A big thanks to everyone who contributed to the joy of our Harvest Celebrations this year: for the wonderful flower decorations in each of our four churches, for the enthusiastic singing of the great Harvest hymns and for the many kind donation gifts towards the Winchester charities we are supporting. If you would still like to make a financial donation to these charities, you can do so here.

It was great too to be able, yesterday, to welcome back into St John’s Itchen Abbas —after a 3-year gap because of the pandemic—the children and parents of Itchen Abbas Primary School. They brought many gifts to place around the harvest display near the church’s’ main door and sang two excellent Harvest songs—including a very energetic and rhythmic ‘Harvest Samba’!

As we look back on Harvest, with great thanksgiving for God’s good gifts in creation, it’s good too to realise how Jesus saw his own ministry—and his own death and resurrection—in terms of ‘sowing and reaping’ (the recording of my sermon on this can be heard below).

And to be able to look forward with confidence and hope that, as we sang in the words of the final Hymn at Evensong, that he shall indeed ‘reap the harvest he has sown’.

With love and prayers for the coming week

Revd Peter