Building our future
St Matthew’s Church has been standing at the heart of this community since 1858. In recent years, we have welcomed many new people through our doors with friendship groups like Socially Yours, our own Toddle Time, our extended Saturday Café welcoming the Neighbourhood Charity Crafters and Comfortable with Computers; as well as large scale public events like our fairs, Community Open Day, and school performances. As part of our commitment to our community, we have invested in a full time Community Development Manager, and also purchased, and fully refurbished, St Matthew’s Church House. It is licensed for worship and provides meeting rooms and facilities for community activities. Please go to St Matthew's Church House page to find out more. We will now invest in improving the interior of the church so that it is more welcoming, accessible, and flexible to meet the needs of both our church family and the wider community. We want to remove any barriers that may prevent, or at least make it difficult, for people entering the church, enlarge our capacity, create more flexibility in how we can layout our central space, particularly for large scale events, and improve the quality of your visit. By making these changes, we hope to also be able to try new things, based on our understanding of the needs in our community. There will be no changes to the overall look of the church. Under our Creating Accessible Space project, we will:
Click here to view our Plans In early 2020, we held a public consultation in the form of both an electronic and paper survey, as well as a coffee morning. A total of 106 responses were received and there was overwhelming support for the improvements we had proposed. Here is a summary of the public consultation results. We are delighted that work has now started! it is scehduled to take up to six months. Church will remain open at the weekends so you can still drop off your donations for the food bank, and for Sunday worship. You are welcome to join us at 10am any Saturday to help to clean and tidy church, ready for Sunday services! All welcome.
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