Services

​

​

​​

Regular events
 

​St Mary’s Community Café: Open every Saturday and Tuesday from 10am–12pm. Everyone is welcome.

• On Tuesdays, the Community Café hosts an arts and crafts table. Bring your own art or craft projects to work on, use donated materials to help create items for sale at future church events, or support initiatives such as knitted blanket squares. If you want to learn knitting or crochet, we can help. There’s plenty of time to chat too! If anyone has odd bits of wool or fabric they’d like to donate, these items would be very welcome.

• On the second Saturday of each month, there is an informal prayer meeting in the St Francis chapel at 9:30am, before the Community Café opens, with a particular focus on praying for the life of our church.

​​

The church is also open every Thursday 11:30am-1pm for Ignite. Everyone is most welcome to attend.

 

Upcoming events​

​

Lent Course sessions in March: There is a choice between daytime sessions at
St Mary’s Community Centre, Rylands Road on Tuesday mornings at 11:00am,
and evening sessions here at St Mary’s on Wednesday evenings at 7:30pm.
We’re finding out about ‘The Desert Fathers and Mothers’, a truly remarkable
group of people from over 1500 years ago who have continued to inspire
Christians ever since and reflecting on what they can teach us today about
following the way of Christ. The course is linked in with Lectio365, which is a
great resource for praying with the Bible day by day.

Sunday 8th March - Bring and Share Lunch for the Bishop of Dover: Join us
after the service, which Bishop Rose will lead, for a time of fellowship together
with our bishop over lunch. Please bring a contribution of food to share with
others if you can.

29th March – Palm Sunday: Palm Sunday marks the beginning of Holy Week,
which ends with Easter Day on 4th April. At St Mary’s, in accordance with the ancient traditions of the Church we hold special services on Maundy Thursday
(7.30pm), Good Friday (9.30pm) and Easter Eve (8.00pm), to help us draw
near to the heart of our faith – Jesus Christ, crucified and risen. It’s such a
powerful thing to travel through those three days together. If you haven’t
experienced it before, do consider making this your first year.

4th April–Easter Garden and Easter Crafts: making the Easter Garden is a
well-established tradition at St Mary’s, and we are planning to add some other
family craft activities this year. Please encourage any primary or pre-school
children you know to come along with their parents or grandparents from
10am! If you can help with preparing and / or supervising craft activities,
please speak to Jeremy (we have lots of ideas).

25th April–Ashford Christian Women: the next event is on April 25th at
Singleton Environment Centre, Wesley School Road, TN23 5LM. 8.30 - 11am
includes cooked Breakfast! The title is ‘No Mountain Immovable’ and the
speaker Becky Waterman, talking on seeing the miracle working God in
everyday life. Book on line @ashfordchristianwomen.net, or see Lynne Miller
for further details.

Sunday 7th June – Lunch at the London Beach Hotel: Following the great
success of our 1st Church Family lunch at London Beach Hotel almost
18months ago, we are planning another Sunday lunch at the LBH on June 7th
so please save the date and join us! All proceeds from the lunch (excluding
room hire) will be given back to us, so it's a great and enjoyable way to
fundraise for our Church. More details coming next month!