St Mary's Parish Church

Our brand new organ is now in place and has had it’s first service! The brightness and variety was a joy to hear and should provide great music for years to come.

We would like to invite everybody to a special service on Sunday 2nd May 2010 at 10.30am to celebrate the new organ. We are delighted that the Lord Mayor of Leeds, Judith Elliott, is able to join us.

The Faculty required to purchase the new organ was approved this week after there were no objections.

We are pleased to announce that we have now been able to order the organ.

We will keep you updated of progress, but expect the organ to be fitted by the end of April!

This year, the Lent course will be held on Tuesdays from 23rd February to 23rd March. There are two sessions on each Tuesday, one in the afternoon and one in the evening.

The course is for everyone, no matter how far in your journey as a Christian, you will get something out of the course. The groups are supportive and you will be made most welcome. Sign up on the list in the porch or contact the Vicar.

We will be using a book to support the course. You can buy it in advance from Amazon using the the link below.

It’s a been a few months now since the organ demonstrations and appeal which was so successful. As we said at the time, there was a detailed process which needed following to receive our new organ, so this article is to keep you up-to-date of the progress which has been made so far.

Once the money had been raised, the November PCC meeting officially agreed to the purchase of the organ. We then had to apply for a Faculty. This is like planning permission and is designed to ensure churches in all Dioceses remain in keeping with their design and age and that changes are appropriate. The committee which meets to decide on Faculty applications meets once a month. We completed the application well in time for the December meeting but it was not considered until the January 2010 meeting.

We now have to display a public notice for 28 days, to allow time for people to object to the plans, again a bit like planning permission. The notice will be removed on 12th February and so, assuming there are no objections, a Faculty should be issued shortly afterwards.

The organ is not ‘off-the-shelf’ so will take a number of weeks to build and install. We cannot order it until the Faculty is received.

Once again, thank you for the generosity of everybody who contributed to the purchase of the organ, and for everyone’s patience over the last couple of months. I’m sure the wait will be worth it, and the organ will enhance our worship for years to come.

We will provide further updates in the magazine and web site.

Neal Pinder-Packard, Churchwarden

Apologies for the site outages over the past couple of days which is due to the cold weather. The hamsters which run on their wheels to power the St Mary’s server can’t go as fast when it’s cold. Hopefully things will be back to normal in a few days.

Thank you.

From all at St Mary’s!!

January and early February 2010 calendar is now on the web site and the January 2010 magazine is available in church. These are some photos taken this morning (3rd January) on a beautiful winters day!

Click on each one to enlarge.

The Church of England have developed a web site www.whywearewaiting.com which contains an Advent Calendar with daily videos and reflections for Advent. It is designed to help people ‘slow down’ in the preparation for Christmas and remember what we are preparing for.

The £20000 has been raised in the short time the sample organ was in church. The Faculty to get permission from the Diocese (like an advanced planning permission) has been completed and will be considered next week.

We hope that the Faculty will go through smoothly and the order placed as soon as we can.

Once again, many thanks to all involved in raising the money.

This is a photograph of the organ we had as a sample. Our organ will be roughly the same but with some slight adjustments to the stops.