Uniting churches and their communities: The Uniting Church in Garden Lane
A place of unity
A place of community worship
A place of diversity
A place of learning
The Uniting Church in Garden Lane has strong links with the local community and is considered as being at the heart of the local Garden Quarter. But how did the Church build on and modernise historic links with their community and what can we learn from this?
Revd Ceri Gardner Minister for the Uniting Church in Garden Lane alongside Caldy Valley Church and Hoole URC commented: “The Church in Garden Lane is reimagining how it will be an expression of church in the future. With a shared vision to make the garden quarter a better place to live they are passionate about a healthy holistic community, welcoming and being a place of safety and sanctuary. Here is a church and community growing in relationship, moving and responding together as they listen to the voices of their neighbours.”
A fresh expression of church emerging as a place of sanctuary for the community needed some new ideas and so a project group was formed.
Caption: Members of the Uniting Church in Garden Lane and their community
The Plum Project
The Plum Project launched during the pandemic in 2020, a unique alliance between the Church and the community with a joint mission to build an exciting, sustainable future for the Uniting Church and the neighbourhood.
Neil Kendall, who is Chair of the Plum Project explains:
“The aim was to reimagine the Church’s current role as a place of worship. We already had activities like dance, drama, photography, non-traditional worship and music taking place in our building, but we needed to ensure a future for community engagement. This wasn’t just to make sure we could keep going after the pandemic, but about developing a diverse range of users and encouraging them to participate, contributing their culture and experiences.”
The Plum Project steering group put out a community survey to find out what local people wanted and secured funds to ensure the church building was sustainable and fit for purpose as a modern space designed to serve a wide variety of uses.
The steering group commented on this survey:
We set out with an online community survey to inform forthcoming developments. Over 200 people responded with 120 offering suggestions. This immediately created a network of ‘Plum Friends’ forming a basis for communication for future engagement. We learned there was whole-hearted support for an open door in the community and a majority sought church to remain part of what happens. There was considerable encouragement to further develop creative arts activities and to explore how health and well-being can be woven within church as a place of listening and caring. Hospitality was a thread running through the feedback with an urge to model environmental sustainability whenever possible. The survey proved to be a crucial starting point and source of reference.
Caption: A community event at the Uniting Church in Garden Lane
Having established this network of ‘Friends’, when we needed funds, individuals have consistently contributed. Further, there has been a selection of successful bids for local authority community funds.
The next move was to look at what the Church already had to offer, what could be developed and redesigned and how the community could get involved. The idea came about to involve the neighbourhood and the variety of skills from local people to plan and deliver festivals and gatherings.
Neil continued:
“This included reworking our usual events like Harvest to include a community food-related workshop, bringing in healing events to mark memories of loss in November, and at Christmas, as the culmination of an Advent journey, developing a ‘Travelling Nativity’ on a pastoral journey around the neighbourhood.
“We also strengthened our partnerships with local organisations. For Refugee Week, we started working with the local primary school to include a creative workshop which produces artistic materials for the celebration. All this involved community members from start to finish.”
The links with refugees continued through working closely with the community on activities, as members noticed that there was a need for more support during school holidays. The nature of help included acquiring re-conditioned bikes and somewhere to meet, especially for the parents of pre-school children. The Bren Bike project on Chester Greenway agreed to provide re-conditioned bikes for Ukrainian families. In the neighbourhood, theatre and singing professionals offered places at summer workshops for both primary and secondary children, whilst a ‘Sing and Sign’ specialist offered sessions with Tots. Friends of the ‘Plum’ offered volunteering for knitting and crafts, support for children’s activities, sandwich making and games in the park. Many of the Ukrainian families have children at Bluecoat Primary School. During the planning, the school provided support, sharing experiences and offering much appreciated advice. The school is a School of Sanctuary and being a neighbour to the Uniting Church creates opportunities to develop relationships which support local people who are seeking sanctuary.
Chester City of Sanctuary group support the collaboration of different organisations involved with sanctuary seekers and Plum as a local neighbourhood is now connected to others in the city. The primary school has children from 33 different countries, so for the future, we hope developments can be informed by the school as to how Plum can offer support for families. For example, developing a cafe would enable Plum to offer a breakfast facility for the school and funding could be sought to ensure an inclusive approach to out-of- school creative activities. Currently, Plum is supporting face to face pastoral support for Ukrainian women, by Ukrainian women.
In order to trial the potential to develop a cafe, the proprietors of a small local coffee shop agreed to offer a trail ‘PopUp’ for the Coronation. Informed by this experience, the hope is to negotiate a permanent partnership, reflecting the ambition for Plum to be ‘by the community, for the community’. Ultimately, Plum will host the coffee shop and focus on using the facility for hospitality rather than being distracted by running a business.
Neil added:
“We have a common goal of making the Garden Quarter a brighter, more meaningful and united place to live in and also to open up opportunities for informal worship and talking about our faith.”
The Plum Project Committee
Neil Kendall, Chair
Revd Christine M Jones
Alan Johnson
Matthew Baker
Sue Rawski
Rachel Dison
Mike Rawski
Gill Taggart
Lucy Thatcher