NEWS BRIEFS

Church Leaders meet PSNI Chief Constable

Photo – PSNI Chief Constable Simon Byrne with (from left) the Rev Sam McGuffin (President, Methodist Church in Ireland), the Rev Brian Anderson (President, Irish Council of Churches), Archbishop Eamon Martin (Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh), Archbishop Richard Clarke (Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh), and Dr William Henry (Moderator, General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland).

The Church Leaders, at their meeting in Armagh on Friday (6th December), met with representatives of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, including Chief Constable Simon Byrne. The Church Leaders expressed support for the work of the PSNI, particularly in the area of community policing.

After the meeting the Chief Constable tweeted – “Really productive meeting with Church Leaders in Armagh. Thank you for making the time and such a constructive discussion about the PoliceService NI story “

One leader tweeted, “We need our very best young people to join the Police – and serve the community with generosity, concern, respect and courage. I was pleased to meet Chief Con PSNI Simon Byrne and wish him every blessing in his important leadership role.”

25 years of sharing Christmas joy with others around the world

Photo above – Helping to seal the shoeboxes for Samaritan’s Purse charity at Drumkeeran Parish Hall are (from left): Valerie Kerrigan, Iris Knox, Catherine Fitzpatrick, Irene Boyd, co-ordinator; Lorraine Holden and Ethel Aiken.

Drumkeeran Parish Hall in Clogher Diocese was recently bursting with the joys of Christmas as thousands of shoeboxes collected for this year’s Samaritan’s Purse Operation Christmas Child were prepared for loading onto a lorry to bring to needy children in foreign countries.

This collection centre at Tubrid in North Fermanagh is supervised each year by Irene Boyd MBE who receives filled boxes from people from churches, schools and various organisations from over a wide area.

But this year is a special one for Irene. This is her 25th year as co–ordinator in the area for the charity, the international organisation which delivers the boxes of toys and goodies to children who have not experienced gifts at Christmas before.

Irene modestly estimates that in all those years, she has overseen the collection of almost 110,000 shoeboxes with an average 4,000 boxes brought to her collection centre at Drumkeeran Parish Hall, Tubrid, each year.

Irene has been supported by a team of committed volunteers who help check the boxes and seal them before they are packed into cardboard cartons prior to loading onto a lorry at the end of November.

For Irene, her work begins in January each year, when she uses some of the donations she receives for the charity, to buy items in the post–Christmas sales which will be used as fillers for the following year’s boxes. Then in August and September, she will visit schools, youth organisations, voluntary organisations and churches distributing leaflets and give talks before preparing to accept the filled boxes throughout October and November.

She says she wants to share God’s love through bringing these small gifts to children of various ages in countries where Christmas presents are not able to be given.

It all began for Irene from a small project she introduced to her Sunday School class in the 1990s, originally using her home as a makeshift collection centre. Now this has grown to be a major exercise each year as she co–ordinates this collection centre.

She acknowledges great help from her husband John and family members as well as her team of volunteers and for others around the diocese as well as from many different church denominations.

Through the year, Irene promotes the charity through talks to various church groups, senior citizens’ clubs and school organisations and often accepts donations for the charity which helps to purchase additional resources such as booklets of Gospel stories about the birth of Jesus which will accompany the boxes.

As Irene, her family and local helpers look forward to their own Christmas celebrations, they can be satisfied that needy children and teenagers will take great delight opening their boxes of joy and goodwill.

Lent Bible studies on caring for the earth

Given the climate–change crisis facing the world today, BACI invited the noted scripture scholar Margaret Daly–Denton to present a series of Bible Studies for Lent 2020 on the theme of ‘Caring for Creation’.

In response, she introduces us here to creation–centred scriptures which would have been familiar to Jesus and which she sees as underlying the Gospel of John. In this gospel, she points out: ‘We find the story of Jesus doing the work of God in the world and inviting his disciples to share in that work’. Her book John: an Earth Bible Commentary (Bloomsbury T&T Clark 2017) will be helpful to those who wish to go into further detail.

The Bible Studies will be launched at Church of Ireland House, Dublin, in the lunch hour on Tuesday January 21st, when multiple copies will be available at a special price. Further copies can be purchased at €3.00 or £2.50 from BACI treasurer Barbara Bergin, but these will incur a postage charge. It is expected that the Bible Studies will also be available for download from the BACI website ([bibliahibernica.wordpress.com]) in due course, when a new webmaster takes over the site.

Porvoo Prayer Diary now available 2020

The Porvoo Declaration commits the Churches which have signed it ‘to share a common life’ and ‘to pray for and with one another’. An important way of doing this is to pray through the year for the Porvoo Churches and their dioceses.

The calendar for 2020 is now available

The Prayer Diary is a list of Porvoo Communion dioceses or Churches covering each Sunday of the year, mindful of the many calls upon compilers of intercessions, and the environmental and production costs of printing a more elaborate list.

Those using the calendar are invited to choose one day each week on which they will pray for the Porvoo Churches. It is hoped that individuals and parishes, cathedrals and religious orders will make use of the Calendar in their own cycle of prayer week by week.

In addition to the Churches which have approved the Porvoo Declaration, we continue to pray for Churches with observer status. Observers attend all the meetings held under the Agreement.

The calendar may be freely copied or emailed for wider circulation.

West Kirk Shankill raise £2241 for Children’s Hospice with Jingle All The Way appeal

Walter McBride from West Kirk says a big thank-you, “On behalf of myself and all the many kind hearted volunteers at West Kirk Community Project, we would like to say thank you to everyone who played a part in our events over the year for the Children’s Hospice. From our sponsored walk to our tea/coffee morning to our Carol singing in Tescos as well as our all year round gift tin…. a big happy and wonderful thank you to all. We at our Centre are so proud of being the means for a meeting point to organize our activities in aid of the Hospice & are over joyed of our total amount we raised. A very big thanks must be given to the people of the Greater Shankill and beyond who supported us by their generous financial support. God bless all over this Christmas period and a Happy New Year. From All at West Kirk Community Project.”