Extending St Hilda's Building in 2010 - very nearly complete! (start of January 2011).Praise God - A Christmas Eve opening went ahead as planned, despite some of the outside groundwork having to wait till the New Year due to the frozen conditions! We were very excited about the plan to extend our building to make it much more suitable for community use and equipped fully for our ministry and outreach, with more meeting rooms and space, storage space, children's facilities and a big well equipped kitchen. We worked in partnership with our local Children's Centre on this project, who agreed to part fund it. The congregation and friends pledged their support in committed giving over five years to enable us to pay the full costs of the work. This was amazing commitment and generosity at a time when finances are tight has allowed us to move forward on the project. So we will have loans to repay, not to mention more plans that we have not yet been able to fund to go alongside this work, so that anyone wishing to support is still able to make a real difference to what we can do. You can give directly to the designated fund for the extension - click here for a giving form for this purpose. Armitage Construction have done the most superb job on the new building, designed by Goth Hibbert. We can strongly recommend both companies. Thank you so much to everyone who has given to this project. Thank you also to the Church and Community Fund, Garfield Weston Foundation and All Churches Trust who have added their support. We are very grateful. More detail We have developed St Hilda’s life, ministry and mission considerably over the last six years, and our church has grown signficantly. Our building has many advantages being fairly modern (consecrated 1965), but lacked key facilities, which were seriously inhibiting us now. We have a large worship area which we have made multi-purpose by introducing high quality stacking chairs in place of the two central blocks of pews. But we had only a vestry and a single modest sized meeting room alongside this – not even enough space for our children’s groups on a Sunday morning, and only a tiny and limited kitchen facility. On Friday evenings, for example, we have crammed as many as 50 or more young people plus leaders into our youth groups (one group covering 8-11s and another group for secondary school aged young people). These groups have grown and thrived, beginning from nothing several years ago when the church supported a trainee youth worker through his degree course, with his brief being the development of youth work, starting by catering better for the older children in our primary school. We now have a large lay team helping with our children’s and young people’s work from the church, with more people attending our child protection training than were in the congregation six years ago!
We have opened up the building to wide use in the community throughout the week, with various courses, activities, fitness groups, breakfasts, coffee shop, lunches and so on. Several sessions have been delivered in partnership with the Children’s Centre, and also with other groups. This is consistent with our vision. We have a church voluntary aided primary school and both school and church agreed some two years ago that we should extend the care we offer to children through the school into the years before children join us. Church schools aim to offer a distinctive ethos for education, and we want to see how that same distinctive Christian ethos can support and enhance the Children’s Centre role within the community.
Uniquely in the country (as far as we are aware) Trafford decided to invite bids for the most recent round of Children’s Centre Funding, for them to invest in community buildings. Because of our existing work and relationship with the Children’s Centre, we were able to bid successfully for some of this finance. We believed we had a really exciting and worthwhile scheme, and were thrilled that they agreed. This project has greatly enhanced our building, making it fit for the wider community role and church use we now have and are continuing to develop. The Scheme The scheme has given St Hilda’s: A significantly larger main meeting room alongside the worship space (with partitions to allow flexible use) A large kitchen, with teaching quality facilities (which is the particular feature the Children’s Centre are keen to utilise extensively) A smaller meeting room/creche room Children's toilets Storage space (which we are desperate for, at present constantly shifting furniture and equipment between rooms because there is really no adequate storage anywhere) The platform from which to seek further funds to bring the whole of our outside land into good use as a community garden and safe children’s play area.
We think this really is a tremendous scheme, which is going to open up, during 2010 and beyond, so much for the church and community. Click to see drawings of the relevant part of the building: The Financial need The total project cost is now projected at £332,000. £145,000 is a grant from Trafford. £22,500 is grants from other funders - thank you to the Church and Community Fund (10,000), Garfield Weston Foundation (£10,000) and All Churches Trust (£1,500). The remainder is being raised by St Hilda's. A diocesan loan of £47,000 may be made into a grant - we hope so since this would only be the return to the parish of some of the finance which came from the sale of St Peter’s Church in Gorse Hill which was within the parish. Your Possible Response We continue to seek donations and pledges from members, supporters and friends of St Hilda’s to help us with this project. Ideally these pledges would be sizeable, but obviously everything helps. Could you contribute? If you would be glad to support this scheme that would be wonderful. We are asking if people could (a) give a one-off sum of money; and/or (b) give finance, perhaps ideally on a regular basis, but could be in other ways that fit in better for you, over the next few years. Please reply to the treasury team. (For info, unless it were to be needed for some unusual circumstance, the ministers generally avoid seeing any details concerning individual giving). But if you do wish to reply to or discuss this with our minister Ross, he would, of course, be glad to receive replies/quereis about this directly if you would prefer to respond in that way. Alternatively please would you inform our treasurer, Gill Hunter,
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
if you will support the scheme financially as indicated. Click here for our giving form for this purpose. Contributions in addition to those already received/pledged are still very much needed and welcomed because: (a) you can be confident that your contribution will add to a project that is now very nearly completed, has wide support from others, but at the same time could really need your contirbution for the full total finally required to be achieved (e.g. another contributor's financial circumstances may change, or there may still be some unexpected costs) (b) we will need as yet unspecified amounts of finance to equip the new space well, and any funding towards this will be a great help. We hope we may be able to draw down some match funding to go with whatever we are able to put in on top of that, so all contributions may multiply up in practice! (c) costs may yet hit us that we have not foreseen although likelihood of this is now very low; (d) when we first talked with the Children’s Centre about our plans we had two extra elements to them, and we also have a further internal aspect of work to equip our church building fully for our work and ministry, all of which we are viewing as Stage B (and C and D etc) of this work. We still intend to work on these aspects of the plan, in conjunction with other funding sources, as soon as we can, and any finance we can put towards this will be a great help. The elements concerned are: i. a new crèche and general purpose children’s room with toilet facility, able to be used independently of the rest of our space; ii. creating a secure outdoor children’s play area (which the crèche room would open onto) and substantial community garden space, suitably landscaped and with seating and other features. (We have spoken with Groundwork Trust about working with us on this). iii. putting in a good quality suitable sound system and data projection facilities, and replacing the remaining pews with chairs, to complete the transformation of our worship space into a fully equipped, up to date and flexible area for worship, meetings and even conference style use. Thank you so much for considering this. Please do so prayerfully. We will be grateful for any support you are able to give, but would also want to say, please do not jeopardise your other areas of financial responsibility in order to help with this scheme. As Paul told the church in Corinth, if the willingness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has, not according to what one does not have (2 Cor 8.12). We hope you can give generously, responsibly and joyfully, for God loves a cheerful giver. (2 Cor 9.7) Please would you pray for everyone else who is considering this request, and ask the Lord to provide what is needed for the ongoing life and ministry of this church, as we seek to live out and share the gospel locally. Please also feel free to pass the request on to others who you feel may want to assist. Grace and peace be with you, Ross and all the leadership of St Hilda's.
|
