Living to make a difference
The church notice sheet for this week is available to view or download here.
Printed copies will be available at all our services and celebrations this weekend.
To receive a weekly copy of the notices by email please contact the church office and we’ll add you to the circulation list.
The Heart of the Community project (HOTC) is central to our plan to be a welcoming, thriving, sharing community that is truly living to make a difference.
Create St Michael’s Centre (SMC)
Refurbish and protect the church building
Upgrade the facilities at the Old School Rooms (OSR)
Support our mission partners in the UK and overseas
“Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back, lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left.”
Isaiah 54:2-3
The St Michael’s Centre is open and welcomes over 23,000 people each year.
Last year’s gifts enabled the balcony to open.
We serve church groups, uniformed organisations, local and regional businesses and many more.
The Charity Commission has recently agreed to our request to release assets held in Trust to repair and improve the Old School Rooms.
£120k has been donated to mission.
We have allocated investment for the improvement and preservation of the church building.
Regular gifts help to pay the mortgage. The repayment of capital and interest is £155k per year.
Meet our tithe to mission commitments of £45k in 2018.
These are partly met by existing monthly giving. We need another £120k annually to properly cover these two commitments.
Complete the next phases of the SMC building
1. The office suite upstairs – to alleviate current office over-crowding and create more meeting space
2. The arches corridor – completing access to four large meeting rooms and storage
3. The new kitchen – adding catering and hospitality to the St Michael’s Centre
These three elements will cost in the region of £650k
Pay off a section of our mortgage loans early £115k
We are continuing our journey of faith with the Heart of the Community project. It’s not too late to pledge a new donation or increase your giving level.
Together, we can each play our part and complete the project. We can make even more of a difference across our community and beyond.
to everyone who belongs to St Michael’s.
Some of us haven’t been in a position to support the project financially before. Now we can pray about how much we should give.
Maybe you’ve only just heard of the project. Maybe you are here because of the project. Now is the time for you to consider your level of giving to become part of it.
Some of us are in a better financial position than when we committed to give to the project. We can pray about how to increase the amount we give.
To make your pledge to the project please pick up a Gift Day Pledge Form from the church or download your copy here. Please return your completed pledge form to the church office by the Gift Day on Sunday 13 May 2018.
UK taxpayers can also complete a simple GiftAid form, which means the government will donate an extra 25% on top of your giving at no cost to you or the project.
If you would like to know more about any of the Heart of the Community project, how the money is spent, or help with ways to make one-off donations or arrange regular giving, please contact the church office.
St Michael’s Church Centre Limited
Registered Charity in England and Wales 1149601
You are one of the first people to visit the new-look church website. We’ve spent over a year working on this design – which should make everything more accessible, particularly for those who use smartphones and tablets.
As with all updates – it will take us a little while to get used to the changes. We will all need to be a little patient as the new design settles in. Thank you for your understanding and care.
Hopefully everything you need can be found by clicking one of the 5 coloured menu buttons at the top of every page. Or you could try using the search button to find what you’re looking for. If you get stuck, please accept our apologies – we are continuing to make corrections and improvements all the time.
If there’s anything you particularly like, or dislike about the new layout and navigation – we’d love to hear from you. Similarly, if anything appears to be not working, do let us know.
Please contact us with any comment using the feedback form below.
Between us we’ll work to make the website clear, accessible, welcoming and informative for as many people as possible.
Thank you.
The underlying principle of the update to the website is to get more of the right communications, to more people, in more ways.
In the last year we have had 14,000 visitors to our website with 60% of visitors accessing the website from a mobile phone or tablet.
Responsive layout design. A major feature of the updated website is that the design is now fully responsive and will optimise the website layout to the size of the screen you are viewing it on. Making content more readable, especially on mobile phones.
Responsive text size. The website now fully responds to browsers that have adjusted the font size setting, so if you like your font size a little larger (or smaller) the website now obliges on all pages.
Menu structure. The menus have been simplified and consolidated to the top bar of the website with 5 coloured menu buttons. You will find everything you need from one of these 5 menus. The menu structure also responds to the size of the screen you are viewing it on and optimises the experience.
It’s fast. The updated website uses the very latest website scripting standards which are claimed to be 30% faster than the predecessor. So you will benefit as a visitor with faster web page load times, which means you get to see the information you came to find quicker.
Maintenance. The updated website has been built with flexibility in mind, to allow the structure of menus, headers and footers to all be updated from the admin panel without having to be web scripting ninja. You will notice that some things (e.g. church services) appear on more than one menu. This is not a mistake and is intentional to help visitors find things and it just highlights the flexibility we have with the new menu structure.
Home page. The front home page has a “priority 9” grid for the most important current communications headlines and links. This is easy to change and adapt to make the home page more dynamic and more effective in communicating key messages.
ChurchSuite. All of the events for the church that are created in ChurchSuite are now automatically imported into the website, to allow the latest events to be shown dynamically in web pages. Check out the Rhythms of Grace page under the ‘When’ section, where you can see the dates for the next events. This no longer has to be manually entered and is automatically pulled through from ChurchSuite and displayed.
The site is more secure. The updated website has been built with security in mind. Using the very latest web scripting standards, which have security at the core, combined with back-end security measures to ensure that our databases and files remain safe. This has been combined with SSL/ HTTPS encryption for the entire site so your interaction with the site is secure. Check out your address bar for the padlock sign.
Backups. The updated website has a robust backup approach to ensure that should something go wrong then the site can be up and running again with minimal downtime.
Removal of personal data. No emails or personal details are stored on website, with all correspondence now managed through contact forms. Rotas have also now been removed from the website and all rotas should now be accessed via login to ChurchSuite or through email.
One of the best things about the updated site is that it has not cost the church anything! It has been developed entirely in-house by an enthusiastic bunch of volunteers who have a heart for communicating the good news of God’s work at St Michael’s to everyone who visits this site.
Thank you for reading and don’t forget to send us any feedback using the form above.
St Michael’s Web Team
The notice sheet for this week can be downloaded here
The notice sheet for this week can be downloaded here
The notice sheet for this week can be downloaded by clicking here
The notice sheet for this week can be downloaded here
Did you know you can receive free Christmas reflections during December & early January? The Church of England have created a set of 13 short Reflections to take us through the Christmas period, entitled “Your Christmas Journey”
You can sign up to get them in various ways. You can text GodWithUs to 88802 to get messages from #GodWithUs
For more info or to sign up via emails, please visit their website
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby says:
“Your Christmas Journey seeks to help you explore what the Christmas story might mean in your life. The constant refrain of Christmas, in carols and readings, is that God is with us. In whatever situations you find yourself this Christmas, God is with you – you need only turn to him and ask to know his presence. “
We’re delighted to be hosting a concert with the Christian band Treasure Field on Saturday 18th November.
This is one of only 3 dates on their winter tour this year, and they will be supported by our very own Gospel Generation Community Choir!
It looks set to be a fantastic evening of music, worship and more, so book your tickets now!
Tickets are priced £8 (£5 for concessions) plus booking fees. You can book online here
