl who has been in the Parish since June doing an au pair job to improve her English. Melanie had not been to church very much before coming here and it had had little impact. John asked her what had drawn her to a positive belief and she said she was first attracted to the fellowship between us all at John & Joy’s barbecue last year, and then Joy urged John to seek her out. After many books and talks Melanie came subsequently to Church and to prayer – one day on walking down to the beach she had a certainty of God’s love and as she said "everything seems better and brighter and the world was a better place." We are thankful that a visitor (now a friend) has found a faith which I pray will last all her days.

Christine Hammond grew up in a Christian family but found herself rather rebellious in her teenage years. However she qualified as a teacher and taught in America and eventually with a Missionary Society in the Philippines, where she worked for about four years, during which she had a motorcycle accident and damaged her hand badly. After much faith and prayer she was able eventually to play her beloved piano again (and the organ as we have heard). Eventually Christine came home and met Gita who was leaving Margate and her position at Clarendon House Ramsgate. God’s timing was, as always, just right, and Christine was offered the teaching job that Gita was relinquishing. So now she is able to do work with our young adults and is a blessing to those who are striving to show a living faith to our young people. Thank you Christine that you are happy to be used!

Pat Bailey has had a very interesting life with visits to many countries – none more so than her stay in the Philippines where she saw an exuberant form of Christianity – so many loud and joyful prayers that she asked for some for herself as she felt she needed more assurance in her life.

When Pat got home after that experience she knew she must seek God, and she found her spiritual home at St Mark’s Ramsgate where the Vicar and his wife were a means of helping her to find faith and peace in her heart. After a time of illness, Pat was guided to Westgate and eventually to us where she has proved herself to be a blessing, taking part in the Home Group at Hazel’s and speaking at the Friendship Club etc.

When she was asked if she would like to go to Israel, she made up her mind quickly (as is her wont!) and joined John and many others from St James – there she got to know people in a deeper way and she said it was a great experience. Thank you Pat for sharing your life and times with us – it was very uplifting.

Tuesday	1st	7.30pm	Summer Fete Meeting, Church Centre
Wednesday	2nd	10.15am	Home Bible study group
		7.30pm	Home Bible study group
		8.00pm	Home Bible study group
Thursday	3rd	10.15am	Parent & Toddlers, Church centre
		2.00pm	Dandelyon Patchers, Church Centre.
		7.30pm	Home Bible study group
Friday	4th	1.30pm	Prayer meeting, 2, Westleigh Rd, Westgate
SUNDAY	6th	8.00am	The Lords Supper
		10.30am	Morning Worship with the Lords Supper
		6.30pm	Evening Service
Monday	7th	Note	Bank holiday - No prayer meeting
Tuesday	8th	8.00pm	PCC Meeting Church Centre
Wednesday	9th	7.15pm	Prayer meeting choir vestry
		8.00pm	Bible study, Church centre
		8.00pm	Home Bible study group - Lesley Mayes only
Thursday	10th	10.15am	Parents & Toddlers, Church centre.
Friday	11th	1.30pm	Prayer meeting, 2, Westleigh Rd, Westgate
Saturday	12th	10.00am	Saturday Shop, St James' Church Hall, Garlinge
SUNDAY	13th	8.00am	The Lords Supper
		10.30am	Morning worship
		6.30pm	Evening Service
Monday	14th	7.00am	Prayer meeting, Choir vestry
Wednesday	16th	7.15pm	Prayer meeting, Choir vestry
Thursday	17th	10.15am	Parent & Toddlers Church centre
		2.00pm	Dandylyon Patchers, Church Centre.
		7.30pm	Archdeacons visitation, Canterbury Cathedral
Friday	18th	1.30pm	Prayer meeting, 2, Westleigh Rd, Westgate
SUNDAY	20th	8.00am	The Lord's Supper
		10.30am	Family Service
		6.30pm	Evening Service with The Lords Supper
Monday	21st	7.00am	Prayer meeting, Choir vestry
		2.30pm	Friendship Club'Hi' Kent Resources (Reg Charity) Church Centre
		7-10pm	Half Night of Prayer, Church Centre.
Tuesday	22nd	7.30pm	Youth Leaders meeting, 7, Meadow Road
Wednesday	23rd	8.00pm	Christian Encounter, "The Best Offer in Town" John Pritchard, Archdeacon of Canterbury, Church Centre.
Thursday	24th	10.15am	Parents & Toddlers, Church Centre
Ascension Day		8.00pm	The Lords Supper
Friday	25th	1.30pm	Prayer meeting, 2, Westleigh Rd, Westgate
SUNDAY	27th	8.00pm	The Lords Supper
		10.30am	Morning Worship
		6.30pm	Evening Service
Monday	28th	Note	Bank Holiday, No Prayer Meeting
Wednesday	30th	7.15pm	Prayer meeting, Choir vestry
		8.00pm	Bible study, Church centre
Thursday	31st	Note	Half Term- No Parent & Toddlers

Please note that on Monday 21^st May there will be a half night of prayer in the Church Centre from 7.00pm to 10.00pm. This will be an opportunity to pray for the appointment of our new Vicar as well as to give thanks for the many answers to prayer, not least the progress which has been made by Catriona and Lydia. As a guideline, the meeting will be split into 6 sessions of 30 minutes each. Please feel free to come and go as you wish.

On Wednesday 23^rd May, we shall welcome as our speaker to the Christian Encounter meeting the Archdeacon of Canterbury, John Pritchard. His subject is "The Best Offer in Town" Obviously one not to be missed so bring your friends and neighbours!

Churchwardens, Sidespersons and members of the PCC are reminded that the Archdeacon’s Visitation will be held on Thursday 17^th May at 7.30pm in Canterbury Cathedral.