Come along to our Holy Cross fete, a fabulous community event with food, goods and fun!
10am-3pm Saturday 18 November
Enjoy scones and tea in the morning, and sit in the sun listening to live music for lunch while enjoying food from around the world.
Pick up repurposed treasures from our bookstall, clothes and famous white elephant, and get ready for Christmas with handmade crafts, jams, gifts, cards and beautiful decorations.
Let your kids have fun on the jumping castle, kids’ games and face painting, then end the day with gelato, cake and lemonade.
Join Holy Cross, the Good Faith Choir and the PNG Perovata Singers of Canberra in celebrating Christmas in July and the Coming of the Light, from 5.15pm 1st July.
5.15pm Firepit, kids’ games and marshmallows
6pm Carols for Winter Christmas and the Coming of the Light
7pm Christmas Feast with traditional foods from Australia, PNG and around the world
The North Canberra Nativity Festival is back for a second year running! Holy Cross is proud to co-host an exhibition of over 200 nativity displays and Community Carols by Candlelight with our friends at St Margaret’s and Holy Rosary.
Thursday 10th-Sunday 13th December Exhibition 10am-5pm every day
Sunday 13th December 6.30pm Community BBQ 7.30pm Carols by Candlelight
On 19-20 September, Holy Cross Anglican Church and St Margaret’s Uniting Church, Hackett, are running a community sustainability festival, as part of our joint churches Carbon Action Project. This is a COVIDSafe event, and is open to all.
Saturday
12.00 noon to 12.20 pm. Welcome to Country by Aunty Vi Sheridan
12.25 to 1.00 pm. Australia’s Ambassador for the Environment and head climate negotiator, Jamie Isbister in conversation with local writer and journalist, Toni Hassan
1.05 pm to 1.35 pm. Brook Clinton from Capital Scraps Composting on “The science of composting”
2.05 pm to 2.45 pm. Mia Swainson from Zero Waste on “How to halve your household waste”
3pm to 4pm. ACT Candidates’ Forum run by students from Dickson College, with candidates for Kurrajong, including Elizabeth Lee and Shane Rattenbury. To book for this event please go to: https://www.trybooking.com/book/event?eid=659164
Stalls by Society, Environment and Economy (SEE) Change, Canberra Seed Savers, Switched on cycling, ENJO & Women’s Climate Congress.
12 noon to 4 pm. Photography exhibition with photos from lockdown
4.30 pm to 6 pm. Concert with Lucy Sugerman (The Voice / National Folk Festival Youth Ambassador 2020) and local bands including Northbourne Flats and Pig Dog. To book for this free concert go to: https://www.trybooking.com/654789
Sunday
9.30am: Ecumenical Creation Service outdoors under our flowering cherry tree
Holy Cross are proud to partner with Holy Rosary and St Margaret’s to cohost the North Canberra Nativity Festival with over 200 nativity displays and events all weekend.
This week I am exploring the second in an occasional series entitled “The Language of Worship”. At Holy Cross we are blessed with a Christian heritage of words and music written over more than 1000 years. Learning more about the songs we sing helps us to appreciate the diversity of God’s abundant creativity, in which we all share.
“All Creatures Of Our God and King“, based on the 13th century hymn Laudato sia Dio mio Signore by Francis of Assisi (written in Italian at a time when most church worship was in Latin), was written by English Anglican priest William Henry Draper for a children’s Pentecost service in about 1910. The chorale tune was published by German Jesuit Friedrich Spee in 1623, and re-harmonised for the English Hymnal in 1906 by Ralph Vaughan Williams.
“O Thou Who Camest From Above“, a hymn to the Holy Spirit, is one of 6,500(!) hymns written by Charles Wesley (1707-1788), Anglican priest and co-founder of Methodism with his brother John Wesley. The tune “Hereford” was written many years later by his grandson Samuel Sebastian Wesley, an Anglican organist and composer. Charles Wesley had a remarkable gift of putting deep theological truths into memorable poetry, at a time when many Christians were illiterate: Methodists learned theology by singing it.
Geoff Bullock, an ABC cameraman from Sydney, experienced a powerful conversion in 1978 and co-founded Hills Christian Life Centre (later Hillsong) in 1983, where he wrote “The Power of Your Love (I)“. Bullock left Hillsong after burnout and marriage breakdown in the 1990s. He subsequently published “The Power of Your Love (II)“, changing the lyrics to emphasise God’s gracious and unmerited forgiveness, and this is the version we’re singing today.
Melbourne vicar Elizabeth J. Smith (b.1956) is known for her modern hymns with inclusive language. She says she wrote “God gives us a future” as a curate, partly out of frustration at congregation members who were reluctant to learn new songs! The jaunty tune “Camberwell” is by English Anglican priest John Brierley, a member of the “20th Century Church Light Music Group” in the 1950s (along with Patrick Appleford, the author of “Living Lord”).