PEW SHEET, week beginning 22nd December 2024 Click HERE
PEW SHEET, week beginning 15th December 2024 Click HERE
WEDDINGS, BAPTISMS, FUNERALS, etc:-CONTACT THE CHURCH OFFICE - email Carron stoswald.office@gmail.com for a convenient appointment time during the week if you need to meet up. Emails are monitored daily and responded to within twenty-four hours (usually)...or ring 01691 652861 and leave a message
BOXING DAY BEAR ZIP WIRE Thursday 26th December from 10.30 a.m. - 1 p.m. Bring along your bravest
cuddly toy to zoom down from the very top of the tower to the churchyard. All donations to the tower fund to help maintain the bells. Children to be accompanied by adults..
CHILDREN’S SOCIETY HOUSE COLLECTION BOXES Please bring your box to the Christingle Service on Christmas Eve at 4 p.m. in Church or drop it off at church or The Vicarage.
DONATIONS AT THE PLACE OF WELCOME CHRISTMAS COFFEE MORNING raised £100 for the Food Bank. Thank you to everyone who supported it and to Haydn Jones for playing for us.
Christmas Hamper Donations
To all our wonderful supporters,
Oswestry and Borders Foodbank is asking local people to help bring festive cheer to families struggling to eat this Christmas by donating festive food items to the food bank. For some families, the Christmas hampers given out alongside standard food parcels will be their only treat this Christmas. Approximately 250 households (1,000 people!) will benefit in the two weeks leading up to Christmas.
The Foodbank will be taking over the upstairs of Cabin Lane Whole Life Centre to pack Christmas parcels. Operation Christmas will commence on Monday 9th December. We are therefore asking all our supporters to deliver their donations to us by Friday 6th December to give time to collate and sort items ready for packing. Click HERE for a list of food items we are collecting, along with some additional information for anyone who would like to support us this year.
Many thanks and blessings to you all,
The Foodbank Team
Come and join in half an hour of peace, readings, reflection and prayers, every Wednesday in Advent at 12 noon in St. Catherine’s Chapel. We will use the words of the hymn ‘Hark the Glad Sound’. All are welcome commencing Wednesday 27th November. Please contact Lindsay Clarke for further details.
ADVENT BOOK: we are suggesting ‘Women of the Nativity’ as our Advent book, copies are still available for £10. There is an opportunity to gather to chat about the stories on Wednesdays after the 12 noon reflection, or at 7 p.m. in the church office.
Book club now meeting fortnightly on Mondays in the Parish Centre. Next meeting Monday 23rd December at 1930 reading 'The bad Christian's manifesto' by Dave Tomlinson . Contact Carron in the office for more info.
JASSICA'S BIBLE STUDY, Next meeting to be announced later. 2.00 pm in St. Catherine's Chapel. ALL WELCOME. IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO JOIN! (No meetings of this group in December)
STREAMING OF SERVICES: Would you like to know how we stream our services on You Tube? Would you like to help? Do you have a young person who might be interested? Speak with Carron for more information.
Stewards needed for the Thursday 10.30 BCP service in the Lady Chapel. Share the weeks, by agreement.
PLACE OF WELCOME Tuesdays in the Parish Centre 10.30 - 12.30 for coffee,
company and chat. Everyone welcome
Tuesday 17th December
Hot Drinks, Mince Pies and Christmas Music with Haydn Jones at the Piano in the Parish Centre
RECYCLING FOR GOOD CAUSES – 1 Empty Printer Ink Cartridges
You’ll all be pleased to know that on the 1st May I sent off our first full box of empty printer ink cartridges to Recycle4Charity.
Our account with Recycle4Charity shows that the contents of our first full box of used ink cartridges raised £44.50 for Hope House, our chosen charity.The company accepts all makes of printer ink cartridges e.g. Brother; Canon; Epson; HP; - both branded originals and remanufactured. Their value to our chosen charity ranges from as little as 10p (for the remanufactured varieties) to as much as £1.75 for some of the Canon cartridges – but most of the branded varieties which would otherwise end up in landfill are worth at least £1.00 each so please encourage your friends and neighbours to save them for you to bring into church –
Let’s see how soon we can fill our second box!
Here are some facts to encourage you –
45 million cartridges end up in landfill each year, in the UK alone
Cartridges take up to 1,000 years to decompose so it makes sense to re-use them as many times as possible.
Well done everyone - keep up the good work!!
RECYCLING FOR GOOD CAUSES – 2 Postage Stamps
Yes, we are still collecting used stamps, and they are still being passed to Mary Beaman, who gathers stamps from various sources in the Oswestry area, sorts them and trims them before sending them on - but - I don’t think we’ve ever explained where they send them on to!
They are sent to an organisation called 'The Stamp Fellowship' which began life in 1946 by collecting used stamps to sell to collectors in order to raise money for Mary Lovell’s Home for Blind Girls in Jerusalem.
Today the Fellowship is still going strong and in the last four years alone has raised £21,000 for the Embrace charity which supports education projects across the Middle East. The ‘Embrace the Middle East’ charity is 170 years old this year.
The Fellowship has been run for the past 20 years by volunteer Gordon Young, who singlehandedly uses his expertise to both sort and sell the stamps to a network of collectors. His ‘Embrace Thrifty Fifties’ packs of fifty stamps based on a country or a theme are particularly popular
Needless to say they don’t make much money out of UK stamps these days, both foreign and themed stamps are worth far more, but as the saying goes ‘every little helps’ – so please carry on collecting. The stamps don’t need to be trimmed just make sure you leave as much space as possible around them.
If you want to know more or if you are a stamp collector who would be interested in buying stamps from The Stamp Fellowship, please go to -embraceme.org/stamp-fellowshipChris. Abram
CHURCH PRAYER BOOK – is kept in the church office as before and names can be added to it personally when the office is open, or by posting names/prayer requests in the prayer box in church. The prayer box is opened ahead of the main Sunday service
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SUPPORTING THE FOODBANK - You can check the Foodbank website https://oswestryandborders.foodbank.org.uk/give-help/donate-food/ for up-to-date lists of their urgently needed items. |
If you are unable to get out to make a donation of food, please consider a Standing Order to the Foodbank. Here are the bank details:-
Bank: HSBC
sort code: 40-35-32
Account number 11785451
name; Oswestry and Borders foodbank.
Visit our page at :-
St Oswald's Parish Church, Oswestry.