Our church is at an exciting time of growth. Our village population has already increased in the last five years, and with more housing currently being built, we foresee further growth and opportunities for us to serve our local community. As a church, we seek to share the love of Christ, and are known for our practical care in the local community. We do this is various ways and in different venues, but we would like to use our church building to serve our community more. The church remains the largest meeting space in the village, and the only one open to the public with any historical features. The building is in regular use by the church and the community throughout the week, but many of the facilities within it are now in poor condition and the space is not well apportioned for our present needs. Both these factors are to the detriment of its historic features.
The vision for our facilities at All Saints Church is to provide inspiring, welcoming and flexible meeting spaces for worship and community engagement to serve the needs of our present and future parish, whilst enhancing and recapturing the historical character of the whole church building, all to the glory of God. We have a vision for a building where the space is better apportioned so that groups of varying sizes can be accommodated more efficiently and comfortably, and for the facilities to be of a standard that enriches the experience of worship and hospitality for all those that come to church.
There are two ways we believe this can be achieved:
a) Improvement of the kitchen and toilet facilities.
b) Making better use of the space in church for our variety of activities (especially when activities happen concurrently).
We would like to start by refurbishing the current toilets and kitchen.
We are a church that loves to offer hospitality on a regular basis; more than once a month we cater a meal for 30-100 people (men and women's evenings, Family Fridays, church lunches, Passover meals) and several times a week the kitchen is used to provide lighter refreshments (after Sunday services, for Tiddlypeeps, for funerals or meetings etc). The present kitchen is too small, and has very limited space for appliances and cupboards, all of which are now in poor condition. Just serving tea and coffee to the regular Sunday morning congregation is difficult. The space inside the kitchen is cramped with just two people, the servery is too small and the water supply is very poor. Both toilets are also now in poor condition and need updating.
We would like a kitchen that is of a size and specification to cater for a meal for at least 50 people, as we have a growing outreach ministry of men’s and women’s supper events where we regularly cater for up to this number. We need a servery suitably sized so that a congregation of 100 people can be served light refreshments in reasonable time.
We require a comfortable and easily cleanable toilet and hand washing facilities that can provide for a full church congregation of up to 150 people, of suitable size and accessibility for all. At least one toilet would need to be universally accessible and have space for baby changing facilities. One of the new toilets would be located on the first floor to better provide for people using the space upstairs (eg. a children’s group during services).
All Saints’ is a Grade 2* listed building and any work will require DAC faculty approval, but we are already in communication with the team at the diocese and we are confident that our proposals for the west end refurbishment of the kitchen and toilets will be well received. Our architect has drawn up a number of drawings to help us visualise the changes which can be found below.
We also have a vision to improve the use of space at the east end of the church so we have more break-out space, but we have decided to do the west end refurbishment first as this project will be quicker and simpler to achieve than some of our ideas for the east end and in conversation with many people, the toilets and kitchen are a greater priority at present.
The west end refurbishment of the kitchen and toilets is likely to cost in the region of £150,000. We believe that we can find this money through a combination of using some reserves*, fundraising and grant applications. We hope to raise £50,000 from church and community and have already secured £55000 in grants.
If you would like to find out more about making a donation towards the cost of this project, please contact our treasurer on treasurer@allsaintsmarcham.org or you can fill in the pledge form below:
to the west end refurbishment project. I understand that the treasurer may contact me to follow this up and am happy for them to do so.