Beautiful Music in an Idyllic Rural Setting

Music has become a very important part of all that goes on at Fogo Parish Church. It’s important on a Sunday morning when we enjoy a service which is full of music, which is always joyful and which enables us all to sing enthusiastically as well. We also have been delighted to welcome several local (and not so local) musicians to play in our church and in so doing have been able to share our building with many more people than would otherwise come to visit.

We are very grateful to Heather Cattanach and Harris   Playfair who live just next to the church and who have arranged all of our special concerts over the last eighteen months. Usually these concerts have involved pupils from the Berwickshire High School (where Harris teaches), or the pupils have been supporting other artists; sometimes they have performed on their own supported by Harris and Heather.

On the last Sunday evening of May we welcomed Jenna Reid, a celebrated Shetland fiddler. To support her, Harris brought the Berwickshire High School Folk Band, six fiddlers and a bass player, who provided some spectacular music and who are pictured at the top of this page.

All of us who were present — and the church was very well filled for the occasion — were simply blown away by the music. Jenna took us from Dundee to Newcastle and Perthshire but most of the music came from Shetland, some of it old and traditional, others contemporary, some slow and melancholy, others   gloriously exuberant and played so fast that we  wondered how Jenna’s fingers were able to cope.

At the interval folk from the congregation had provided a finger buffet and although there were more in our audience than we had anticipated there was still food left at the end — and what a superb buffet it was! The money raised by donations — there was no charge for admission but folk donated extremely generously — was given for music projects at the school and we hope its musicians, and Jenna, will return to us again quite soon.

Some of our audience — not a lot of room!

Jenna with members of the Folk BandJenna Reid — celebrated Shetland fiddler

John and Kirsten take charge!

John and Kirsten welcoming Clare and Bridget to church

We had a particularly special service on Sunday 3rd. June. It was conducted by two of our own members, John and Kirsten Arthur.

It wasn’t the first time that they had led worship as they explained to us during the service, but it was the first time they had conducted a service in a church in Scotland.

Kirsten explained that a number of years ago they had lived in Saudi Arabia where Christian churches were not permitted. As a result members of the British community would meet in the Embassy on a Friday and conduct their own service. Occasionally there would be a visiting minister who would come and administer a communion service but on other Fridays it was down to the community itself to make its own arrangements using its own resources.

Later on when John was in Afghanistan with the army where he served as a doctor, he would stand in for the chaplain because the chaplain had such a large number of units to cover. Kirsten worked in education and became accustomed to leading assemblies, so together John and Kirsten brought a great deal of   experience to this Sunday in Fogo.

We all enjoyed the service enormously — really good hymns, a great talk from Kirsten with the children during which she explained that we were all members of several families: our own personal one, the larger family of Fogo Church and the huge family of the Church world-wide. All of this she did using a large collection of family bibles and little figures to  represent the folk in the family.

Kirsten talking with Alice and Eck during the service

John spoke about prayer and particularly about the way that prayer can be used to help healing which is something which all of us need. Prayer is what the Church does.

It was a good service, very well attended, and  afterwards all of us were invited to Kirsten and John’s home for a wonderful lunch. There were tables in the garden and in the house and an abundance of good food and great company, itself a picture of what Church is all about.

Our church plan for the future is based on the premise that some of our services will be conducted by members of our congregation. John and Kirsten have given us a grand start and reminded us of the  considerable talents we have within our congregation. We are looking forward to their next service.

One of several tables filled with happy lunchers after a very happy service!

Kirk Session Report on the Way Forward: our Mission Plan for 2018/19

Our Kirk Session and Congregational Board met on Wednesday 6th. June for its regular meeting. Our numbers have increased dramatically over the last year and the complement of our combined Board and  Session is now seventeen — surely a healthy sign for the future!

We heard that our finances continue to be sound and our income has exceeded our budgeted target. We heard too that exterior work on the building has been almost completed and we agreed to proceed with a  complete redecoration of the church during these   summer months.

Most of our meeting, however, was given over to discussing mission — one of the fundamental purposes of the Church. In preparation for this meeting an open-to-everyone meeting had been held in the home of one of our elders; a meeting which was attended by more than half of our congregation.

After talking about the way forward, a way forward which will demand real commitment from us all, we moved on to talk about what mission really means. It’s not, of course, something that we engage in from time to time — ‘Oh, let’s do mission this week!’ — but rather something which has to be at the heart of     everything we do. When we seek to involve new folk in our worship, that’s mission. When we talk with our friends and tell them how much our church and our faith means to us, that’s mission.

But there does need to be a framework of events to help us to keep mission right at the forefront of our consciousness and at our Session we discussed nine different ideas which had grown out of that initial meeting.

With limited space this article can only outline the proposals but each will be more fully fleshed out in coming editions of this Newsletter.

First of all we are going to have a special service on the third Sunday of September. It will be a Harvest service but it will be even more than that. Our working title is an ‘Everybody Here’ service. There will be special invitations and we will end the service with a picnic lunch and maybe even a late season bar-b-cue.

Our second proposal is to offer to run a course, not aimed at Church members, but at folk who don’t come to church at all. We’ll base it on the story of how our Bible came to us — it’s a really fascinating story and one which might be of real interest to folk who have not considered it before. We’ll use one of our member’s homes as a venue and we’ll see what happens!

Music, especially with young folk, is hugely important. We live in a gloriously rural setting, we have great musicians in our community, so we are going to plan a small afternoon and evening open-air family music festival to which we invite some of the folk who have already entertained us in church and share in a bar-b-cue.

Mission is also about developing ourselves. We are making plans to conduct a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and spend a year preparing for it with a monthly meeting learning about all we will see. We are possibly looking at January or February in 2020 and we hope other folk from the area will want to join us.

Many come to visit our church — making it more accessible and ensuring that visits can be really  informative is our fifth proposal. We are also conscious that our presbytery is struggling with lack of staff and extra large parishes so our sixth idea is to offer to help by taking on some of the load of visiting a larger area than we do at present.

Our seventh proposal is just a bit of fun. Our small congregation seems to have folk in it who travel the world. Next time folk set off we are going to ask them to take one of our Church postcards and have a picture taken holding it in an exotic location and then give us the picture. We’ll make up a board which shows just how widely we reach into our world.

Another idea about creating identity is to produce some church mugs. They will make splendid conversation starters when folks come to our homes for coffee.

Our final proposal is to start now to prepare for a summer fayre next year. We’ll be planning holiday stalls, a stall where everything on sale is of one colour, and we’ll be making up some funfair games and organising a tea tent.

Now these are just the sketchiest outlines of what exists as a five-page report but the important thing is that a discussion has now begun and we hope to begin to be seen by our community as a church which is really active, which has good things to say and exciting ways of saying them, and, of course, everything will centre around our Sunday morning worship every Sunday at 10.30 a.m. to which everyone is and always will be welcome. We would really love to know what you think of our plans.

Flower FestivalA display from last year’s Festival

Please Come to Our Flower Festival

After the success of our first Flower Festival last year, we are having our second festival this year. It will be held on Saturday 16th. and Sunday 17th. June and will run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and from 12 noon to 4 p.m. on Sunday.

Clare Fleming who is organising the Festival tells us that she is gathering historic facts about the role of Fogo Kirk in Christian worship and this information will be linked with the decorations throughout the church.

Refreshments will be served during the time that the Festival is on and everything will come to a climax with a Songs of Praise service on Sunday 17th. June at 4 p.m. to which, of course, everyone is invited.

If you have only heard of the changes which have been made to our beautiful church over the last year or so, and haven’t had an opportunity to see these for yourself, then why not plan to look in at our Flower Festival and see all that has been going on? We can promise that you will be made very welcome.

From the Minister’s DeskDane Sherrard

This is a joint edition for May and June. There wasn’t a great deal of special news to share in May and it may be that there is going to be too much news for June but I didn’t want to put out an edition which just seemed to be saying the same things over and again. It is true that things are going well for us and it is true that we are moving forward month by month but by now I expect that all of our readers know that.

In particular I wanted to be able to include the plans made at the Kirk Session on June 6th. These are  exciting times. We now have the Trustees in place for our Fogo Parish Church Community Trust. These are the people who we hope will eventually take  ownership of the Church on behalf of the community. It is an excellent team, eleven strong with one outside expert, Bob Kay, who has been Property Convener of the Presbytery of Duns for many years and is currently an assessor elder in our Kirk Session, and ten local trustees, six of whom live within the parish of Fogo and four very close by. Five are men and five are women and all are members of the congregation.

The complete list of Trustees is John Arthur, Liz Casey, Heather Cattanach, Clare Fleming, Olive     Gardiner, Gill Gibbens, Bob Kay, Chris Scott, Tom Thorburn, Fergus Torrance and Alexander Trotter.

Alexander Trotter will be the first chairman of the Trust, Olive Gardiner the secretary and Liz Casey the treasurer. At present the Trust is being registered as a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation with the Scottish Charity Regulator.

I should also tell you that we are trying to share the information in our Newsletter more widely than before — and with it the invitation to join us at worship any Sunday at 10.30 a.m. There is always a good crowd in church so you can count on being made welcome.

Plans are afoot for our next concert which will be in September. The date is not yet finalised, and will     include the flute quartet who played at our very first concert and whose return has been long anticipated. Our plans for next year include a Family Festival of Music building on what Heather and Harris have begun with their regular programme of concerts.

We now have our own church website. It can be found at www.fogokirk.org and information can be accessed there in between the times when our newsletter is published.

This next year is going to be an important one for us as we move from trying to establish a congregation and stabilise our building to setting out detailed plans about our worship, mission and education programmes for the future — our preliminary thoughts are included in our Kirk Session report on page three.