Join us Online: YouTube (from 6am Sunday)

The church is open at 11:00am on Sunday for a family service.

If you plan to come to in-person church please register!

(You can now book for services through to June 20th, you can either book one week at a time or all the services in one go. We'll take your most recent booking when drawing up the register. So you can always rebook to change what you have said you are doing.)

Register to attend

Also, join us for a chat at 11:30am on Sunday: 

Click this link to join the Zoom meeting.

Note that there will not be an email next week

as it is half-term.

"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,

who was and is, and is to come." (Revelation 4:8)

What is God like? It is a big question and in a sense it takes the whole Bible to begin to answer it. I say, 'begin,' because the reality is that we cannot fully understand what God is like.

On the one hand, we are made in his image (Genesis 1:27), that means in some sense we are like him, we represent him in the world, we can relate to him and in the birth of Jesus Christ (the incarnation) he became one of us. More than that Jesus lived among and mixed with normal people like you and me. God came down to our level, to connect with us and save us.

The Holy Spirit takes that further, because the Holy Spirit comes and dwells in us. In fact the Spirit is there to help us and to pray for us (Romans 8:26).

Both Jesus's incarnation and the work of the Holy Spirit show that God is immanent: he is close to us, he is accessible and almost understandable.

Yet, this is not all there is to say about God. For God is also transcendent: he is above and beyond us, he is out of reach and beyond our understanding.

This is what the term, 'Holy' refers to. It means God is set apart, beyond and above and different to us or anything else for that matter. After all, God is eternal, we are finite without him. God is the creator, we are the created. God is pure: no sin, wickedness or stain can be found in him. We are sinful and guilty. In every respect God is set apart from us. He is beyond our understanding. We can never fully know what God is like.

We need to grasp and hold together these two descriptions of God. He is both immanent and transcendent. To emphasise one and de-emphasise the other will corrupt our faith and ruin our relationship with God.

We need to grasp his immanence to know that God is approachable, we can pray to him, he does understand us, he does care about us and he has saved us. God is love after all (1 John 4:8).

Yet, we also need to grasp his transcendence. We cannot let familiarity breed contempt or bring God down to our level. God cannot be put into 'a box' of our own understanding or reduced to cliched statements. He deserves our respect, our honour and our awe. His ways are pure and true, whilst ours are often corrupt, twisted and false. God is holy, holy, holy.

Join us this Sunday for our Trinity Sunday service. We will be looking at Isaiah 6:1-8.

The following week (June 6th), we will be looking at Nehemiah 1:1-11.

Please read on...

• Prayer: Urgent: Opener to send in. Pre-recorded services and livestreaming - what's the difference? The latest prayer requests.
• Care: The Great Ramsgate Spring Clean - this Saturday, 11am, Boundary Road Park. Report from St. Luke's APCM: our plans for the coming months.
• Share: Last Sunday. St. Luke's Life Stories. An interview about dealing with depression.

Contributions to this week's Opener

URGENT:

For this Sunday:  We need people responding to:

"Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty...

with:

who is and was and is to come.

Please send video contributions in as soon as possible (by 10am on Friday). You can send them by Whatsapp (07769 871520) or by WeTransfer.com to: [email protected].

Pre-Recorded and Livestreaming of Services

Since the lockdown in March 2020 we have produced a pre-recorded Sunday Service each week. This is done by different people recording different parts of the service in advance. These different elements are then edited together with slides and all the parts are combined to form one video for the service. The completed video is then uploaded to YouTube and set to be available from 6am each Sunday. It is also put on to DVDs for those who cannot access YouTube.

The advantage of doing things this way is that people can contribute from their homes and we can be confident that a full service is available for everyone each Sunday. Over the last year it has been great to be able to do this during all the lockdowns and restrictions.

The disadvantage is that it takes a lot of time and effort from a number of people. There is contacting the people to do the recordings, their time in making the recordings, the receiving and editing of the different elements of the service, the editing together of the whole service and the uploading to YouTube.

We will continue with pre-recorded services until the lifting of all restrictions (hopefully) June 21st. However, after that date, we are hoping that most people will be able and happy to return to in-person services. This will include a singing group leading our singing and people doing the other elements of the service live in church. It would be an unnecessary waste of everyone's time at that stage to pre-record the services, but we still want to make them available online for those who cannot attend.

So, from June 28th we will switch to livestreaming services. This will involve the service being filmed while it is happening and the video being put on YouTube immediately so that those unable to come to the in-person church can still watch from home at 11am. The video will also be available after that time, so those who cannot make it to church at that time for work or miss parts of the service because they are helping with the children can watch the service sometime later that day or week. 

In short the switch to livestreaming will mean that the service will not be available before 11am on a Sunday, but it will save a lot of time and effort to produce.

We are at present trialling the livestreaming of services, but it will be the pre-recorded service that will be publicly available and publicised until the switchover. This is to avoid confusion. However, if you would like a link to the livestreamed service so you can offer feedback to help us improve it, then please let me know.

Prayer Requests:

​​Be assured I will do my best to check that people are happy for the requests to be shared before including them. Please pray for...

• That the lockdown can end safely and fully on 21st June.

• St. Luke's plans over the coming months and the hoped return to church services with no restrictions.

• Katrina (Norah's daughter) has cancer in the lung, but the good news is it can be easily removed with just surgery. Give thanks that this is treatable and pray that the operation would be successful.
  

• Rita who is not feeling well, because of a thyroid issue.

• Jean Simmons. Please pray that she can be kept comfortable at this time.

• Barb (Gloria's daughter's friend) now finished chemotherapy and having a scan to assess the need for further treatment.

• Pauline Emptage waiting to hear from King's College Hospital about next steps for treating her back.

• Nathan Court for his continuing treatment.
  

• Alison's granddaughter, Lexi, who has been diagnosed with a growth on her knee. It looks like it is benign, but please pray that the surgery will be successful and the following biopsy will show it is benign.

Please also continue to pray for: Jean Mayton, Jeannette (Claudia's sister), Shirley Crabb, Collette Judge and Joy Smithers.

The Great Ramsgate Spring Clean - This Saturday, 29th May at 11:00am

The Great Ramsgate Spring Clean is part of Keep Britain Tidy’s annual Big Spring Clean, and consists of a series of short local litter-picks across town, each organised by a different group of local residents.

Anyone can take part for part or all of any of the litter-picking sessions, and children are also very welcome if accompanied by an adult. The litter-picks last between 90 minutes and 2 hours and social distancing and guidelines on group sizes will be observed at all events.

Pickers, hoops, rubbish bags and Covid hygiene items will be provided for all events - and the collected rubbish will be picked up afterwards by Ramsgate Town Council and disposed of properly.

Events will be running from 28th May until 13th June 2021.

Can I highlight the one for Boundary Road Park, which the vicar is going to be involved with:

SAT, 29 MAY AT 11:00 Boundary Park

Meet near children's play area in Boundary Road Recreation Ground.

St. Luke's Roadmap & APCM report

At our Annual Meeting on Tuesday 18th, we re-elected Christopher Waldie as church warden and Pauline Emptage and Audrey Tucker onto the PCC. Apart from Pauline Mackinney stepping down from the PCC that meant there were no changes to its membership. However, there is a vacancy for one Church Warden and one PCC member.

At the meeting, I also shared our plans for St. Luke's for the next few months. Here is a brief summary:

June - Laying the Foundations:

• Trialling of Livestreamed Services
  
• Explore setting up a join office in St. George's hall.
• Recruit ready for returning to church with no restrictions, especially for children's group leaders and helpers and host teams.

Try Out July (from 28th June, if all restrictions lifted):

There are four weeks from the lifting of restrictions to the school summer holidays. We want people to 'try out' coming back to church and to perhaps 'try out' coming back to old roles or taking on new ones. Also, we may 'try out' some new ways of doing things and some new initiatives. The hope is that the Sunday Services will include Sunday Club, we will be able to sing and there will be no social distancing.

• Switch from pre-recorded to livestreamed services
• Welcome Claire as curate from Sunday 4th July.
• Hold a summer school for a few weeks on a mid-week evening, so we can explore together how best to set up Growth Communities.
• Hold a couple of vicarage BBQs.

Back to church September

We hope most will have returned to in-person church in July, but in September we plan to have an extra push to encourage people to return and to ensure our main Sunday Service is running well.

This will also be the moment when some of our regular activities that can easily be restarted return. Others that cannot be easily restarted will need to be reviewed and either replaced with something different or dropped.

We also want to fully launch Growth Communities in September. More about Growth Communities in a future email...

Last Week's Talk:

Can these bones live? (Ezekiel 37:1-14)  - Available Online

At times the people of God face moments when they feel like they have been totally abandoned or rejected by God. The Israelites felt like that when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and they were left languishing in exile. It felt like there hope was gone, they were cut off. Ezekiel’s vision reminds them that no matter how desperate their situation, God is able to bring them back.

St. Luke's Stories

Remember you can use this form to send in your personal reflections on your pandemic experience, which we can then publish. We also welcome mini-autobiographies and poems! Please just email them. In the meantime check out the poems and stories already there...

Hope in troubled times

This is an interview with Philippa Wilson, author of 'A Certain Brightness: Bible Devotions For Troubled Times'. Philippa shares her story of dealing with depression and where there is hope in the darkness.

Finally, let's keep our vision of God as both transcendent and immanent.

Yours in Christ,

Paul Worledge 

Vicar, St. Luke's Ramsgate

www.stlukesramsgate.org​