Today was Easter Sunday, a day when Christian churches celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. At Trinity Church in Abingdon, there was a model of the empty tomb – created for Experience Easter, an event staged by Trinity Learning and visited by lots of schools before Easter.

Easter is a movable feast, celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the Spring Equinox.

For Trinity, the Easter Sunday service was celebrated at Trinity Church, but the congregation has moved about during the last few days of Holy Week.

Maundy Thursday – 7:00 pm – Abingdon Baptist Church

Good Friday – 10:00am at Trinity Church
12 noon – Church in Abingdon United Service in the Market Place

Holy Saturday – 8:00 pm – St Michael and All Angels’ Church, Abingdon

It doesn’t stop there. On Sunday, 23rd April, the Trinity congregation are joining All Saints Methodist Church in Abingdon.

At Christchurch in Northcourt Road, the day started with an event for all ages with different scenes from Holy Week, starting with the crowd welcoming Jesus on a donkey and ending in the crucifixion of Jesus.

The Church in Abingdon met at the Library for a Walk along the precinct.
This ended at the Market Place for a short united service led by Revd Paul Smith. The following video includes the childhood favourite There Is a Green Hill Far Away.

Thomas Leach moved to Abingdon with his young family and opened a shop in Bath Street in 1900. He was a printer and sold books and stationery.

The Leach family went to Trinity Church and had a big influence. Thomas was a lay preacher and preached at Trinity and many free churches in Abingdon and surrounding villages. He also worked for the temperance cause and preached a famous sermon on temperance at Trinity in November 1909, where he calculated if the £22,500 spent on drink in Abingdon in 1908 were saved for three years, two hundred families could be taken from the unsanitary courts of Ock Street and moved rent free to good houses.

Norman, the youngest of his sons, died at sea in 1918, a wireless operator on the S.S. Arka, sunk by a German Submarine. William was badly injured in the trenches and died fairly young.

Two other brothers were well known in Abingdon and at Trinity Church. Frederick managed the printing works, while Victor managed the Bath Street shop. The printing expanded and moved from the back of the Bath Street shop to Ock Street in 1937.

The firm was well known for its clerical printing and had a dog-collared cleric as a logo for its clerical business. Leach’s offering envelopes were well known among all denominations, and how many church people heard of the town Abingdon-on-Thames.

Frederick was remembered at Trinity as being kind and generous. He produced and distributed Trinity News free of charge. He gave generously to surrounding churches and to the elderly and sick children.

Victor was a choirmaster at Trinity and a founding member of the Abingdon Music Society. In 1959 he laid the foundation stone of All Saints Methodist Church. He was also involved in the renovation and modernisation of Trinity Church, moving the organ and later reordering the church, replacing pews with seats.

References:
1. History of Trinity (Wesleyan) Methodist Church by D.B.Tranter.
2) Information by Jonathon Leach at https://www.abingdonfirstworldwar.uk/leach.
3) A Oxford Mail article when the Leach printing business moved from Ock Street https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/2091421.new-chapter-print-firm-illustrious-past/.

Thank you to St Helens and St Katherine’s for the ecclesiastical publisher’s advert. The other advert came from The Abingdon Free Press on the British Newspaper Archive in 1906.

This morning at Trinity Church in Abingdon we celebrated 50 years since the founding of the United Reformed Church or URC. The URC was created by the union of the Presbyterian Church of England and the Congregational Church in England and Wales.

The Congregational Church in Abingdon was where Ask now is.

Timeline
1700 – Erection of the first Congregational meeting house in the sheep market. Most of this still stands today and was a building about 40 feet square. The roof was upheld by two ships’ masts.

1862 – The Congregational Church was extended in the Square in 1862. Part of the old meeting house became a schoolroom and part was incorporated into the new church sanctuary. Three cottages were taken down and rebuilt in Spring Road to make more room.

1968 – The Congregational Church closed its building in the town centre and moved in for joint services with Trinity Church, Conduit Road, on an informal basis.

1972 – The Congregational Church nationally united with the Presbyterians to form the United Reformed Church.

1978 – The signing of sharing agreements between Trinity Methodist Church and Abingdon United Reformed Church formed the current church.

In 1972 it was hoped that the forming of the URC would be a catalyst for bringing more churches together. That has not happened nationally but has happened locally. The Church in Abingdon was formed in 1992 and allows 14 Abingdon churches to work and worship together. Trinity is a Methodist, URC union. The Peachcroft Christian Centre is an Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, and URC union.