At last, at the end of August, my dining room came back!  Since July last year it has been the Parish Office, while St Alban’s was closed for the building works, and which has been quite fun in its own way.

However, it has been very nice to have the dining room back, and it has been well used since then.

The Parish Office is now back where it should be, downstairs at St Alban’s, where two rooms are used - one for the computers and Julie, the Parish Administrator, and one for the photocopiers and general administrative tasks. 

Julie is in the Office on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, and volunteers are there on other days doing copying, stapling, entering registers, dealing with fees, booking wedding and baptisms and much else - as well as having coffee and (I hope) enjoying each other’s company.

As a condition of the English Heritage Grant we received to repair the tower and roof at St Alban’s, we have to have the Church open to the public - a very good idea.

I am excited by this, and think it will be good for the Church to be available.  We have agreed with English Heritage that the Church will be open during Office Hours (10-12 each weekday), and we are putting into place some security (closed circuit television) and other measures (removing silver candlesticks, for example), so that the building and the people can be as safe as possible.

Ecclesiastical, our insurers, have discovered the open churches suffer less vandalism than closed ones, and we hope that that will be the case here as well.

The best way to keep the Church safe is for it to be used as much as possible, and if you would like to be a ‘Church-sitter’ for some time each week, do let us know, and we can arrange a rota.  We hope to be able to begin with a short time of prayer at 10.00a.m. each morning, and to ring the bell, so that people know that we are open.

The Open Church is a sign of the openness which we want our buildings and our Christian lives to express, and we hope that local people will find it a real spiritual resource.