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It was great to see so many in the church last Sunday. My own calculation was that thirty persons were present at the service. While we were about to finish the service inside the church, a group of children and parents from our Sunday school were heading to Merisatamanranta for a picnic. For a moment it felt like a normal Sunday!
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You are welcome to attend services in the Mikael Agricola Church throughout the summer. Many will be on leave and for most Sundays there will be no choir. The services in Espoo will resume later.
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I attended the Diocesan Synod yesterday. I have been the Clerical Vice-President of that synod for the last six years. The experience has been good and given me an opportunity to closely follow what is happening in other parts of Europe. We are a unique chaplaincy; whilst many historical Anglican churches in Europe (they are called chaplaincies because of their history) have magnificent buildings which have offered them a shelter and a home, we have learned to live together with another church and are borrowing their building. This has been a blessing to us but it also very easily creates a feeling that we have not really rooted in the place. St Nicholas, Helsinki is made of the people who worship and work with us. You will find in this newsletter, and on our website, different ways of how you might volunteer within our church. Please have a look of these and consider what might be your way of serving.
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SERVICES
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All of our Services can be viewed live on Facebook, or you can click this link to
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SUNDAY 13th JUNE - 2nd SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY
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10am Sung Eucharist at Mikael Agricola Church followed by coffee in the courtyard
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2 Corinthians 5.6-10, 14-17
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THURSDAY 10th JUNE - EVENING PRAYER
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Join us for a calm and reflective moment in the week, every Thursday at 6.00pm. Click here to join us on zoom: Thursday Evening Prayer
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Meeting ID: 853 6618 2957
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Rotas for Welcoming, Reading lessons, Leading intercessions, and providing Tech Support are up and running on our website! All volunteers much appreciated and needed! Other rotas for coffee and card selling will go up once we are back to using the crypt. Please consider signing up for one or more dates over the next couple of months by visiting the link on our website. You will receive a reminder on email two days before the service.
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Sunday School & Youth Group:
We had a wonderful Sunday School picnic last Sunday! The weather couldn’t have been better and the kids had lots of fun playing frisbee, football and jumping rope. It was a joyful morning in each other’s company!
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We love this photo of Father Tuomas jumping rope with the kids - thank you Lia Edwards for capturing the moment so brilliantly!
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Sunday School and Youth Group are on Summer break.
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We resume in August, hopefully in the Church. crypt
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With the current improvement in the situation in Helsinki, the growing number of vaccinated people, and the easing of government restrictions, I would like to extend my earnest welcome to all members of the choir to return to sing at morning services at Mikael Agricolan kirkko. Although the summer holidays for the choir are fast approaching, there are two Sundays remaining (13.6 and 20.6) where the full choir has an opportunity to sing before the holidays.
Everyone is most welcome to sing in the choir if you are comfortable to do so considering the still present pandemic situation. It is my hope that the choir will continue to grow, flourish, work and sing together in the spirit of musical joy and worship once we return on August 1st.
Wishing you all a safe and happy summer!
Erik Johannes Riekko,
Director of Music
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Saying Farewell to the Murray Family!
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Our dear friends Cat, Andrew and Reuben are leaving for the UK! We are very sad to see them go as they have been such loyal and longstanding members of our congregation. Cat has helped numerous times with after Church coffee and served our chaplaincy as a Council member and Safeguarding Officer. Cat, Andrew and Reuben have also been familiar faces in our Church choir for some time now and will be much missed. Our congratulations to Reuben on graduating from school, he starts college in the Autumn. Andrew plans to commute from the UK (when possible!) and Cat will be working as a SENco. Our love and prayers go with them, and if you would like to wish them well in person they will be at Church regularly before they leave on 18th July.
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Hello from Peter Knight
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Greetings again from sunny Puistola! We are fast approaching midsummer but there is much you can still do if you fancy it. But first a warning (don't run for cover!) SAFE SUMMER GARDENING! What I say now also applies to balcony gardeners. PROTECT YOURSELVES! UV radiation levels are likely to be high over the next two or three months. That's very good news for plant growth but potentially hazardous for us unless we adopt precautionary measures. Here are my tips:
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1 Wise Clothing. Naked gardening is not advised! Minimize exposure of skin. Use collared shirts not T-shirts. Wear a WIDE BRIMMED HAT! Shorts are comfortable but use the long leggy below the knee type.
2 Robust Footwear. Trainers could be ok for say mowing the lawn but grab strong walking shoes for digging/weeding. Dealing with taller undergrowth and especially ditches jump into your WELLIES
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(see tip 4)
3 Suncream Smother all remaining exposed skin with a good quality lotion esp. nose, neck, back of ears, back of knees
4 Beware of ticks/punkki. They can carry the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi which causes borreliosis otherwise known as Lyme disease. Only the wee fellows the nymphs are harder for the naked eye to spot. Borreliosis is well treatable with antibiotics when detected early. Only less than 20% of the ticks carry Borrelia. TBE, tick borne encephalitis, is still fairly rare in Finland, mainly SW coastal strip, but there is a vaccine available against TBE. So check yourself regularly. Wear your wellies in longer undergrowth. Don't panic! I've been endlessly gardening/farming in Finland for 35years and found one or two on me in all that time. I'm so repulsive!!
5 Gardening strategy/Timing. Keep out of the sun! Follow the shade round the garden. Evenings can be sublime and satakieli/nightingale serenades me daily. Remember to drink sufficient fluids!
6. Keep all garden tools well maintained and safely stored away from children. Have any of you enjoyed stepping on a prostrate rake?
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WATERING STRATEGIES
We have been fortunate this year with rainfall. Usually spring here can be very dry and dusty. My precipitation records show 47mm for April, 114 for May and 9mm for June 1-10. This has given us a great start to the season and I reckon the lawns have never been greener. Regarding lawns frankly I don't irrigate them during dry spells. Your grass is deep-rooted and very resilient and will always come back after autumnal rains. Of course you need to water where you have just sown a new area (like I did last week for Brenda) at least until the grass seedlings are 2-3cm tall. Amuse yourselves prizing out the dandelions and other larger broad-leaved weeds like plantains. Garden centres stock various extracting devices. Mercifully most weedkillers are now banned and are gone. However Roundup/active ingredient glyphosateis still ubiquitously available. DO NOT USE IT ANYWHERE.
It is best to water in the evening or early morning, the latter being preferable a) for potatoes about to crop - which are prone to blight/perunarutto and b) where snails/slugs (disgusting thugs!) are a danger at night eg. your newly planted marrows and beans. I'm trying a new ultra cunning anti-snail plan (learnt from Peter J) using a carpet fortress of pine/spruce needles like barbed wire to impede their slimy routeways. Hoho!
Huge gallons of soil moisture evaporate every sunny day, causing what we call soil moisture deficit (SMD) So to reduce SMD you need to cover all your bare surfaces with 'litter' which can be rotted compost around your beloved plants, grass mowings, leaves, extracted weeds (eg leskenlehti/coltsfoot and rhubarb leaves -very large coverage) or even newspaper.
Final tip: Now is the time to cut deciduous hedges like hawthorn which is what I did yesterday. I got smothered in aphids/kirvojawhich only tickle you (but who is laughing?). Aphids can do harmful damage to young growth esp on currant bushes. I advocate using mantysuopa as a safe spray or at least a drenching from a pressure hose/painepesuri. Avoid any insecticides.
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Have fun! Best wishes from Peter K
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Strawberry Tiramisu!
Thank you to Jane Mayhew-Smith for sending us our first dessert recipe of the Summer!
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If you have a recipe you would be willing to share then please email it to Sarah at office@anglican.fi.
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Strawberry juice:
2 cups/330 g chopped strawberries
1 teaspoon lemon juice
1 tablespoon sugar
½ cup (120 g) cold water
Cream mix:
225 g mascarpone cheese
220 g full cream
1.5 tablespoons icing sugar
20-30 Italian lady finger biscuits (savoiardi)
1 cup/170g sliced strawberries
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Make the strawberry juice: first clean and chop the strawberries and sprinkle with sugar. Add to a blender with the lemon juice and water and blend until smooth. Put in a shallow bowl and set aside.
Make the cream mixture: Beat the sugar, mascarpone and cream in a bowl until thick and creamy, around 5 minutes.
Assemble the dessert:
Dip each biscuit in the strawberry juice and place in a layer in a shallow dish to cover the base. (The biscuits should be softened by the juice but not completely soggy). Cover the biscuits with half of the cream mixture then with a layer of sliced strawberries. Cover with a second layer of biscuits dipped in strawberry juice. Cover with the rest of the cream mixture. Leave in the fridge for at least 4 hours, or overnight. Add fresh strawberries on the top, then eat!
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Philately Goes to Church (Part 1), By David Bullivant
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It was a typical Helsinki June Sunday. The hot sun streamed in through the high windows and those at the rear of the Chapel, at the head of the stairs, had been prised open in the forlorn hope of making breathing by the packed congregation possible. Men ran a finger round inside their shirt collars and the ladies in their summer frocks fretted about the amount of deodorant they had applied to overcome their glow. The final notes of the hymn died away and the Chaplain took the step into the pulpit and faced the packed worshipers, who expectantly awaited his usual erudite words of wisdom.
He reached into a pocket and brought forth a packet of Marlboro cigarettes, and stood it on the edge of the woodwork in front of him, and smiled his familiar smile.
He opened his mouth to start the sermon saying, "Judging from the amount taken up in the weekly collections, most of you consider my worth to you individually as a single packet of cigarettes." Shock-horror flew up and down the packed pews adding to the already supercharged heat! Some may even have fainted. He continued to tell us as it was - Church finances could not remain balanced considering his modest income and what we, the people, provided on the plate weekly. He suggested that despite the heat we should put our thinking caps on and come up with some ideas as to how this matter could be redressed, in addition to digging more deeply into our personal pockets and purses. Various wheezes were aired, and then David stood to speak.
" Most of us toss money into our waste bin regularly - the stamp-bearing envelopes in which our post arrives daily." This was in the days when people actually wrote letters and bought stamps, the postal authority provided a service and the world ran smoothly on familiar, well established bearings. "Why don't we all collect our stamped envelopes and give them to someone here who will sell the stamps on a commercial basis and add the funds so raised to the Church coffers?" Gasps all round as others may have fainted.
" Right David," beamed the Chaplain, "you've got a job - see to it!"
The moral of the sermon may have concerned the dangers of standing up to be counted, but from that day on stamps featured in my life and in funds raised.
It was discovered that among our large congregation there were then several keen philatelists, and some knew of friends, family members far and wide, neighbours who were known 'stampers', and names and addresses were eagerly provided, and also details of the individual collectors interests - stamp collecting was not simply a hobby of grabbing every stamp that came your way, but it meant specialisation - this person was interested in Finnish stamps from the thirties, that person collected stamps with fire engines on them or some other theme, someone else in stamps bearing a certain type of cancellation . . . .and so on and so forth. I soon had a number of 'buyers' and was able to meet market needs! Also at that time there were philately dealers who had shops, and some of them were happy to pay for my 'left overs'. Hard as it may be to understand, at that time there were no computers, no video games, no instant gratification . . . hobbies took time and effort, required patience and devotion, and collecting things was popular - stamps, of course, and matchboxes, books of matches, post cards, Toby Jugs, 'Green Shield Stamps', coupons when buying petrol . . . . even the tax office had a hobby, collecting taxes!
My own stamp collecting benefited, although Manx stamps remained a rarity in Helsinki. I discovered that my son found sorting stamps each Sunday afternoon when Daddy came back from church fascinating, and philately became a father-son interest as he read off the names of the countries on the stamps and helped sort them into packets according to customer wants. One day he piped up, "Daddy, where's TOPAY?" We later had a customer who collected only those surcharge stamps issued by the British Post Office. . . . .
One day we went together to the Customs Post Office located in Tennispalatsi in Helsinki, to collect a parcel, and I imagined that the surly Customs official would take pity on us when seeing this small boy . . . in my dreams! The parcel was produced and the really unpleasant official, with an everlasting cigarette hanging from his lower lip demanded to know what the parcel contained so that the pertinent duty could be levied. I suggested that the parcel was a birthday present for my son, send by a loving aunt in Britain . . . he smiled, and then asked if we collected stamps! I confirmed that we did - he pointed to the stamps on the parcel and asked if we already had them in our collection, and before I had reached the 's' of 'yes', his hand darted out of his pocket and a small pair of scissors circumnavigated the block of stamps and they, and the scissors, had vanished. The parcel was pushed across the counter to us with a smile. He then pressed into my hand a card showing his name and address, and he mumbled, "Come and see me tomorrow at eighteen hundred hours - now off you go."
Visiting him as requested revealed a totally different person, and changed our lives. He lived in a three roomed flat in Munkkiniemi, and all those rooms had shelving fixed to the walls, even in the room in which he slept. He had stamp albums by the hundred, catalogues - very important, those - and shelves of prize cups and medallions he had won at various stamp exhibitions from all over the world! He spoke mostly to Thomas, asking him how we stored our collection, and he went on to explain that it was no good starting with an exercise book - start with a proper commercial album for displaying the best examples, and stock books for the also rans. Start as you intend to continue, there's a right way and a wrong way. Amazing lesson. He said he was going off to Spain for a months' holiday the following week, and he showed us his wallet. In it were three stamps.
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"That," he added, "is my money for my month of high living in Spain." At that time there were very tight restrictions on how much money you could take out of Finland for your holidays . . . . no restrictions on a few stamps you could easily sell at your destination. He went on to explain that when he retired, he was going to buy a house in Spain and live out his days there. He pointed to the shelves groaning under the weight of his stamps. He smiled and added that when he died, his off-spring, that he hadn't heard from for years, would break into his flat to grab their inheritence from the shelves, but they'd find the shelves empty!
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Read Part 2 in next week's newsletter!
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COVID guidelines
when coming to worship at St Nicholas
- Before entering the Church, please use the hand disinfectant provided or wash your hands in the bathrooms.
- All those joining in worship (clergy and laity) should wear a face mask to reduce transfer of respiratory droplets into the environment. Those who have a formal part in the liturgy (presiding, preaching, reading, interceding) may remove their face mask when they are actually speaking. Please be careful where masks are placed to avoid cross-contamination. Face masks are available at the entrance.
- The Vergers are here to ensure your safety and those of other members of the congregation by overseeing the seating arrangements and providing guidance during the service. They will ask you for a phone number when you arrive at Church, this is for purely for contact tracing.
- The seating arrangements have been planned to ensure that a two-metre distance is maintained. If you are here with your family or individuals who live with you in the same household, you are welcome to sit together.
- Should you feel the need to cough or sneeze, please use a tissue. Used tissues can be disposed of in the bin at the entrance. It is recommended that each individual or each family carry a small bottle of hand sanitizer.
- At the Peace, please maintain a safe distance from other members of the congregation. The sign itself can take the form of a wave or smile instead of shaking hands.
- Holy Communion will be administered in the form of the wafer only. The wafer will be administered by the Chaplain and you will be guided at this point in the service by the Vergers. If you wish to receive Holy Communion then please extend your hands, with face covering in place. You may lower or unloop your face mask to consume the consecrated bread and then replace the face mask before moving back to your place in the congregation.
- The Vergers will ensure that safe distancing is maintained when leaving the Church, please wait for their signal that it is safe to leave.
- Contactless giving is available at the entrance/exit. Offerings can also be placed in a basket at the exit when leaving the service.
- Please note that there is no post-service gathering for tea and fellowship in the Crypt.
- Online Sunday School finishes on 30th May and resumes in early August. At this point we are not permitted to hold Sunday School in the crypt.
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Those with symptoms of Covid-19 or other respiratory or flu-like illness, or an elevated temperature, or who are particularly vulnerable to infection should not attend public services, but join our online worship.
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Annual Chaplaincy Meeting - Sunday 29th August 2021
Please remember that in order to stand for election or to vote at the meeting you need to be on the Electoral Roll. If you added your name to the electoral roll back in 2019 then you don't need to put your name down again until 2025, but if you are unsure or would like to check then please don't hesitate to get in touch with Sarah in the office.
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To be added to the Electoral Roll and/or to stand for one of our lay roles then please fill out the relevant form and return it before the ACM. You can now pick up nomination and electoral roll forms at the back of Church or download them from our website: https://www.anglican.fi/registration-forms/
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SAVE THE DATE!
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Outdoor Service in Mikael Agricola Courtyard
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Back to School All-Age Service
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Annual Chaplaincy Meeting after the service
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PRAY WITH US
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deepen our faithfulness to you
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Scottish Episcopal Church: Diocese of Argyll and the Isles, Vacancy
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Church of Ireland: Diocese of Connor, Bishop George Davison
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Evangelical Lutheran Church in Denmark: Diocese of Lolland-Falster, Bishop Marianne
Gaarden
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SUPPORTING US
In these difficult times your continued support is greatly appreciated and if possible we would ask you to consider donating towards our ongoing costs by clicking here to be directed to our easy Donate buttons or by means of a bank transfer using the details below:
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Suomen Anglikaaninen Kirkko (The Anglican Church in Finland)
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IBAN: F173 3131 1000 3282 07
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Father Tuomas Mäkipää (050-3099132)
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[Please use the contact emails provided]
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