Young and old

To Bluegrove Care Home in Southwark Park Road for our monthly service. A good number of residents joined us to sing their favourite hymns (they chose All Things Bright & Beautiful; Amazing Grace; Praise to the Lord Almighty, and I chose What a friend we have in Jesus to fit in with the theme of the talk, which was based on Jesus calming the storm from Mark 4).

Bluegrove is a wonderfully bright and cheery home, with a friendly welcoming staff to match, who always join in with our services, and it is good to have this link with them (also with nearby Rock Grove).

Later it was back to St James's Church for a visit from a year 5 class at St James's School. We climbed up to the very top of the church to see the Pauper's Galleries (now hidden from view), where the poorest of the poor would perch to view the services from their location just below the ceiling. We descended to the depths of the crypt to see where Bermondsey families sheltered during the Blitz.

We went to the font - where one of the teaching assistants has been baptised as a baby - to learn about baptism and do a mock baptism (Any volunteers, I asked? Thirty hands went up).

Several of the children had themselves been baptised at St James's and at least one of them said their parents had been married there.

And we learnt about the Holy Communion and the children had the chance to handle the silver Chalice (above), Paten, and Flagon (below), given to the church when it was built in 1829, and used every week since as we have eaten the bread, drunk the wine, and done 'this in remembrance' of him.