Our 9.30 am Eucharist at St Mary’s on Sunday 4th October will be presided over by the Rt Revd Richard Jackson, Bishop of Hereford. This will be Bishop Richard’s first official physical visit to our parishes (though he’s made a couple of virtual appearances during lockdown).
This will be the only service in our three churches on this day and our Covid-19 policy means there is a limit of 50 on seats for members of the congregation.
Please book a place here to be assured a place if you wish to come to the service.
You have choice of three Communion services on Sunday, one in each of our churches: 9.30 am at Ross and Walford and 11.15 in Brampton Abbotts Church.
We have removed the need to prebook a place for the service at St Mary’s, Ross. Numbers attending the service in person are well within what is possible with very good social distancing in place. We will ask you to make yourself known when you arrive for the purposes of Test and Trace. This service will continue to be live streamed via Facebook if you prefer to take part from home.
We look forward to seeing you, in person or online, at one of our services.
We welcome confirmation from the Church of England that church services, including weddings and funerals, are exempt from the new restrictions on gatherings of more than 6 people. All existing social distancing and hygiene precautions will continue at our services.
If you come to a service as part of a social bubble and wish to move your seats together you are welcome to do so.
The 8th September is the day the Church commemorates the birth of St Mary. St Mary is our patron saint in Ross and we have traditionally kept this day as our patronal festival.
Here is a recording of a hymn for St Mary that the choir made at our first rehearsal on Friday, to be streamed in Sunday’s service. If you tried to watch that, sorry it didn’t quite happen, we are not sure what went wrong!
Someone asked me this week whether the pandemic had killed the vision that we have for our parishes. Under the circumstances a fair question, but let us remember firstly that this vision was not just the product of wishful thinking. It was something that was prayerfully and corporately discerned, and thus a vision given to us by a God who knew the future, and gave us a vision for what these churches can be in a post-pandemic era. There is no doubt that our communities need even more faith, hope and love now than they did in January 2020 when we had our Vision Day! Read more …
Thank you to everyone who completed our recent survey on our Online Worship provision and to Derek Glover who has crunched the numbers and analysed the results.
A few headlines: we have had nearly 70 responses and only two thirds of these considered themselves regular “church-goers” before March. Nearly 60% of the people responding are accessing services online at least weekly. 80% accessed services easily in the main. 74% have said they prefer live stream and/or prerecorded services as a digital offering (these are the main formats we’ve used). More than 80% of respondents said they would wish to continue some form of digital worship in a post Covid world.
These results are encouraging and seem to suggest we are providing what people want. We are indeed proud of the provision we’ve made at St Mary’s and of the speed at which we’ve reacted to an ever changing situation. We strive to continue to do that. We are also conscious that we need to continue to support the few with no access to technology, develop further our forms of service so that they meet both physical and online needs, and contribute to our mission of inspiring faith, hope and love.
Have you been missing Toast in real life? Have you recently had a baby and are looking for a group to join? Whilst we cannot yet meet in our usual indoor format at St Mary’s we are starting a buggy walk from the bandstand every other Wednesday. Our first one will be Wednesday 2nd September at 9.15 am.
You are welcome to come along but will need to book a free place using the Eventbrite link below. We will then link you with a small group to walk together rain or shine.
Members of Brampton Abbotts PCC would like to express their very grateful thanks to the village Cake Club and their spouses for turning out in force to help with the churchyard maintenance.
Since lockdown, the Probationary Service, who normally come every other week from April to October, have been unable to assist. Thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the Cake Clubbers, we now have mown grass, widened paths and unearthed graves. What resembled an overgrown meadow has been transformed.
Thank you also to Simon Leney who has been disposing of the mountains of rubbish for us. We are so grateful for all this invaluable help and can’t thank everybody enough for this communal effort.
This morning’s service from St Mary’s was accidentally streamed to the wrong Facebook page. Well done to those who made it to the choir page (or Walford Church) and found us!
Today we have added our dear friend, Ann Purvis to our Ross Remembers website. Ann died in July, she was a a much valued friend and active contributor to the life of our church and town and we all miss her.
We’re carrying out a bit of an audit of our online worship offering and would love to hear from you if you’ve joined us for a service, or part of a service, any time over the last few months; or even if you haven’t and have thoughts to share.
Please take a minute or so to answer a few questions.
Here’s an additional treat to follow on from yesterday’s service, from Elaine Loe, Centre Manager for the Wye Valley branch of Christians Against Poverty.
If you missed the service yesterday the live stream is here.
And details of what’s happening in The Ross Parishes accessible from the home page of our website: https://rossparishes.uk
Walford Church is holding an outdoor service on Sunday morning. At St Mary’s in Ross there is Picnic Church in the afternoon.
Or if you fancy something more conventional, come along to the 9.30 Eucharist at St Mary’s or join in at home with the live streamed service – https://rossparishes.uk/digital-services
If you missed Laurence’s recital yesterday evening, or if you just thought it was so amazing that you’d like to relive the experience, you can see it at 7.30 this evening (Sunday 26th July) when it premieres on YouTube in a specially edited version. It will, of course, be available any time after that.
Pour yourself a glass of wine, sit back and relax – and no false starts this time!
There is no charge for this recital but it is a fundraising event. A great deal of hard work has gone into make it what we hope will be an enjoyable experience. We hope you’ll consider donating to the maintenance and development of the fabric of St Mary’s.
This is Laurence’s third summer recital at St Mary’s. His two previous concerts were near sell outs and attracted 300 music lovers from all over Herefordshire and surrounding counties.
Laurence said: “Though churches are now open for public worship, social distancing restrictions are still quite severe and effectively mean that holding a recital in the church itself is not a realistic possibility. So the concert is being streamed live on the internet and will still be available for viewing at home for some time afterwards.”
Laurence is also breaking with tradition in another way. “Organists generally tend to compile their own recital programmes. But this time I wanted to give audience members a relatively rare opportunity to select their own favourite pieces of music. We’ve had many requests and I’m afraid I’ve not been able to include them all, so please accept my apologies if your piece has not made it.”
Five years ago, Laurence, who was then a sixth form pupil at Hereford Cathedral School, became possibly St Mary’s youngest ever organist in the church’s 700-year history.
He subsequently went on to become organ scholar at Hereford Cathedral where, on occasions, he also conducted the cathedral choir and once played a fanfare for the arrival of the Duke of Kent.
For the past three years he has been an organ scholar and music student at The Queen’s College Oxford. During this time he has accompanied the college’s world famous choir on BBC Radio Three’s Choral Evensong, played at a Westminster Abbey Eucharist, with a congregation from all over the world, and toured with the choir in the United States, Spain and Portugal.
PROGRAMME
Litanies — Jehan Alain (1911–40)
Noël Variations — Louis-Claude Daquin (1694–1772)
Hornpipe from Water Music — G.F. Handel (1685–1759)
Three pieces based on hymn tunes
Rhosymedre — Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)
Ar Hyd y Nos — Welsh traditional (arr. Laurence John)
Nun danket alle Gott — Siegfried Karg-Elert (1877–1933)
Carol from Five Bagatelles — Gerald Finzi (1901–56)
Postlude in D minor — C.V. Stanford (1852–1924)
Nimrod from Enigma Variations — Edward Elgar (1857–1934)
Toccata from Symphonie V — Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)
Sunday’s service, at 9.30 am at St Mary’s is for churches in The Ross and Archenfield Deanery. You will be most welcome to attend in person but you’ll need to book a seat – we’re limiting the congregation to 40.
The Ross Parishes: Ross-on-Wye, Walford & Brampton Abbotts 