Fifteen years ago

The Parish Mission of 1989

October 1989 saw St George's News move into the twentieth century, relaunched as it is today. Previously, the magazine had been typed out by a secretarial bureau and copied on a stencil duplicating machine. In October 1989 the computer took over, typesetting the magazine and incorporating illustrations and photographs.

In those early days we had help from the local Marconi printshop getting the magazine photocopied. Eventually the church purchased its own photocopier, and a team gathered each month to collate all the different pages of the magazine together. Now we are on our second photocopier, the latest machine being fully digital and able to place the whole magazine into memory and print both sides of the paper and fully collate each copy in one operation. In February 1996 the magazine was launched on the Internet, the very first Parish Magazine anywhere to have an "On Line" Edition.

The October 1989 magazine was a celebration issue marking the Parish Mission that took place from October 5th to 15th, conducted by Fr Richard Oakley of the Community of the Resurrection based at the Royal Foundation of St Katherine in Stepney. The other members of the mission team were Sister Rita Margaret, and Sister Mary Paul of the Society of St Margaret, East Grinstead, and Sister Margaret Mary of the Community of All Saints, Oxford.

A programme of events took place on each of the eleven days of the Mission, highlights being a visit by The Bishop of Portsmouth who preached and celebrated the Eucharist on the first Sunday, and a parish lunch on the final Sunday, concluding with a candlelit evening service.

Fifteen years on, the words of Fr Richard Oakley, published in that October 1989 issue of St George's News, still remain relevant:

In What can we Trust?

Is there anything in this world that you can completely trust? Looking at the advertisements on the television you might think that there are a great many things guaranteed to make your life secure: - a good job with prospects; money in the bank; a nice house in which you can build a home and be comfortable with your family; the appropriate medicine or disinfectant to keep germs at bay. Then there is the insurance policy to help you sleep undisturbed by worries of sudden catastrophe. It is so easy to be lulled into a false sense of security for these are not things in which you can have total faith. We know how uncertain life can be with many facing unemployment, the threat to the environment, violence and disaster. Any number of things can happen to our own secure world and we forget so easily that the most important things in life cannot be bought. A beautiful house can be filled with unhappiness, suffering and grief and, whatever provision we make for our health, we can be stricken by illness. There are some losses that the best insurance policy cannot make good. The foolishness of putting so much faith in such things is obvious when we remember that they are ours only for the short time we are on this earth and then ...?

So is there anything in which we can trust and be certain we will not be let down? The answer is no. There is not a thing but there is some one - Jesus Christ. In him God has shared our life and shown that it has meaning; that his love is stronger than the very worst that can happen to us - even death itself.

Fr Richard Oakley, CR