Welcome to Weobley & Staunton Joint Benefice

I confess to being fairly baffled by incoherent and bonkers ideas spouting from politicians of all stripes over these last few days of Party Conferences and political posturing. Very often, newly thought-up policies seem to be based on misunderstanding, or else on current myths in order to please "core voters," or just to tap into the perceived public mood of the moment.

The sadness is that many of the ideas and opinions expressed are not based on what is     actually true, relevant and reasonable, let alone any understanding of what is just and good. 

As Christians, we are called to stand for what is just, good, true and above all else,                  compassionate. When asked how we are to live our lives under God, Jesus' said we are to love God with all our heart, mind and strength and to love our neighbour as ourselves.  In the gospels, especially John's Gospel, we see God is concerned with truth – what is actually the case as opposed to mere opinion or prejudice. If we are to take our calling seriously, we need to cut through the chaos of bonkers ideas and lies. We need to arm ourselves with  information that is actually true. Perhaps we can be brave enough to speak up when destructive ideas based on lies or misunderstanding are being spread?

How will we do this? Many folk I talk to have lost faith in ALL news media – especially ones that challenge some of their own opinions.  I suggest that we all need to listen to a variety of "voices" – to include our own friends, neighbours, and maybe several different news        media.   Does what we read in the Daily Whatever accord with our own experience of what is happening round and about us? Can we learn to spot the difference, between a headline that is fairly clearly just "click-bait" and one that is leading on to a serious story?

Discuss this with your friends and family: it's a vital area to think about before we're all sucked into a whirlpool of lies and misinformation that, as Christian people, it is our job to resist!

The Revd Prebendary Mike Kneen 

I was raised in the bustling city of Sydney, far from the farms of western NSW. However, every year our family would celebrate Harvest Festival in April (mid-autumn in the Southern Hemisphere) and visit the Sydney Easter Show. There we marvelled at massive displays of fruits, vegetables and cereals, assembled on a large stage, to portray a rural landscape. There would be hills made of green apples, a sun made of wheat, clouds of cotton, farmhouses made of pumpkins and gourds, fields made from coloured fruits and even kangaroos and wombats shaped from brown nuts.

We all have memories of the harvest celebrations we enjoyed as child. The harvest festival service reminds us to give thanks for all those people involved in agriculture and food         production who work so tirelessly, day in and day out, to bring food to our tables. We are also reminded that it’s only through the cycle of the seasons, and the hand of God, that we are fed.

While most people in the developed world enjoy the fruits of the harvest for a reasonable price, there are many in the world who work in fields or factories from dawn until dusk but who are enslaved by debt, undernourished and deal with grinding poverty. The World Bank estimates that at least one in ten of the global population currently lives under the poverty line of US $3 a day. They are unable to taste the benefit of the harvest, simply because of the circumstances into which they were born.

One of the key commands given in the book of Leviticus regarding harvest time states:

When you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. Leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands (Leviticus 23:22).

As we give thanks at harvest time, let’s also remember to pray for and provide something from our bounty to those organisations working to bring hope and economic justice to those who are in need.

Reverend Philip