Extending St Hilda's Building in 2010
We are 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 are working in partnership with our local Children's Centre on this project, who agreed to half fund it. The congregation and friends are pledging their support in committed giving over the next five years to enable us to pay the full costs of the work. Amazing commitment and generosity at a time when finances are tight has allowed us to move forward on the project. We have more plans that we have not yet been able to fund to go alongside this work so anyone wishing to support is still able to make a real difference to what we can do. Plans have been drawn up and submitted to the diocese who have given their support. Planning permission has been agreed and tenders have just come in and are being processed (as at start of May). Full diocesan permission should be granted mid May with building work starting straight afterwards. NEWSFLASH - Ross ran in the Greater Manchester 10k Run on Sunday 16 May to raise funds for this project - it's not too late to sponsor him - please click here. Or you can give directly to the designated fund for the extension - click here for a giving form for this purpose. 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 lacks key facilities, which are 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 have 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 40 or more young people plus leaders into our youth groups (one group covering 8-11s and another gorup for high 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 believe we have a really exciting and worthwhile scheme, and were thrilled that they agreed. This project will greatly enhance 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 will give 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 will open up so much for the church and community. Click to see drawings of the relevant part of the building: The proposed layout may adjust a little in the light of ongoing work by a consultant commissioned by Trafford, and planning/faculty feedback, but give a very good indication of the likely overall layout we will achieve. The Financial need The main part of the scheme was estimated to cost in the region of £200,000. This has now increased and both Children's Centre and church have agreed to contribute more finance to meet the costs - obviously these will only be truly finalised once tenders come back in. We had hoped the diocese would consider returning to the parish some of the finance which came from the sale of St Peter’s Church in Gorse Hill within our parish. The diocesan Finance Committee were in principle quite supportive of this, but could not do so owing to the fund involved having to be frozen, with a legal action underway against the diocese. Until that is resolved, which may take a long time, they cannot commit the finance to projects of this kind at all anywhere in the diocese. Therefore we have needed to ask members and friends to contribute the necessary finance, and with the pledges we have so far received have been able to secure a five year loan from the Church of England via the diocese. 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 now; 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 five year loan period. 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,
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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 definitely going ahead, 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 be 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 exceed current outline estimates; (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. fencing in the whole of our external area to create a safe outdoor children’s play area (which the crèche room would open onto) and substantial community garden space. (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.
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