Prayers answered….. and Other Important News!
Prayers Answered
Many thanks to all of you who supported Lez and me though prayer in the last few weeks and to those of you who so kindly wrote emails.
Lez spent the week in the Cardiac Investigation Unit and is now home armed with a small pharmacy of medication attempting to take things rather more easily and let other folk in church do some of the heavy lifting and running around. She has felt fit enough to do the three days of the craft festival, sing in and direct the Christmas show from a chair (orders of the cast) and go to the toddler group!
Her experience in Treliske was a very positive one, apart from the worry and the investigations. The lady who did her angiogram turned out to have a daughter being taught music at Truro college by our son….. and the chaplain Angela, had been our curate in Redruth just to mention a couple of things! Amazing how things work out- thank you God!
It also shows the importance of asking for prayer-the reader community is a fantastic spiritual resource longing to be used!
Transforming ministry Magazine
Some time ago a survey was sent out about who read what in the magazine because of the quite large price increase to the Diocese. The results were varied but many more folk said they did not read it, or, only read the odd article than those found it a particularly useful resource.
The resulting discussion in the wardens group concluded that buying the full subscription for all readers was not only too expensive in the current climate but also not good value for money so this year Readers are asked to take out their own individual subscriptions if they would like to. Some funding has been put aside to pay for subscriptions for any readers who cannot afford one and would really find the magazine beneficial. We will repeat the survey next year and review the subject.
Local Reader Chaplains and deanery Reader Stewards…….
It had been proposed that each deanery should have it’s own Reader Chaplain (the old DRS) who would form the basis of a committee to feed information to the Warden’s Group however this has proved to be a more difficult task that was anticipated!
The thought now is that we need to try something different at the same time as keeping those things that are working well, e.g. the wonderful work done by Graham Downes and the St Austell group.
So the Warden’s Group would like you all to consider whether you feel called to be part of the chaplaincy team, no matter whether there is already a chaplain / Deanery Reader Steward in post. In the new year there will be the chance to have a vocational conversation with Bishop Hugh and chaplains will be appointed and celebrated at the Reader Day in May. I have the names of the people who transferred from being Deanery Reader Stewards, plus a couple of other people who have expressed a desire to pursue their vocation as chaplain…. If you would like to add your name, or make sure you are on the list, please do drop me a line!
Hacked, Cloned or Conned?
I wonder how many of you have experienced the irritation of receiving an email that at first glance appears to be from me or one of your ministry team along the lines of; “I need a favour ….. “ then when you examine the address it is actually coming from someone entirely different bent on weaving a story to prise away your well-earned cash. It seems the Internet confidence tricksters probably take the names and addresses from the Diocesan online data base as their starting point.
As you will all well know my emails tend to be fairly full with a full signature at the end- so do watch out for the copy cat tricksters. There are many many scams, conns and phishing expeditions out there so if there is one you have experienced that others might learn from do let me know.
In the meantime, if you use Facebook, make sure that you hide your friends list. That is the other place that cloning happens, the perpetrator makes another account in your name, steals a few pictures from you pages and then sends requests to all your friends… hide the friends list and you cut down the chances!
Hacking involves taking over your account, usually by guessing your password. With people making sure they use a mixture of upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols this form of attack in much more rare. The expert on all this stuff is Robin West who used to deal with Internet security for a living.
Ministers in Conversation
Every Monday morning at 10 am. Always something fascinating….. this week it was about ship’s propellers!
see the emails for the address for the Zoom Meeting