About St Peter's Church, Church Langton, Leicestershire
St Peter's church is set in the village of Church Langton, in south Leicestershire, near to the town of Market Harborough.
Worship is Church of England (Anglican). St Peter's is one of the churches forming the Benefice of the Langtons and Shangton in the Diocese of Leicester.
St Peter's serves three villages, Church Langton, West Langton and East Langton and has friends and visitors from all over.
We love to meet new people and visitors. Everyone is welcome! Contact us on info@churchlangton.org.uk and follow our story on www.churchlangton.org.uk
Next weekend sees the first Sunday of Advent when Christians anticipate and remember the birth of Jesus. Advent is a time of quiet contemplation and prayer for four weeks before the festival of Christmas itself. It has its own hymns and carols such as O Come Emanuel, which reflect this beautiful time. Christmas, at the end of December is the most joyous season as we all know and love, with feast and song as the news of Jesus’s birth brings hope and light!
This December, we are delighted to offer worship and activities to reflect both Advent and Christmas in all our villages in the Langtons and Welham Benefices.
Advent and Christmas Services for Langton and Shangton and Welham Benefices for December 2024
We have produced a Christmas card with all the details. The card will be delivered to the parishioners of St Peter’s Church this weekend, but for friends further afield, there is a PDF to download below, with all the services listed, along with a Christmas message from our Lay Incumbent, Maxine Johnson.
We are delighted that this year’s card features a remarkable photograph of the church by Melissa Johnston, taken earlier this year with an unprecedented appearance in the night sky of the Aurora Borealis. Thank you Melissa for allowing us to use your lovely image.
St Peter’s Church Aurora Sky by Melissa JohnstonChristmas message 2024
We hope you can join us for some of the services but also wish our friends and followers here who live further away, a very peaceful Advent season and a joyful Christmas when it comes. Thank you 🙏
Smiles were all around when a certain email popped into our in box recently. What is it all about? You might well ask! St Peter’s now qualifies as a Bronze Eco Church. After filling in questionnaires on the Arocha UK website, we discussed our care for the churchyard, the flowers and the creatures that inhabit it, as well as the care for our building and our hopes for its future use by our community. We applied to Arocha Uk and were delighted to receive our Bronze Eco Award. We made promises to help protect God’s Earth and its creatures from extinction by reducing pollution, landfill and food waste. This promise applies to St Peter’s Church building and churchyard but also to us as individual members of the church community.
Join us on our Eco Journey
There are a number of initiatives we aim to support at the start of our Eco journey. The churchyard is already a haven to wildlife, (see the example below) but we want to install bug houses and bird boxes and hedgehog houses go encourage more. Can you help us make them or install them? If so, we’d love to hear from you. Contact us here by email or reply to this post on our Facebook Page.
See below, just one example of the extraordinary natural habitat found in the churchyard. These tiny fungi form an almost magical landscape and appear in the autumn.
The fairy village – tiny fungi growing in St Peter’s Church yard
Just One Thing
We pray to encourage our community to join us in pledging to do “JUST ONE THING” however small to help restore the Earth’s balance. Lifestyle Change does not have to be massive it can be as small as not using paper handkerchiefs, reducing the use of cling film and single use plastic such as bottled water or it could be to set the washing machine to a lower temperature.
Could you think about making a pledge and letting us know? We’d love to hear what you and your family have decided to change in your household. Every step we all take, however small, makes a huge difference.
Fair Trade Produce
The use of Fair Trade produce is so important to ensure that farmers in third world countries have a fair salary and have good working conditions. Would you consider buying Fair Trade produce for your pledge? We want to promote the use of Fair Trade produce in St Peter’s especially during our much-loved Cream Tea Sundays.
Time for tea!
What is YOUR Carbon Footprint?
Finally, one last thought to ponder is to check your own carbon footprint on the website CreationCare.org.uk where you can get your own personalised carbon footprint number. Use this number to update every six months or whenever you have time. What a great thing to do with your children and grandchildren by introducing them to carry on the legacy of caring for God’s Earth.
Visit St Peter’s church and churchyard
St Peter’s is open every day for contemplation and quiet prayer. It welcomes you for those moments when you need a quiet space to get away from the pressures of everyday life or just for somewhere to sit for a while. St Peter’s is always there for all.
Creation is given as a gift to us all and we share responsibility to protect and nurture it.
Today, we gathered at St Peter’s church and the War Memorial to remember the fallen from our villages from the First World War and to reflect upon the loss of precious lives in all conflicts before and since. The current conflicts in Ukraine and Israel continue relentlessly with no end in sight.
It was a grey and somewhat bleak day, after a spell of almost two weeks with very little sunshine; somehow appropriate for very bleak times in the wider world.
Our incredible flower arranging team transformed the church with a variety of arrangements. Large solemn sentinels by the altar contrasted with tiny posies of poppies which caught the eye brightening hidden corners.
While we sang and prayed; listened to readings, held silence for the Last Post and Reveille and listened to the names of our lost young men, the little poppies captured my thoughts.
Poppies are the epitome of calm after chaos, bringing beauty after unimaginable ugliness.. Tender fragility following brutal cruelty.
The tiny field poppy symbolises hope as it grows from disturbed ground. Its seeds can lie dormant for hundreds of years until the earth turns… but its blood red petals remind us of the horror and sacrifice. And a field of little poppies remind us of the millions who died.
St Peter's Church, Church Langton 