NSB News

The Parish Magazine of North Stoneham and Bassett, Southampton

August 2008

A letter from the Ministry team

I shall probably get into trouble with the editor, but I left writing this letter till the last minute, waiting to hear the decision of the General Synod as to further progress with the question of consecrating women as bishops. The decision to move forward with plans to consecrate women bishops, without concession (other than a proposed code of practice) to the Traditionalist opposition, came as no surprise to me. I feel it is right and proper that the Church of England should get its act together and move into the 21st century, recognising, as commerce and industry did some fifty years ago, that women can do most jobs just as well as men, and in some cases better than men, and should therefore be treated equally. While I must stress that this is a personal view, I consider that the Traditionalists (who seem to come mainly from the Anglo Catholic wing of the Church) are doing a great deal of harm to the Church as a whole. How can the Church seriously seek to increase its membership, particularly among the younger generations, while a proportion of its clergy and some bishops are still so backward looking and refuse to recognise the need to bring the Church into line with modern thinking and culture. While the Church is the first to condemn discrimination on the basis of race, colour, religion or disability, certain sections of the Church seem set to encourage sexual discrimination against its own members and clergy. All other professions including the law, medicine and accountancy welcome, and indeed applaud the valuable contribution made by women at all levels.

While not wishing to venture too deeply into the theological debate, the argument against women bishops, in simple terms, is based on the biblical evidence that Jesus was a man, his Disciples were all men and therefore it was not the intention of God or Jesus that women should play any major leadership role in the Christian Church. This argument ignores the obvious fact that in first century Jewish culture women were regarded as having minimal social status, and it is therefore not surprising that most New Testament accounts of Jesus’ ministry say so little about his women friends and “disciples”. Having said that, it is clear from the Gospels that Jesus had great respect for women, and sought to raise their lowly status. His friendships with Mary Magdalen and Mary and Martha demonstrate this, as does the account of Jesus’ meeting with the woman at the well.

Surely one of the principal roles of the Church in modern society is to proclaim a gospel of equality, breaking down the barriers which separate or discriminate against people of different genders, cultures, races and religions. Any attempt to discriminate against or categorise its members or clergy, must be unacceptable and unbiblical.

Legislation to implement the change will now be prepared and will be referred back to synod next February for approval. It is however likely to be another two or three years before a final vote is taken, and that final vote will require a majority of two thirds from bishops, clergy and laity and that might still be hard to achieve. There are certainly interesting times ahead.

Malcolm Harper

Confirmation 15th June 2008

There was a parish confirmation service on the 15th of June at St. Michael’s church where ten members of the congregation were confirmed by the Bishop of Southampton, Paul Butler. There were four adults and six young people. Three of the adults and one of the young people were from the same family. I was lucky enough to be one of the candidates and it was a very special day for everyone.

The service was very nice and everyone enjoyed it. The sermon was good and people were really engaged by it. After the service there was the normal coffee and tea in the hall, but Jane Owen had kindly made some shortbread that morning which was lovely. The weather was also kind to us so there was a photo opportunity outside the church. (see the cover Ed) One of the funniest things of the day was when Luke was having his picture taken. The bishop put his hat on Luke and Luke’s face will never be forgotten.

After the service a lot of my family came back to my house and continued the celebrations with my brother Will who was also confirmed on that day.

Lucy Anderson

North Stoneham Park

The Willis Fleming Historical Trust is working on two projects relating to the history of North Stoneham Park. We are championing the conservation of Stoneham’s parkland landscape (designed, partly, by ‘Capability’ Brown), with its surviving features such as the WW1 War Shrine. We are also producing a record of North Stoneham House, the enormous mansion that stood at the centre of the Park.

Conservation of the parkland

In the last twenty years, it has been recognised that North Stoneham Park should be afforded greater merit as part of Hampshire’s heritage – and efforts made to turn the surviving parkland into a viable historical and natural landscape. The south portion (61 acres) of the Avenue Park area of North Stoneham Park was placed in public ownership in 1996, and a well-received landscape restoration project took place to the whole of Avenue Park – including Eastleigh Council’s northern portion – from 2000. Today, the wider parkland comprises much of the statutory Southampton-Eastleigh ‘strategic gap’. But threats and obstacles to the Park’s conservation remain, not least the perception that it is a lost cause. A new project is underway that seeks to further the earlier work to Avenue Park. The joint project – between Eastleigh Borough Council and the Willis Fleming Historical Trust – focuses on the restoration of the derelict War Shrine, and will use this symbolic monument as a key to unlocking the history of the landscape. In particular we are seeking to increase awareness of the historical and natural environment. By focusing on the Shrine and its environs, the project will also create a new landmark for North Stoneham Park, which it is hoped will galvanise support, and lead to a more ambitious project in the future.

It is planned that the Shrine restoration project will run from 11 November 2008 for twelve months. The project will include a programme of events, activities for schools, talks, guided walks, and open days. We are now looking for people to join our Project Steering Group. (If you are interested, please contact me.) We also want to establish a Friends Group.

North Stoneham House

In 1818, the architect Thomas Hopper was commissioned to conceive a building at North Stoneham to represent the dynastic Willis Fleming family. Over the next twenty-six years, and with a seemingly limitless budget, Hopper’s vision materialised: a fantastical Grecian mansion, set in the old 1000-acre park. But the house was never completed. North Stoneham House was demolished at the outbreak of the war in 1939. I am working with The Willis Fleming Historical Trust to revisit and recreate North Stoneham House - through a new account of the house’s life; the formation of The Stoneham Archive; and a collaborative arts project.

The Stoneham Archive

This new special collection relates to North Stoneham House (and the parkland): its architecture and design; the architect; the house’s dispersed contents, collections, and Library; and the people who lived and worked there. The Archive is drawn together from various sources including previously unseen Willis Fleming family papers, and includes an image library, and oral history recorded with people who remember Stoneham. If you have any information - memories, stories, photographs - connected with North Stoneham House and the Stoneham Estate, please contact me on 077 4548 6231 or email harry@willisfleming.org.uk.

Harry Willis Fleming

Restoring the organ at St Michael’s

St Michael’s has a long tradition of choral and musical excellence, and the church organ is a good example of an unusual design. Built by Rushworth and Dreaper in 1937, it features four extended ranks of pipes providing some twenty-four speaking stops, a system that made relatively few compromises to achieve a lot for the size and cost. Everything inside is beautifully and carefully made, built to last.

The organ sits behind an oak screen in an art deco style appropriate to its time and in keeping with its surroundings, with a central tower of seven decorative pipes.

Seventy years later the instrument, which plays such a central part in much of the worship at St Michael’s, is becoming unreliable and needs significant work to bring it back to near-original condition. It is estimated that the work will cost £44,000, of which some £14,000 has already been raised and set aside. A new appeal to raise the remaining £30,000 was launched with a concert on 28th June by the senior and junior choirs.

Sponsoring an organ pipe

To raise what is needed we are inviting sponsorship of the 352 organ pipes, at a cost of £200 (large), £100 (medium) and £50 (small) per pipe. You can sponsor a single pipe, a favourite chord or even an entire octave of twelve notes, and there will be a plaque on the restored instrument on which sponsors can choose to have their own or, for a gift or a commemoration, someone else’s name. Certificates suitable for giving as a gift can also be produced.

Other fund-raising activities

We plan to run a series of concerts throughout the coming year, to raise awareness as well as funds. These will rely on the talents of our own people as well as musicians from around the area, and will showcase different styles of music. Other activities are planned – already the Treble Rebels are saving money in Smarties tubes for the project, having enjoyed emptying the tubes to begin with – and we would be grateful for any ideas or offers of help. Commercial sponsorship and grants are also being investigated.

What we have raised so far

Fundraising has started well! The launch concert raised £555 and a further £1200-worth of pipes have been sponsored in the first two weeks. From the sponsorship we should be able to reclaim tax worth a further £224 via the Gift Aid scheme, so at 12th July we have £1979 towards the target of £30,000. In addition to this, £220 was given at the concert for the urgent repair of the “sticky D.”

Timescales

The organ can’t wait for much longer! Our target is to have the work carried out in the summer and early autumn of 2009, so that we can celebrate its completion at Christmas. This, of course, depends on securing the funds needed in sufficient time to order the work. Will you help?

If you would like to sponsor one or more pipes or would like to know more, please talk to Rod Anderson, Colin Davey or Andy Carmichael at St Michael’s, or take one of the leaflets from the back of the church. If you are able to help us secure commercial sponsorship – for example if your employer has a scheme to support charities – please contact Rod Anderson. We’d also be delighted to hear from anyone with other fundraising ideas.

Rod Anderson

A bag of troubles

(a story for our times - for young and old - from a sermon at the July family service)

I was in London last week and saw a taxi which said, on its side, in big letters: ‘Love your luggage’, the idea being, that if you were a tourist lugging all your bags with you round London, you’d immediately want to pile all your stuff in the taxi and travel light. Now one of the big themes of the Bible, especially the New Testament part of it, is that human beings carry heavy bags with them all the time. You can’t see these bags because they’re sort of spiritual worry-bags - things which are there all the time, and which sometimes make people ill and tired through worry. They weigh people down. Sometimes they get heavier and heavier as people get older.

There’s a little story which is told about these bags. Maybe it’s a children’s story, and maybe it’s not. It’s about Jena who is tormented by her bag of trouble. Every night before she goes to sleep, she sees her bag of trouble squealing and squirming in the corner of her bedroom. Some days it isn’t too bad, this bag of trouble, but other days it gets on top of her. It demands to be noticed, and tears at her hair, worries her with its calls, torments her with its silly jokes. Some nights she comes to her bed and wishes that the bag would be taken away for good.

One night - and maybe it is a dream - she wakens to find a tall woman standing at the window. Jena starts.

‘Who are you?’, she says.

And the tall woman, who presumably has been CRB checked, tells Jena that she is Mrs Smythe, and she is a bag collector. Without more ado, Mrs Smythe reaches down, scoops up Jena’s bag of troubles on the floor of the bedroom, and takes it with her.

Jena calls out to her: ‘Can I come?’

And the woman answers yes, she can, and so Jena follows her through the deserted streets of the city to wasteland nearby. There, on the ground, is a most enormous pile of bags of all shapes and sizes, heaving and groaning and making little grunts of annoyance. Mrs Smythe takes Jena’s bag of troubles and hurls it onto the pile. Then she turns to Jena, and says: ‘Which one do you want?’

‘But I don’t want any’ replies Jena, in shock.

Mrs Smythe patiently explains. ‘These are all the troubles of those who live nearby. These troubles have to be shared around. Which bag will you have in exchange for your own?’

And Jena, feeling that she is beginning to understand, points to a very small bag at the edge of the heap. ‘That one’.

Mrs Smythe and Jena return to her house, with the small bag. In the morning, when Jena awakes, it is very quiet. Until suddenly, the small bag she collected the night before, bursts into life, calling and shouting, wriggling and screaming. It is very much smaller than her last bag, but already Jena begins to wonder whether she would have been better to stick with her own bag, rather than take someone else’s. She thinks she might have to have another night time rendezvous with Mrs Smythe, Bag Collector.

Everyone has a bag of trouble. The apostle Paul, a follower of Christ, who wrote the first reading today, describes his one. What worries him is that he wants to do good things - to be moral and caring towards others, but he can’t do it. The bad things he doesn’t want to do, he does; the good things he wants to do, he can’t. He is too weak. The problem is that his goodness is weaker than his badness. So the badness always wins. That is a real bag of trouble.

In church we’ve got our very own Mrs Smythe. Except better. Jesus says: ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.’ He provides a taxi service which loves our luggage. Unlike Mrs Smythe, he doesn’t just swap bags of troubles around, giving us someone else’s troubles, He actually removes our troubles once and for all.

How he does this has been discussed and speculated upon for two thousand years. In all of the discussions, the Cross of Christ is the place where the burdens fall away. That’s why the pilgrim Christian in Bunyan’s ‘Pilgrim Progress’ stands at the foot of the cross and finds his burden rolling off his back. You can take your pick from the theories which have been put forward. The basic idea is that all our bags of trouble come from one source: the breakdown in the relationship between God and human beings caused by our wrong headedness, our sin, if you like. So atonement (at-one-ment) is the way in which God and human beings are brought together in the love of God seen when Jesus died on the Cross for us. In most of the theories, Jesus is understood to take our place on the cross. Our troubles lead us to the cross, but he steps in and says, “Let me be there for you instead.” He substitutes himself for us. And by doing that, our bags of troubles really are removed, because he opens up the possibility of the Resurrection for us.

So he’s a lot more effective than Mrs Smythe, who just moved the bags around. He takes them right way. Next time you’re feeling down, and things are on top of you, just remember the words of Jesus from Matthew’s Gospel: ‘Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’

John Owen

St Michael the Archangel - Patronal Day walk to Winchester Cathedral

St Michaels’ Sunday Club invites you to join them on a walk along the river Itchen toWinchester cathedral to celebrate St Michael’s day.

Sunday 28th September 2008

Start: after Eucharist from the west door of St Michael and All Angels

Arrive: 5.30pm at the West Door of the Cathedral after which there will be some prayers to celebrate our safe arrival led by the Rector. The walk is just under 10 miles in distance along the Itchen river/canal public path. You will need good shoes and a packed lunch which we plan to eat about half way. Alternatively you can join us for the last 2 miles at the carpark next to the bridge on Garnier Road (1st exit from Junction 10 on the M3, past park and ride). We estimate we will arrive here at about 4pm

Return: back by train as the station is 5 mins walk from the cathedral

Details: Colin McDougall 023 8034 5148

Colin McDougall

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