St John’s Weekly Bulletin – Sunday 18 June 2017

The process of consultation will begin for us this week, with some preparation and with a meeting.

The preparation involves praying about and responsding to a series of questions – you can find them in a PDF file available at http://www.saintjohns.com.au/bishopconsultation

Respond by writing your answers on a pad of sticky-notes and bring them with you to the consultation meeting. If you can’t attend the meeting, keep hold of your answers and there will be a chance to enter them in an on-line survey that will be available shortly.

If you can, please join us for the consultation meeting at St John the Baptist Church, 18 Morehead Street, Lambton on Thursday 22 June from 7pm-10pm. All members of our church are welcome to attend these gatherings, with parish leaders (synod representatives, wardens, parish councillors for example) strongly encouraged to. People who are not able to attend a gathering in their own region but who wish to participate are most welcome to attend a gathering in another region. Let me know if you can’t make this meeting but might be able to attend somewhere else on a different date.

If you can’t attend the meeeting, and aren’t sure about filling in on-line surveys, please get in touch with me on 0487 545 547 and I’d be happy to meet with you and collect your answers before the meeting on Thursday night.

Blessings, Murray

This bulletin was emailed to members of the parish on Saturday 17 June 2017 – if you would like to join the Weekly Bulletin email list, please call the church office on 02 4927 5399 and we will happily arrange this.

The cost of these buildings is often measured in the amount of money that we need to spend at times to make sure that they are still standing for the next generation of disciples who want to worship here. In recent times, we have seen significant damage start to happen because of water getting into the walls of both the hall and the church. We have patches of damp in the walls, and some of the stone window frames are rotting away as water seeps through the walls.

This week, we received notification that we have been successful in applying for a grant from the NSW Department of Heritage to fix the problems in the roof and gutters and do groundwork to get water away from our buildings. However, this is a matched grant and we will need to raise around $60,000 over the next two years to complete the project.

This is a significant amount of money that we need to raise. At our meeting on Thursday night, your Parish Council decided to begin a 1K Club, inviting members of our parish to commit to giving 1K – $1000 – over the next two years to see this project through. We would like to invite you to take part in this project.

If you are able to make a contribution up-front, that would help us a great deal. But if you would like to commit to $10 a week, or $42 a month extra on your giving over those two years, that would get us there as well. If you wanted to organise your own fundraising towards that total, we would greatly appreciate it. Please take some time in the next week or so to think about how you would like to respond to this project. Can you commit to one or more ‘K’s to protect our buildings for the years to come?

There will be more information and an invitation to commit next Sunday, but we wanted to get this information out this week particuarly for those who would like to make a tax-deductible gift to St John’s before the end of this month. If you would like to do so, please contact our Treasurer, Howard Benson, on 02 4952 6279 or Murray on 0487 545 547, or get in contact with a message through our website at http://www.saintjohns.com.au/contact

We are constantly in need of good quality clothing and household goods to be able to sell and also to give out to the needier people of the greater Windale community, so if you are thinking of doing a clean out of your cupboards, or downsizing or perhaps after a garage sale when you are wondering what to do with the leftovers, we’d be so grateful if you would think of us!

We could pick up at any time convenient to you or donations can be dropped off at the church hall any Tuesday morning between 9am and 12midday. The car park is in Talinga Close and there is a ramp from the car park into the hall. Contact Kaz on 0414 489 373 if you have any questions about this.

Unfortunately we are not able to except electrical items, as they have to be tagged by an electrician, or large furniture items, as we have nowhere to store them.

It was a surprise.

Howard