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SUNDAY SERVICES - 28TH NOVEMBER 2021 - ADVENT SUNDAY

Ashcroft Church will be having a face-to-face service in the church building tomorrow at 10.30am, this week led by Ann Pearce. I intend to be there. The service will usually be streamed live via the church website and our Facebook page, and a recording of it will be available online thereafter too.

If you wish to attend any service in person, you no longer need to book by phone as you did previously, and can just turn up on the day. Covid restrictions will apply when you attend, including wearing a face mask unless you are exempt.

The Circuit will continue to provide the weekly “Worship at Home” online service via YouTube and Facebook for those who cannot attend in person nor access an individual church’s service online. It should normally be available on the Gloucestershire Methodist Circuit Facebook page from about 8am tomorrow. This week’s service is led by Rev Rachel Leather, and the order of service is already available at https://www.gloucestershiremethodist.org.uk/doc/D614064.pdf.

Every blessing, Andy Rickell, Chair of Trustees

Read the Bible, and it is clear that God intends the perfect world to be one in which women and men, girls and boys, female and male, are equal. The Bible also makes it clear that the reason why in this imperfect world, men dominate, is because of human failure to live up to God’s wishes. So trying to work towards true equality between the genders is an important part of what God calls us to do, to repent, to live life God’s way. And because we all have a gender, we all have an agenda about how we live alongside one another, so the debate can get quite heated about what equality looks like. This article reports on an unfortunate MP who entered the minefield of this issue without a sensitive footfall nor a metal detector, with the inevitable result, standing on a number of mines. We know that to get from the traditional inequality between the sexes to equality, things need to change, and in some cases quite fundamentally, because the relationship between the sexes is such a central part of what it is to be human. Successfully negotiating this change is not going to be easy, either in our heads or in our hearts, but God always calls us to work towards the perfect, however difficult it might be. Both women and men have to learn a new way to be themselves, not rejecting their gender identities but embracing them positively, within a new thinking. It does mean though rejecting lots of the old thinking that particularly forced women into lower status than men, and which pushed both women and men, but particularly men as a group, to forms of behaviour which utterly undermine the image of God in which we are all made. That does mean that there need to be new role models for both women and men, that encourage positive, life-affirming, virtuous, moral, supportive and selfless behaviour in our own gender identities and towards one another, built on the fundamental bedrock of our equality in God’s eyes and of God’s love for all of us. Every blessing, Andy Rickell, Circuit Steward and Portfolio Holder for Social and Climate Justice

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-59421259?fbclid=IwAR1YbjtrMSDxRmEamHL5BxQXrHj9fbk68RvGaAZFrwXAd5w0IeJ_lDIl4gs