Welcome to the blog!

Welcome to the Parish of Aberdare St Fagan blog!

I am Fr Richard Green, the Vicar of the parish, and you will probably be reading quite a bit from me on here, but I'm hoping other members of our parish may contribute as well.

The idea for having a blog came to me when I found myself - quite by surprise - actually missing writing the monthly Vicar's letter for the parish magazine! Normally we print a magazine once a month, but publication has been suspended during lockdown. Despite sometimes feeling anxious as the deadline approaches each month, I actually quite enjoy doing the Vicar's Letter. But when lockdown started, and the magazine stopped, I did allow myself to think "well at least that's one less thing to do!".

But then, as I've said, I started to miss it. Some while back I adopted the practice of doing a "series of series" of articles, if you get my drift. So, I would choose a topic and do a series of articles on that theme over several months. When that came to end, I'd choose another, and so on. My first series was the letters of the New Testament; then I looked at the Lord's Prayer. The latest set of articles was on the Nicene Creed. As with the Lord's Prayer, I was examining it a section at a time each month. I had got to "For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried", and then lockdown happened; and my series of articles came to an abrupt end.

So, it was when I started to miss writing the monthly letter that I had the idea for the blog. "Why not continue the series of articles, but online", I thought to myself. The beauty of blogs is that readers can comment on what I've written, so there can be some interaction. I've even started thinking about what series to do after the current one, so I thought I better get on and finish what I started!

What I propose to do is re-publish as blog posts the previous articles on the Creed, so you can see where we left off. These will appear quite rapidly, since they are already on my computer! Then, hopefully once a month, I will take up where I left off back in March.

Of course, the blog doesn't just have to be a substitute for the monthly Vicar's letter. It can be a forum for other pieces of writing which perhaps don't quite fit the short-and-snappy social media posts. As I said at the start, I'd like to think other members of the parish would want to contribute items to the blog - just let me know if you do. And finally, of course, the parish magazine will one day - hopefully fairly soon - return in its traditional format. But the blog can live on after this happens, and become yet another way in which we can communicate with our parishioners, friends and followers.