January Message from Adrian

Happy New Year

May I begin my wishing you all a Happy New Year and thank you for all your help and support during the last year.

I know that it has been a most difficult year for so many people in our community but we must face the future with hope and the assurance that if we work together we can come through. Hopefully 2021 will be a very different year for the church and the community than 2020.

With locked churches, few Sunday services and weddings and baptisms postponed, it has been a very sad year for so many church members, young couples as well as families, and so we look to the future, in hopefully a virus free world. In 2021 some of the churches in our Deanery will say farewell to their clergy, as some of us will be retiring, but we hope that before that happens all the clergy, readers and worship assistants will be able to form a working group which will be ready to face the future with confidence.

As I write this letter it has been proposed that the Wayland Group would work with the Watton and Ashill benefices to form a Federation. This Federation would mean that the church leaders coming together to pray, to plan and to encourage one another and share resources. Whether this plan will come to fruition is to be seen, but there is no doubt that the virus has encouraged all parishes to see that the status quo cannot continue.

Whatever happens the Wayland Group it will have pastoral care and its weekly service, as well as the confidence that any changes will be helpful and not a hindrance. I shall keep you informed at every point.

So we look forward with hope and I leave you with the words of Dr Martin Luther King :- “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.”

With every blessing

Revd Adrian Bell