Inver and Mountcharles Church

How wonderful it was to be able to welcome a beautiful baby girl to our Church Family, during the baptism ceremony of Chloe Elizabeth Sarah Duncan, at our United Service in St. John's Church on Sunday. God bless you and all your family and we look forward to watching you grow in faith.

St.John's Church, shining bright under the arch of a rainbow this evening, in the midst of storm Kathleen.

Please note the change of services for the first Sunday in April.

We're on countdown to our Duck Race on Sat. 13th April at 3pm in Darney. If you want to participate why not check out our online entry option at the following link and good luck to everyone. https://www.idonate.ie/raffle/darneyduckrace

🌼🌼The final details for our Spring Fair.🌼🌼

Summer Madness tickets are still available on early bird price until this weekend! If you and your friends know already that you'd like to come, we really suggest buying tickets quickly to get the best price.

Our information sheet about buying tickets to come as part of DRY and the consent form can all be found here: https://linktr.ee/DerryRaphoeYouth

Maybe a night out for all the family over the Easter weekend?

Please contact Rev. Elliott for more details on these events.

🕙Don't forget to put your clocks forward by one hour tonight🕚. We don't want anyone to miss celebrating Easter 🐣✝️⛪️

The March sunshine seems a long way from the dark pre-Christmas evening of our Community Carol Service on 15th Dec. - at which we lit our Memorial Lights Christmas Tree. A Donation Box in aid of Donegal Hospice was in place in the church that evening and an amazing €515 was given in aid of this very worthy cause - which is close to many of our hearts. Pictured is Jacinta Kelly on behalf of Donegal Hospice along with Ben, David, David and Darren who represent the much larger number of volunteers from the church and community who worked so hard to achieve the success of that event.

The Presentations of Cheques, for the money raised at the Bake Sale on 17th Feb., took place yesterday at Salthill Cabin with an incredible €750 being raised for both Mountcharles Tidy Town Community and Inver & Mountcharles Church Funds. Sincere thanks to all who contributed in any way to making the day such a success and especially to Richard for organising and managing the whole event.

Please note the change to services for this Sunday Service.

HOW PATRICK'S LIFE SPEAKS INTO LIVING IN IRELAND TODAY

Archbishops John McDowell and Michael Jackson share a joint reflection on how Patrick’s life and faith resonate with the challenges of life across our island and the wider world at this time:

St Patrick’s Day is a day on which to reflect on Gospel and on Ireland. It is also a day on which to ask what connects them to one another in the contemporary world. St Patrick came to Ireland and came back to Ireland to share the Gospel, to live the Gospel, and to teach the Irish to live by the Gospel. He was not at the top of the social pile but at the bottom. He was a captive and a refugee, trafficked and enslaved. He did worthy and menial work. Yet the glory of God shone through his person in his teaching, his example and his writing. And he loved the Irish.

There is every reason to be sad and to be angry in a world where we readily feel helpless. And helplessness feeds hopelessness. Inequalities and injustices are part of the wallpaper of our world. Their protagonists occupy the front rows of seating in our world. Our frustration at institutions and acronyms that promise so much and deliver so little mounts daily and readily spills over into cynicism. The pulsating danger for our world on St Patrick’s Day is that cynicism morphs into apathy. And apathy opens the door to anarchy, polite and impolite, whether to left or to right, it matters not.

Our world, and indeed our Ireland, is a place of jarring and jagged contrasts. On the one hand, we welcome strangers and on the other hand, we set alight the accommodation that might have been their home and inflict shame on the community in whose midst they might have begun a new life holding to the lifeline of human dignity. Vast tracts of housing, which those who live in them will never be able to buy because they are built not to sell, but solely to rent, sit edgily alongside people for whom living in a tent on the street is not even an option.

Israel-Palestine, Russia and Ukraine are places of war and unsettlement, of disease and contagion. So also are Yemen and the Democratic Republic of the Congo along with countless other countries. Alienation and irrelevance show their faces differently but they show their faces nonetheless at home and abroad. It is a human duty in a post-Christian country to welcome those who flee oppression and to stand against those who persecute. Failure to speak against an anti-immigrant and a racist narrative creates a new level of tolerance of what only weeks before was intolerable.

The Gospel for St Patrick’s Day (St John 4.31-38) speaks of the fields being ripe for harvest. This is a creative and a generous prospect. In the midst of desolation, there is the hope of harvest mediated through love. It speaks also of: one sowing and another reaping. Those who benefit do so on the back of the hard graft of those who went before them. Our world is a world where self-image triumphs over self-understanding. St Patrick’s life gives us food for thought and food for generosity about who we are and about who we might yet become. We have still a lot to learn from one who was an enslaved serf and a trafficked foreigner in Ireland 2024.

“Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40)
Our next online workshop will be March 19th at 7.30pm
We will be exploring ways that we as a church can support local families in poverty.
Our keynote speaker is Alan McElwee from Christians Against Poverty Ireland.
Click here to register for the zoom link: https://bit.ly/3UQivtZ

A perfect opportunity to tidy up and make room in the wardrobe for your summer clothes!

Yes it's months away but it's good to get the information out there for those planning their schedule of runs for the next few months. Please share with anyone you think may be interested.

Super excited that the DRY Weekend is coming up at the end of the month! The closing date is approaching and we wouldn't want anyone to miss out on coming along, so make sure you get consent forms filled in. This weekend is open to all young people from our diocese who are in secondary school.

Use this link to find the digital consent form and the information sheet: https://linktr.ee/DerryRaphoeYouth

How wonderful to be able to be back in Christchurch, Mountcharles for services now that the maintenance work is complete. A huge thank you to everyone for their efforts over the last week in putting everything back in order. The Church looks so lovely!!