For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16
Dear All
Holy Week and Easter 2024
Thank you to everyone who helped to deliver the Easter cards to the homes in the neighbourhood of the church.
Thank you also to everyone who helped to make the Maundy Thursday evening meal so special and provided food and help in setting up and clearing away.
Easter Sunday – the service at 10 am will be an Easter Celebration Café Style service including baptisms. Do join us to celebrate the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ and rejoice with those being baptised.
On Easter Sunday afternoon we have the Easter Egg Hunt with Prettygate Bapiist Church. The hunt starts here at Plume Avenue Church at 2.30pm and finishes at the Baptist church with refreshments and crafts. It is open to all ages, especially families.
Colchester Foodbank
David writes “Thank you to everyone that supported our appeal for the Foodbank last week. I was able to take 66 kgs of provisions to the Foodbank centre on Tuesday for which they were very grateful. They are still very short of stocks, the lady that accepted our donations said that she had not seen it as bad in the six years that she had been volunteering there.
We will continue to take church donations each week and be open for collections between 10-11 am each Saturday”.
The items they particularly need are : Long life fruit juice, long life milk, fruit squash, tins of custard, rice pudding, veg, meat, fish, pasta sauce, tea bags (80 bags), jam/peanut butter, multipack snacks, small jars of coffee, nappies size 5 ,6,7 & 8, deodorant, shampoo, shaving gel, small washing powder/liquid and washing up liquid.
Vacancy Update
I am sure you will have heard by now that Mark Ambrose will be taking over as our Interim Moderator whilst David Sebley is on sabbatical. We are very grateful to Mark for this and also to David for all that he has done for us in so many ways since the start of the vacancy.
As you will also no doubt know, we have received an application from someone to be the next minister for Tiptree URC and ourselves. We will be interviewing the candidate on 11th May. We will be hosting most of the day here at Plume Avenue and we would ask everyone to avoid coming to the church on that day. After the interview the two leadership teams will pray and consider if we are to invite the candidate back to meet the churches for a weekend and preach with a view. The candidate themselves will also be given time to pray and discern if they want to continue with the process to potentially becoming our next minister.
Please pray for the process and all those involved that we might discern God’s will.
Holiday Club Planning
We have agreed to run a Summer Holiday Club on Mondays 29th July, 5th, 12th and 19th August from 9.45am to 12 noon. The holiday club will be open to all children who have attended school in the 2023/24 school year from reception to year 5. We especially need people to help with the children’s groups, run the sound desk, lead games, provide refreshments, make cakes and help in the café area. If you are able to help with this please do speak to Rachael. You don’t need to be available for all four dates. If you are volunteering to help with the children you will need a DBS check through the church which we can arrange if you don’t currently hold one. This is an exciting opportunity to share the good news about the Christian faith with these children so do give it prayerful consideration.
Eco Church
Eco Church is described as: “Eco Church is a learning community of churches of all shapes and sizes open to all denominations. It provides a framework to support your church and its leadership to take practical action on caring for God’s earth. It includes a toolkit of resources, an online award survey, quarterly email update, online events, and conferences. The Eco Church survey will help you ‘go green’ in all areas of your church life. The work you do will all count towards a Bronze, Silver or Gold Eco Church award hopefully, all three”.
We would like to register as a church and start work on the Bronze award. We need a group of people who will work together to do this for you. We have had a couple of names who would potentially like to be a part of team for this but would ideally like to have a few more. If you have a passion for how we need to protect and look after God’s earth, this will no doubt be something you would bring a lot to. Please do speak to Dave, Marie or myself so that we can put everyone in touch with each other to begin this piece of work.
This week
This week, there will be prayer meetings on Wednesday and Saturday morning at 9.30 am. Zoom details will be e-mailed early in the week.
Our normal weekly activities will be taking a break this week.
With love and blessings.
