Month: July 2015

There will be road closures this weekend as a result of the Prudential RideLondon bike ride.  Bus routes may also be affected.  Full details are available on the Transport for London website and also on the Prudential RideLondon website.

Sue and David Kiltie are hosting a tea party in aid of Marie Curie Cancer Care from 2 – 5 pm on Saturday 8 August.  See the notice board in the church hall for further details, or contact the church secretary.

Please note that, as usual, there will be no lunches during August, to give our dedicated lunch teams a break.  Lunches will resume on Sunday 6 September.

The rota for September is on the notice board behind the tea bar, so please sign up for one of the weeks.  If you haven’t done lunches before, please speak to Marlene Tyler or Cheryl Cuthbert for further information.

For a number of years now, we have been opening the church to visitors over the London Open House weekend, and the numbers coming through the doors have been steadily increasing.  However, this year the organisers of Open House have narrowed their criteria for buildings which can be included in their published guide, mainly as a result of the increasing numbers of buildings seeking to be included, and the increasing cost of publishing the guide.  Unfortunately, the City of Westminster has a surfeit of interesting buildings, and this year the organisers are including only Grade I listed churches.  Crown Court is Grade II listed, and in spite of our case being argued very strongly, as a unique church even in Westminster, we are not being included in the official guide this year.

However, we are giving consideration to opening the church over the weekend anyway, using our own website and other media to advertise the fact that we are open.

If we decide to go ahead, we will probably open on Saturday from 11 am until 5 pm, and on Sunday from 2 till 5 pm, and will need volunteers to act as stewards and to provide teas and coffees in the hall.  So if you would like to help, please put the dates in your diary and await further information in the church notices and on the web site.  And if you have any bright ideas about ways in which we can advertise the fact that the church is open, please send them in to the church office (office@crowncourtchurch.org.uk).  All ideas will be gratefully received!

The church magazine is published three times a year, in April, August and December.  Articles of interest from members are welcome, so if you would like to submit something for consideration, please email it to the Editor, Sheena Tait, at chronicle@crowncourtchurch.org.uk.

Please note that the Editorial Board reserves the right not to publish articles submitted, or to edit articles before publication.

available on the welcome desk in the hall

• Crown Court mugs: china mugs with the church crest and in a new fashionable shape!  Choose from four attractive colours: blue, green, red or dark grey – £5 each.

• Assorted hand-made cards for every occasion – £1 each.

• Life and Work – The Magazine of the Church of Scotland, published monthly.  A few copies are available at £2.20 each.  The July issue includes reports and photographs of the General Assembly held in Edinburgh in May.

Members will recall that a few years ago we raised funds to sponsor Bridget’s secondary education at Aburi Girls High School in Ghana.  She successfully completed her secondary education and her ambition was to go on to train as a nurse.

As there was some money left over from the amount raised to pay for her secondary education, the Kirk Session decided to sponsor Bridget’s further education at the St Karol School of Nursing, where she has successfully completed the first two semesters.

The remaining funds are insufficient to cover all of the further six semesters of the course, and the Kirk Session has decided that the proceeds of this year’s Christmas Market (to be held on Saturday 21 November – please put the date in your diary now!) will be earmarked for this purpose.  However, it was also agreed to ask members of the congregation to come forward with other ideas for fundraising to enable us to support Bridget through the remainder of her course.  Please pass any suggestions to the Session Clerk.

Over the past year Churches Together in Westminster have been running a pilot project for CTiW Prisons Mission.  This has been judged to be a success with modest but encouraging progress recorded by participants and churches.  It has therefore been decided to make small but significant extensions to the initiative.  At present three churches take part – Farm Street Jesuit Centre (RC), St James’s Piccadilly and St George’s Hanover Square (CofE) – and one prison, HMP Wandsworth.  The plan is to include up to six more churches of different denominations and traditions and two more of the huge London prisons – HMPs Pentonville and Wormwood Scrubs.

Crown Court has been asked to consider becoming involved in this project, and the Kirk Session discussed the matter at its meeting on 25 June.  It was agreed to extend an invitation to members of the congregation to consider whether or not they would wish to take part in the project.  Further information on the project can be found in the first issue of the CTiW Newsletter, copies of which are available in the hall and on their website at http://ctiw.london/newsletters/.

If you are interested, please speak to the Minister in the first instance.