St Paul's is part of a larger team which includes St Georges Oakdale and Creekmoor churches. St Pauls itself has two clergy;
Vicar: Revd. Peter Gibbs who is married to Jane and can be contacted at ;
16 Rowbarrow Close, Canford Heath, Poole, BH17 9EA Tel No. 01202 565187
Email: ladybird1@ntlworld.com
Curate: Revd. Christine Brooks who is married to Ian and can be contacted at;
87 Verity Crescent, Canford Heath, Poole, BH17 8TT Tel no. 01202 468584
Email: christine.brooks3@ntlworld.com
Clergy Letter from Revd Christine Brooks - Curate at St Pauls
Dear Friends,
I've discovered a wonderful new word which is going to come in very useful for me this year- ‘Quintastic'. For those of you who haven't come across the term Quintastic is a blend of the adjective fantastic and the prefix ‘quin'- which is derived from Latin ‘quinque', meaning 'five', And here's the best bit- it is used to describe those who are 50+ and fantastic! So I like to think that rather than hitting knocking off another decade in November, I will officially become Quintastic!
I discovered the word purely by chance when I was trying to find out how many words were added to our dictionaries each year- as you do! Although I couldn't find the exact figures, I did learn that the Oxford English Dictionary actually updates 4 times a year to keep up with our ever changing vocabulary.
We are living in a fast changing culture where new words are added and the meaning of old words change quicker than the dictionaries can be reprinted and one of the biggest contributors to our expanding vocabulary has been the world of computers and the internet. To ‘Google' has become a universally understood verb and having a virus could now apply equally to you or your computer!
Our rapidly changing culture also means that we can communicate with people in ways we would have never before thought possible. A while ago, Ian's dad sent me one of those circular emails entitled ‘How Things have Changed'. If it got through your SPAM filter (that's Spam as in unsolicited emails as opposed to the canned meat made largely from pork!), you may well have already seen it but for those of you who haven't it is reproduced at the top of the next page.
It made me think, we can access the wonders of computerized technology at the click of a mouse, accessing information and talking to people on the other side of the world. But as the cartoon showed there is a danger that we could become very insular. Last year a study involving people from 18 to 80 found that, of those interviewed, more than a third of people spend more time chatting online than going out with friends.
And despite having an average of 243 Facebook friends, the teenagers interviewed said that they spent so much time on the internet that they had little time to go out with friends, with 60% saying that they found it more difficult to make friends 'in real life'.
Human beings were built to live in relationship with other people. In the account of creation in Genesis there was only one thing about the newly created world and its inhabitants that wasn't good- ‘The Lord God said, "It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him' (Genesis 2: 18). Right from the very beginning we were designed to live in community, in relationship with God and one another- in the words of the poet John Donne ‘no man (or woman!) is an island'.
At the moment in our Sunday services and midweek home groups we are looking at some of the characteristics that should mark out our church community, here at St. Paul's. Amongst other things, we should be a living, caring, united, praying, prophetic, serving community.
The reality is that for the church as for any other group of people trying to do life together, living in community isn't always easy. It can be messy, there can be tensions, disagreements and we don't always get on with one another - probably as John Ortberg reminds us - because everyone is normal until you get to know them!
But when we do manage it, when we manage to get somewhere close to creating a healthy functioning community, something wonderful happens. We give people a glimpse of something heavenly - we give people a glimpse of God. You see, we have all been created in the image of God, and that God exists in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, all living together in perfect community.
And when we too are living in real, loving, caring community loving God and one another then and only then only then are we truly reflecting the image of our triune God. That was what we were made for, always was, always will be and in our ever changing world that is one thing which will always remain the same.
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