News

Our dear brother Eric CR died on Tuesday 19^th January, after a short illness (non Covid-19 related).

Eric was in his 91^st year and the 58^th year of his profession in the Community.

Eric served as Superior of the Community from 1974 until 1987.

We give thanks to God for our brother, for his faithfulness to God and steadfast love for others, and invite you to pray with us for the repose of his soul.

We shall give notice of the funeral arrangements once they have been finalised.

Thank-you for your prayers for all the Community.

Well done to Fr John, Br Marc, Fr Charlie, Joseph and Hugh CoR who completed 5K in 30mins, for Masvingo last weekend!

Thankfully the weather was kind and Fr John got to try out his new running trainers, which had been left unused due to the cancellation of all his running events in 2020.  

Thank you all for your hard work and thank you to everyone who has donated.

If you haven’t donated yet there’s still time to do so at https://cafdonate.cafonline.org/14579#!/DonationDetails

Thank you for your continued support!

Fr Nicolas has started a new YouTube series. There are currently four videos to view, covering a range of interesting topics. You can watch any of his talks here; https://youtu.be/bG2kSK921EU

Please subscribe to the channel to receive notifications of new videos.

Fr John has also produced a talk for Advent which can be viewed here;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAnYUeXNzSU&t=30s

The College is warmly welcoming enquiries and applications from prospective students.

If you, or anyone you know, is interested in preparing for ordained ministry then The College of The Resurrection could be the place for you. We are currently offering a “Zoom Tour” and can organise conversations with current students.

You can also obtain an application form with a view to Zoom interviews.

Personal visits will be offered once circumstances allow.

Please visit our website or email gjohnson@mirfield.org.uk  for further information. 

You can still nominate us in Ecclesiastical’s 12 days of giving, your nomination could be the one that helps us win £1,000!

Open to eligible charities in the UK, Republic of Ireland, Channel Islands and Isle of Man, Ecclesiastical will be donating a total of £120,000 to 120 charities over 12 days in December and we’d love to be one of them.

It’s quick and easy to nominate us, just click the link https://www.movementforgood.com/12days/index.php… Nominations are open now, closing at midnight the day before each draw. Charities not drawn will be carried over to the next draw, and draws will take place each weekday from 7 December to 22 December 2020. The more nominations we get, the greater our chance of winning, so please spread the word to your friends and family. Thank you in advance for your time and support.

Join with us is the title of our new page on Facebook dedicated to live-streaming our services to the wide world. Usually the numbers watching are in the hundreds, while a smaller group of regulars send in comments, and now even greet each other as they come on line. Throughout the spring and summer we just pointed the camera at the Community in church. However, for a little more effort there are excellent resources for doing better than that. It has been an enjoyable challenge to arrive at a point where we can use a number of cameras to give different views and close-ups, for instance.

Help and advice have been there, but only of limited use, as we are so unusual. Experts on streaming are used to advising parish churches on broadcasting, say, one service a week, with days to prepare it, and taking an hour or so to get it up and off the ground on the Sunday morning. We broadcast four services a day, seven days a week, and need to be able to walk into church and click it on straight away without any preparation. A long period of experiment has led us eventually to light on the best way of doing it for our circumstances – watchers will know it has been a bumpy ride at times. We are now using an “app” called Cinamaker, which enables a brother to sit in his stall and control all the cameras while singing away at the same time. With an iPad he can switch between cameras, zoom in, control the sound and lighting, and the focus. We try and iron out the glitches, but human frailty has a way of finding its way in. The Internet might have a hiccup, or a brother forget to switch on the sound system, or another forget to have checked whether a camera’s charge has got too low, and for these we can only ask your patience. In the coming period we hope to be training individual brothers to operate the system. It’s pretty simple to use, but we may have to depend a little longer on the long-suffering good nature of the people tuned in to us!

Monastic worship by its nature is very simple and lacking in frills, but there is an opportunity to help people who aren’t monks and nuns to engage with it more, and so we hope to be able in due course to make imaginative use of our art works during, say, the Psalms, or even show other appropriate pictures connected with the theme being sung or read about.

In connection with all this we are launching a small appeal to cover costs. There has been equipment to buy, and a small annual subscription to Cinamaker, which viewers might like to help us with. Our aim is to raise enough to cover the cost of those things, with a proposal that any donations over that amount would go towards the commissioning of two art works which we have been waiting for some time to put in place. One is a diptych of two paintings about St James by Nicholas Mynheer, for the St James’s Chapel, and the other a column for the holy water stoup in church. The estimated cost of the artworks is yet to be finalised, and more information will appear in due course.

Why should a religious community commission art works? If the church was just for ourselves, we would never do it. But our church at Mirfield is very public, a place of mission and training. With it we have an opportunity to inspire people in a world a lot more artistic than it used to be. One cannot overestimate the power of place and the deep potential effect of artistic experience, and in our times these need to play their part in drawing people to Christ and in helping one another grow in Christ. And, as I have already said, we hope that art will play an important place in our streaming as we go along.

If you would like to make a contribution, you can donate online at https://cafdonate.cafonline.org/15217 If you can’t do that, you can send a cheque to The Community of the Resurrection, with an accompanying letter saying it is for the live streaming/ art project.

Thank you to all.

George CR