St Mary’s Swillington have been celebrating harvest and thinking about God’s generosity recently.
At a service on Sunday, October 6, the church reflected on God’s gifts to us by preparing harvest gifts for a local community pantry, and by relaunching the Parish Giving Scheme.
The familiar hymns of ‘Come ye thankful people come’ and ‘We plough the fields and scatter’ were sung, and the church also thought about how big God is with a rendition of ‘Our God is a great big God’, including actions.
The talk at the service was based around a jammy dodger and how all the bits come together, from the jam to the flour to the sugar, and where these things come from to create something delicious.
For the prayers, the church’s children gave out mustard seeds, showing how something so seemingly small, weak and insignificant can grow into something big and mighty.
The Revd Sarah Harrison, Team Vicar in the benefice, said: “This helped congregation members to think about how the kingdom of God is like a tiny seed – when we look at it, we see smallness, weakness and insignificance but God sees potential, growth and significance in our churches and in our own lives.”
During the service information about the Parish Giving Scheme (PGS) was shared.
The PGS is an established planned giving scheme for churches that aims to boost levels of parish income, and also offers other benefits for parishes and givers alike.
The scheme enables people to give monthly, quarterly or annually to churches by Direct Debit, and to sign up to inflation linked giving annually.
Giving can be done anonymously, and the scheme offers people a secure way to easily and regularly support churches.
Revd Sarah said: “At the end of the service, we used the words, ‘God the Father, who created the world, give us grace to be wise stewards of his creation.’
‘God the Son, who redeemed the world, inspire us to go out as labourers into his harvest.’
‘God the Holy Spirit, whose breath fills the whole of creation, help us to bear his fruits of love, joy and peace.’
‘Amen.’”
To find out more about the PGS, please click here.