An interview I had a while back with John, who volunteers at the Hampton Hill United Reformed Church on the High Street there.
How many people go to the church?
We would have around about 30, perhaps just under 30, on Sunday mornings for worship. But the church is a place where people know that they are loved and welcome, not just on Sundays. So if you count the number of other people who come, like the Brownies on a Monday night and a group called Twelve Steps where they’ve got linked into substances they’d best not, they come on a Tuesday night. Tuesday morning we have sixteen families and so on in the week and the church is only part of the buildings because there is a nursery in the other building and there are more halls at the back, which are used by the community all week, so there is Sunday morning worship which is the hub of it, if that weren’t there none of the rest would be there, it’s just 30, but with the people who use it during the week you are well over three or four hundred. But they’re not church members. Only a small group of us come to worship.
And you have just one service a week?
Yeah, one service per week at the moment but we think that, with people so busy on Sunday mornings, that we might start the service on another day of the week just to compete with time to be quiet and just to reflect, it’s all very fashionable mindfulness at the moment, but just allow people to be instead of dumping them homework even on a Sunday.
So do you think that there’s a lack of young people at the church?
Definitely. But that’s my next job, and the plan is in January to start an after-school set of activities for young people and they can have this place with support, which is why all the plugs here are all linked up to Wi-Fi so that if people want to come in here then they will be able to and our plan is for January we need some volunteers from all sorts of schools we need to talk to people in the community and our hope is to do that. There are other churches around here who have very good youth groups and there’s no point in us copying what someone else is doing well. Its much better to tell a young person to join these other groups with lots of great people there instead. So it’s working in cooperation’s but for our church it’s a gap which we’re looking to try and do something with.
Of course, this has all gone on its head now that the terrible COVID-19 pandemic has laid waste to the high streets all over the country and closed all the churches here. I hope that this will all end and everything will go back to normal, with the churches being reopened and returning us to the normalcy we so enjoyed before.
