Our Business / Ministry

When are Worship Services held?

Each week there are three services of Holy Communion at St. Bede's

Sundays at     8 am Shorter said service from the Australian Prayer Book

Sundays at     9.30 am [Followed by a cuppa]
Eucharist/Communion with music
1st Sunday – Kids Service
2nd & 4th Sunday – Contemporary Eucharist
3rd & 5th Sunday – Traditional Eucharist

Wednesday    9.30 am


5.30 -6.30pm - on the last Sunday of the month
Semaphore DevOCEAN .
An informal, reflective service.

For Prayer and Reflection

Our Father…who always stands with the weak, the powerless,the poor, the abandoned, the sick,
the aged, the very young, the unborn, and those who, by victim of circumstance, bear the heat
of the day.
Who art in heaven…where everything will be reversed,where the first will be last, and the last will
be first, but where all will be well, and every manner of being will be well.
Hallowed be your name…may we always acknowledge your holiness, respecting that your ways
are not our ways, your standards are not our standards.  May the reverence we give your name pull
us out of the selfishness that prevents us from seeing the pain of our neighbour.
Your Kingdom come…help us to create a world where, beyond our own needs and hurts, we will
do justice, love tenderly, and walk humbly with you and each other.
Your will be done…open our freedom to let you in so that the complete mutuality that
characterises your life might flow through our veins and thus the life that we help generate may
radiate your equal love for all and your special love for the poor.
On earth as in heaven…may the work of our hands, the temples and structures we build in this
world, reflect the temple and structure of your glory so that the joy, graciousness, tenderness,
and justice of heaven will show forth within all of our structure on earth.
Give…life and love to us and help us to see always everything as a gift.  Help us to know that
nothing comes to us by right and that we must give because we have been given to.  Help us
realise that we must give to the poor, not because they need it, but because our own health
depends upon our giving to them.
Us…the truly plural us,  Give not just to our own but to everyone, including those who are very
different than the narrow us.  Give your gifts to all of us equally.
This day…not tomorrow.  Do not let us push things off into some indefinite future so that we can
continue to live justified lives in the face of injustice because we can make good excuses
for our inactivity.
Our daily bread…so that each person in the world may have enough food, enough clean water,
enough clean air, adequate health care, and sufficient access to education so as to have the
sustenance for a healthy life.  Teach us to give from our sustenance and not just from our surplus.
And forgive us our trespasses…forgive us our blindness towards our neighbour, our
self-preoccupation, our racism, our sexism, and our incurable propensity to worry only about
ourselves and our own.  Forgive us our capacity to watch the evening news and do nothing about it.
As we forgive those who trespass against us…help us to forgive those who victimise us. 
Help us to mellow out in spirit, to not grow bitter with age, to forgive the imperfect parents and
systems that wounded, cursed and ignored us.
And do not put us to the test…do not judge us only by whether we have fed the hungry, given
clothing to the naked, visited the sick, or tried to mend the system that victimised the poor. 
Spare us this test for none of us can stand before your gospel scrutiny.  Give us, instead, more
days to mend our ways, our selfishness and our systems.
But deliver us from evil…that is, from the blindness that lets us continue to participate in
anonymous systems within which we need not see who gets less as we get more.
Amen.


Affirmation of Faith
There is a God
at whose feet we may sit
and gathered there is love.
There is a quiet space for safe encounters
and wiser understandings for our learning,
a robe for the touching of our hand
to share healing grace from the body of Christ.
There is a place
near to feet that have walked our dusty ways
and moved in courage among our complexities,
felt our painful choices at the crossroads,
turned themselves reluctantly towards our harder paths
and formed footsteps ahead of us
towards a truer, braver, many-coloured life.
We will sit at the feet of our God.

 Dorothy McRae-McMahon, Prayers for Life's Particular Moments
(London: SPCK, 2001), p. 36.

Rich and Poor in the Global Village
We want the goods that unrestricted markets can bring (unrestricted in the sense that no one
other than the prosperous restricts them). But we have yet to come to terms with what the greater
part of humankind believes to be the corollary of this: that the prosperous will be seen as the
makers of poverty. In the global village, the one who becomes rich is seen as the thief of his
neighbour's goods. We will rightly say that this is a crass oversimplification. Free capital
movement benefits the expansion of  markets, and so benefits all producers; there is more space
for the producer to move into, more room for the small economy to grow.
But the response from the poorer economies will be stony-faced. Debt and its management
consume the energies of depressed economies, and often result in political regression and
instability; the great operate their own protectionist policies, and are able to  sustain them by the
prevailing protocols on intellectual property rights (the patenting by companies of regional
produce).  Global economics is impressive in theory as regards its potential for regenerating but
in reality it is seen as managed for the sake of those who are already victorious.

 Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust: Reflections on llth September and its aftermath.
(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2002), pp. 57-58.

Attachment?
Father Raymond tells the charming story of a little child whose mother was teaching him to pray. 
When he got to the part, `Lord, I surrender everything to thee, everything I own,' he abruptly broke
off and whispered to himself, `except my baby rabbit’.
All of us have our baby rabbits.  Sometimes it is an ugly thing, sometimes beautiful, sometimes
large, sometimes small; but we are more attached to it than to anything else.  But this is the thing
God asks of us and that he touches upon when we sincerely ask guidance of him.  God does not,
however, ask us to seek out our neighbour's little rabbits.

 Paul Tournier, Escape from Loneliness, trans. John S. Gilmour
(Lon­don: SCM Press, 1962), p. 111.