Openness

Open to God - Open to the Community

Our Church Meeting decided on this as our slogan in 2006. We try to ensure open-ness in all the things we do.
Young, old, rich, poor, black, white, local or far-away, our open-ness policy applies to all.

Open to God
We try to pick up God's indicators that we should be moving in a particular direction or taking a particular action.
Sometimes these promptings come in answer to prayer, sometimes by what seem "purely coincidental" statements or expressions of need.
Our watchwords here are listening, responding and prioritising.
Churches naturally tend towards a stable state. We try to achieve a more dynamic state, recognising that facilities or ways of doing things sometimes come to the end of their useful life and need to be replaced by other, different things.

Open to the Community
We recognise that in our village community, not everyone is listening or responding to God, but nevertheless they have needs and problems which it may be possible for us to help with. These might be spiritual or worldly needs - a quiet place for reflection, a helping hand with something, a weekly art class.....whatever it may be, we have a range of talents in our church, and we have available premises which can be used for all sorts of purposes.
Our watchwords here are befriending, caring and enabling.
We try to perceive a need in the village when - or preferably before - it arises, and to take whatever steps we can to ease that need, always bearing in mind that we are a small church and not a Government department!
Sometimes the needs are simply too big for us to provide much in the way of help, but we do what we can with God's help.