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Organ Appeal At St Giles we hear sounds from the organ that our predecessors, including Byron, Shelley and John Soane, have heard for more than three hundred years. This historic organ urgently needed sympathetic restoration more>

Worship at St Giles

As part of our Mission Action Plan the Parochial Church Council [PCC], from time to time reviews the pattern of worship at St Giles to consider whether our Sunday worship is appropriately focused to serve our existing congregations, and to draw more people into the worship of God. We have to remember, as my predecessor as Rector commented in this Newsletter in 1964 when new liturgies were first introduced on an experimental basis, ‘A church that does not change will die’. The evidence for our discussions has largely been based on the numbers of people who attend services,

One of our most successful initiatives at St Giles, in terms of worship, has been the development of the voluntary choir at Sunday Evensong, which due to the hard work of our Director of Music, Jonathan Bunney has transformed Evensong, and sometimes it is the best-attended service on a Sunday. Over the past few months we have been considering at the PCC whether, in the light of this, on one Sunday a month we should experiment with having a Sung Eucharist at 6.30 pm instead of singing Evensong, and saying Evensong beforehand at 6 pm. Many people who live in the St Giles area either work or go away on Sundays, and we wonder whether we might be able to offer them an opportunity to join in the Eucharist when they are free, or back on a Sunday evening. Also people sometimes come to church after having been shopping on Sunday afternoons. The PCC has agreed that, on the second Sunday in the month, starting in September, we will have, on an experimental basis, said Evensong at 6 pm, followed by a Sung Eucharist, with the voluntary choir, at 6.30 pm. We will do this for five months, and will review it at the PCC meeting in February. If you have any comments about this initiative, please pass them on, in due course, to the Rector, the Associate Rector, the Churchwardens, or the Secretary of the PCC so that we can take them into account in our review.

We have also been considering at the PCC whether continuing to sing Morning Prayer on Sunday mornings is still appropriately fulfilling our Mission Action Plan to draw people into worship at St Giles. Over the past fourteen weeks the numbers at Choral Morning Prayer have only once reached ten. Whilst our Sunday morning quartet lifts the hearts of those of us who are there in praise of God in the marvellous words of the Morning Prayer canticles, the Venite, the Te Deum and the Benedictus, research suggests that visitors feel discouraged from joining very small congregations, especially in large buildings. In such situations, which I suspect some of us may have experienced, people often feel conspicuous, and anxious about doing the wrong thing and drawing attention to themselves, and nervous that they may be pounced on by a well intentioned person, perhaps the Rector, and asked to do something. This may account for why the few new people who come to Sunday Morning Prayer, seldom come again. Again, we agreed to monitor numbers at Choral Morning Prayer, and review at a future meeting whether it might not be better to say Morning Prayer on Sundays before the Holy Communion.

In the extraordinarily multifarious context of St Giles, we, as the Church of God, in this area have a responsibility to make known to people the unchangeable love of God revealed in our Lord Jesus Christ. We do this mostly in our worship and the prayer focussed at St Giles. We have the challenging task of helping people to be aware of the mysterious presence of God in his world focussed in worship, in ways which are accessible to them, and enable them to reach beyond themselves to God.

Bill Jacob

Special Collections

On Sunday, 4th July 2010 £ 298.01 was raised for The Passage, a charity working with homeless people nr Victoria station, and the special charity which we are supporting for six of our monthly collections this year. www.passage.org.uk On Sunday 2nd August, the collections will be donated to the charity Book Aid, which provides books to libraries, hospitals, refugee camps and schools in order to support literacy, education, training and publishing in over 40 countries.

LICENSING OF ALAN CARR AS ASSOCIATE RECTOR

On Sunday, 5th September 2010 at 6.00 pm there will be a special service of Choral Evensong during which the Revd Alan Carr will be licensed as Associate Rector by the Bishop of London. There will be a reception following the service to which all are invited. To assist catering if you are attending please let Mark the verger know on 020 7240 2532.

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