Summary of PCC meeting held on Tuesday 11 October
The PCC met on at the Rectory on Tuesday 11 October. Stephen opened the meeting with a reflection on Psalm 127, reminding us that anything we do to build the church has to be supported by prayer if we wanted God’s blessing on our work. Helping children to become a blessing to their parents (v 3) takes dedication and hard work, in the same way it takes dedication and hard work for a church to flourish as it is meant to.
Riette has volunteered to take on the responsibility for the rota from next year.
Now that the heating project is underway, we need to take a step back to determine our long-term plans for reordering the church. Anne Brown said she had been collecting information about grants for which we might be able to apply, but we will need to write a comprehensive spec and obtain detailed costings before we can apply for the necessary faculties from the DAC; we can only apply for any of these grants once we have the faculties for the various aspects of the work. We also need to present out accounts and show how much money we have raised ourselves.
She said there is potentially quite a lot of money out there to be had, but pointed out that we have to get our applications right first time as many of the organisations only consider new applications every three years. This does mean a substantial outlay of time and finances beforehand but we cannot continue without having done the groundwork.
We are still hoping to find a willing volunteer to be our Green Champion; this could be any member of the congregation who is willing to help us become more environmentally friendly. There is a talk on the subject at St Mary’s Longfleet in Poole on 24 November is anyone is interested in attending this.
Angela Tolley has created a hand-knitted nativity scene which we plan to send on a “tour” around various families during Advent. Each family who gets to “host” them can keep a knitted sheep to remind them of the nativity story. Stephen will write a Christmas reflection to add to the box in which they travel from home to home.
Next meeting: 15 November