I am writing this on Maundy Thursday in the run up to Easter so I am reminded of the phrase "Remember, love and serve". The Easter story is all about love when we remembered what Jesus did for us all. Our response is that we in turn love one another and that we will take that into our homes, into our communities and into our world. It's a love that puts others first, that serves others; it's a love that celebrates God's abundant love for us. It is a love that is confident because God has shown us just how much he loves us by sending his son - and therefore we are loveable because God loves us. And when we love others, we take God's love to them and we show how loveable they are. This is our Easter story - to remember, love and serve.

As part of my training, the church is expected to work alongside me by taking a good look at itself and the parish in general around it. We are in the process of setting up a Local Training Group (LTG) covering both parishes of Elstead and Thursley which will have four purposes (i) to demonstrate and encourage collaborative ministry in the parish; (ii) to share aspects of my training in relation to the parish, its mission and ministry; (iii) to foster the parish's understanding of Ordained Local Ministry; and (iv) to provide a core support group for me.

The LTG will have a life of three years and there are three annual tasks designed to create opportunities to look in depth at an important area of parish life with the aim that it will be used by the parish for the development of its own ministry and mission.

Think of the three tasks as a series of concentric circles. In year one the innermost circle is concerned with the current church community and the way the church and its workers (lay and ordained) are viewed. At its simplest it is fact finding, to identify needs and opportunities for, dare one say it, mission. This first phase will start after Easter and run to the end of 2007.

In year two, we widen the circle with a link with my pastoral placement and a focus on sectors within the parish in the sense of "how do we reach?" and "how can we develop and strengthen our contact with these people". It is likely that my placement will be at the RSCH but that is still to be confirmed. We are already aware that there are young families and children we don't reach or support and equally there is an ageing population that again we as a church don't support perhaps as well as we might.

In year three, the whole parish is considered and the mission that the church has to the whole parish. The task revolves around working on possible ways and means of achieving what was identified as needful in year two and putting agreed plans into practice.

This is a group effort and part of the challenge will be to encourage all the church to participate. An essential activity for this Local Training Group will be to foster an engagement between the church and those people outside it in the parish who don't currently actively engage with the church.

I hope you will get to hear of the work of this group over the coming months and years. In fact, I know you will because there are planned reports to be made to congregations and annual meetings in due course.

The church has long been at the centre and a focal point for village life. The first steps in strengthening the links between church and the whole parish will be this information gathering phase. This is our story in the 21^st century - to remember, love and serve.