Dear Friends,

Now that you have (hopefully) got past Easter being so early - something you will never see again in this life - what are you going to do with all your time ?  I won't say "with Spring", because last year April turned out to be the nearest we got to summer...; on the other hand, the last time we had a white Easter it was followed by a record eighteen months of heat and drought...; take your pick.

It is the season of the `Annual Meeting` for many organisations, and the Church is no exception, so may I urge you to come to ours ?!   We are still in need of extra members, so please consider standing for the PCC this year.

Peter Muir continues with his training to be an Ordained Local Minister to serve in Thursley and Elstead, and he is now supported by a `Local Training Group` of eight, drawn from both parishes.  The purpose of this group is to tease out, with Peter, the prospects for truly collaborative ministry in our two parishes in the future.  This is to ensure that there is a real ministry for Peter to perform, that it has clear and agreed objectives, and that he is supported by others in the parishes for when he is ordained in 2009.

It is also becoming clear that `collaborative` means `between parishes` as well as `within parishes`.  For sixteen years I have been the `glue` that kept our two parishes together; but that needs to change.  We need to pursue other areas in which we plan and work together in order to maximize what we can achieve with our limited resources.  At the same time, a new Godalming Deanery group is preparing a Mission and Pastoral Plan for our whole Deanery - something that could well mean greater co-operation with other parishes locally.  This is a very positive move, and one that could well see a useful redistribution of all our resources.

Both parishes are currently pursuing aspects of our future `Stewardship`, and it makes no sense for us to take different paths in this - so we must find ways of doing it together.  This has been made even more obvious by the work of the Local Training Group, which is in many ways working along the same lines !  Two groups going over the same ground is wasteful, but three is pointless...  so we must work towards working together more.

I would say more, but I don't want to pre-empt what the various groups come up with.  Elstead has already had a most encouraging morning together on `Our Church Future` and Thursley will shortly follow suit; one of my contributions is to say: "we must do whatever we do together"