St. Barnabas Parish Office, Church Cottage, Waterloo Road, Linslade, Bedfordshire, LU7 2NR, Telephone (01525 371802)
We are a sub-committee of the PCC with eight members. We have met three times this year.
St Barnabas Church supports three charities, one international, one national and one local.
The international project is USPG and we still support a specific project within the USPG. This is Ruth and Saulo de Barros in Brazil with their young son Thomas. They are working in the Amazon region of Brazil. Saulo is the parish priest in Belem and oversees the other five communities there with six other clergy members and a large team of lay people and seminaries. Within the last year Saulo has been elected Bishop of Amazonia. Ruth is still very much involved at ground level.
We get a quarterly newsletter from USPG and a specific newsletter about the work of Saulo and Ruth on an occasional basis; copies are available at the back of the church.
Our national project last year was Emmaus at Carlton village, near Bedford and the third was the local project, Leighton Linslade Homeless.
Altogether, including collections from various services held, Outreach was able to send out cheques of well over £500 to each of the three charities during 2006. But Outreach is not only concerned with raising money. We feel part of our remit is encouraging the congregation to socialise, and to reach people where possible outside of our congregation.
We support Fair Trade and have a stall open after church on a regular basis.
Sheila Deighton
During previous years we have supported by our giving and fundraising various other projects.
One International
one was S.P.C.K.. One national one was Helen House and one local one was the
Walnut Tree Project in Milton Keynes. We understand that the Walnut Tree people
have had a very difficult time, their meeting place, which was a discontinued
pub, was burnt to the ground and they have had to hold their meetings in schools.
This means that they cannot carry on with things they started or implement new
ideas.
Another International cause was Sierra Leone. They do not seem to get much publicity
and our connections of the past pointed us in that direction. Another of our
projects was the Kairos Community. This is a community in Camberwell in the
middle of a very deprived area.
We have had a Hunger Lunches during Lent and Advent. These seem to be enjoyed by those who dare to try our home made soup, why not risk it? . Parish Picnics have been arranged in July and have been enjoyed by all. We have sung carols at the station at Christmas and held Barn dances.
We have also supported Community Action Romania by collecting items such as toiletries for them. They are changing their scheme from now on and are hoping to buy goods out there, as there is such a problem transport wise. They are also hoping to get started a herd of sheep for the community to benefit from.
We hope to arrange speakers connected with our projects and we hope to have events for you to support. Please come along and enjoy yourself. As one of our Churchwardens said at the Annual General Meeting 'Fund raising is fun' (and more so when it helps those less fortunate than ourselves.).