The President of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, Rev Steven Wild, is coming to Christ Church Stocksbridge this coming Sunday. Steven is starting the celebrations for the building of the new church and community hall at Christ Church. Steven is travelling up from Cornwall to preach at the Sunday morning Service, at 10.45.

Steven will be speaking about how churches need to reach out into the community these days. This is precisely the purpose of the new hall; to serve the community.

The Methodist Church has recently agreed a grant of £103,000 towards the building of the new hall, and the new hall is now progressing swiftly after many difficulties. It should soon be ready for use. Christ Church has raised over £400,000 from grants and gifts to build the new hall, and expects that it will be very busy once it is finished.

The Methodists have also agreed a grant of £10,000 a year for three years to create a social café once a week for isolated and vulnerable people in the Stocksbridge and Deepcar area, where people can connect with statutory and voluntary services to help them engage with their community and help them develop their lives in the community. This will start once the hall is complete.

A new lunch club for isolated older people in the area, with its own accessible minibus is also being planned to start about the same time.

Christ Church is a united congregation created from the merger of the former United Reformed Church, on the present site, and the former Methodist Church in Deepcar, which was sold off some years ago to help pay for the new hall. Information about the church is available on its website at www.christchurchonline.org .

Rev Ian Lucraft, the minister, said: “We are now at the point where the hard work and worry of the last three years is turning into a modern set of church and community premises. But the buildings are just the resource that we will use to meet as the friends of Jesus and to serve the community in lots of ways. We already know some of what we will be doing, but the future is open and exciting.”