Welcome to Shaw Church
The Parish of St Mary’s Shaw cum Donnington
We are a community of Christians bringing the Good News of God’s love to everyone in the parish, through Worship, Prayer, Teaching, and Serving.
We invite you to come and join us as we gather to worship God on Sundays at 10am, or in any of the other things we have going on.
Shaw cum Donnington lies to the north of Newbury in Berkshire, and St Mary’s Church is in the middle of the parish, just to the East of the A339.
You can find more about us and what is going on through this website, and do get in touch with the Church Office if there’s anything we can help you with or if you would like more information.
A word for the week
- What do you know?
Well, what do you know? It’s a surprisingly tricky question to answer. You could list a bunch of indisputable facts, except that even things like Grass is Green raises questions of what constitutes Grass and whether the brown grass of summer is really green. 1+1=2 is another obvious answer, but even defining ‘1’ isn’t as easy as you might think.
We send children to school in the expectation that they will know more at 16 than they did at 5, but most would agree that Thomas Gradgrind’s Facts and nothing but Facts approach (Dickens’ Hard Times) is inadequate.
Knowledge comes in different forms: Facts (things we can know are true) is one; how to use Facts (we might call it Wisdom) is another; but what about knowing a person? That’s quite different; and there is knowledge that human ingenuity, wisdom, experience, and learning cannot discover, and this is where God’s revelation comes to us. Ultimately, it’s about God wanting us to know Him. As Jesus said, “Now, this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ.” John 17:3.
So, maybe I began with the wrong question. Not What do you know? but Who do you know?
Raymond.