Bulldozers Move in as Work Commences on New Church And Community Centre

I was delighted to be invited down on a beautiful day in early July to see work commencing on the conversion of the old Barns site behind the Old School Rooms. Youngsters from Stoke Gifford Pre-school and nursery donned their hard hats and brought their spades to watch work begin on the new church and community centre.

This exciting project will see the derelict site being transformed into a 600-seat auditorium, with meeting rooms and other facilities, which will provide much needed conference space for schools, charities and local businesses as well as wedding receptions and other celebrations. It will also serve as a resource for the wider region.

The new church and community centre is key to the church s £5.5m Heart of the Community project, which also includes refurbishing the Old School Rooms adjacent to the Barns and renovating the 14th Century church, next door to the pre-school and nursery. Ten percent of all money raised by the congregation will be used to fund similar projects overseas.

St Michael s congregation has grown by 70% over the last 10 years and currently stands over 300 – and growing! It is too large to fit in the church, forcing the main 10.30am service to start in two separate venues. Up to 1,000 people a week use the community rooms provided by the church, the Old School Rooms coffee shop serves hundreds of hot meals, snacks and drinks each week and the pre-school and nursery – based in the Old Vicarage – is over subscribed.

The congregation s commitment to the project is clear – a gift day last summer raised a staggering £2 million in one-off donations and regular pledges over the next five years. The church plans to raise the rest of the money from fundraising events, grants and the generosity of individual and corporate donors.

The Rev. Simon Jones, Rector of St Michael s told me, “The local population is set   to rise from 12,000 to 20,000 over the next ten years. There is an increasing need for local amenities, particularly where the wider community can join together. St Michael s has a long history of serving the local community and beyond. This building is not just for the needs of the church today, but for the whole community, the wider region and for future generations. We are grateful to God for what he has given us, but we don t want to keep it to ourselves. We want to use what we have to serve others. ”

Parts of the site are locally listed, and the arches (shown above) will be removed from the site, stored whilst the roof is replaced and then reused in the new build. Local historians and archeologists are also involved in the project as some interesting finds are being discovered during the excavation works!

I very much look forward to visiting the project over the next 18 months and bringing you updates of this exciting development as it progresses.

For more information please visit the Heart of the Community website, www.stmichaelsbristol.org/heart

Many thanks to Martin and Sue for taking the time to talk me through the project, to Rob who s photos of the children were better than mine and to the team at Bray & Slaughter who paused in their labours for us to take the photos. I look forward to catching up with you all again in the near future.

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