Highbury Home - 17 - Reports 2008

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11- 12 - 13 - 14 - 15 - 16 - 17 - 18 - 19 - 20 - 21 - 22 - 23 -24 - 25

www.highburychurch. co.uk

I have continued to develop the web site over the last year. The home page is continually changing and has new information on it every time you look at it. Over the last years most of the Sunday morning sermons have been posted for people to read. The home page gives access to numerous sites of interest to people at church. I kept a blog of my visit to the Holy Land enabling people to follow what we were doing at the Tantur Institute. Becky’s course on prayer was posted on the web site too. Becky has created space on Facebook. Highbury News is regularly available on the web site too. My vision for the web site is that people in church make it their ‘home page’ and that it becomes part of the family. There were 53,692 visits to the web site over the year.

Richard Cleaves

Churches Together

I have continued to work in partnership with St Luke’s and St Michael’s and have arranged a meeting bringing together representatives from the three churches so that we can explore further how we might develop our work further. I have been very much part of the Church Leaders in Cheltenham Group. As the year came to a close there was the exciting prospect of setting up a Street Pastors Scheme in Cheltenham and extending that into a Town Chaplaincy. At the start of the New Year I have been encouraged by a sense that the

churches may well succeed in coming more closely together in response to some very real needs in our town.

Richard Cleaves

Highbury Serving the Local Community

Highbury has always had a strong commitment to the local community. With the addition of ramps to both side entrances, hand rails to the platform and markings on the platform carpet, there is now safe and easy access to all parts of the building for people who have mobility problems. We have two spaces reserved for blue badge holders in the car-park and good, modern accessible toilet facilities.

We encourage community groups to use our premises ... and they are well used throughout the week. We are host to Beavers, Cubs, Scouts, and Guides for younger people and to the Social Services Highbury Day Centre for older people.

A great variety of caring groups, interest groups and social justice groups meet at Highbury. It was particularly good in 2008 to share in the Scout Group’s centenary celebration and to see a plaque put on our original home in Grosvenor Street, celebrating the centenary and identifying the building as the original home of Highbury Congregational Church.

Richard Cleaves