Your Help Is Required By St. James' Church

BUILDINGS WONT LIVE, IF PEOPLE DON'T USE THEM

Our Church of St. James' is suffering from the same fate as a lot of other Churches. A falling congregation. No one, even the non churchgoers, want to see our Church closed and either turned into flats or let deteriorate.
We are a small village of about 1500 souls, but we have excellent sport facilities in the making, a first class primary school (see their web site), a relatively new Parish Hall (fully booked), a pub which is being refurbished, shop/post office and two garages. There are numerous small businesses which are run from home and all in all, a very thriving community.

To this end we want to enlarge on these facilities, by utilising the Church for Arts, Crafts, Concerts (we have the capacity) etc. and by doing this we will be able to keep the Church open for worship.

BUT TO DO THIS
We need to raise money for the alterations to our Church. We would like to see toilet facilities (at the moment, we cross a busy road to use the Parish Hall toilets), a small kitchen and see to the electric lighting and heating.
The lights are set up in the rafters about 60 feet above ground and it takes a brave person to climb a ladder to replace a bulb! The lighting was installed in 1930 - no Health and Safety then!! And we still have round pin plugs with square pin adapters.!!!

2005 sees the Church's 130 years of use and we are giving an extra push to raise the money to do all we want. David Richardson our Churchwarden, has agreed to take on the enormous task of organising all this. Brave man.

We as a congregation will be playing our part. We have a concert planned for this autumn; a flower festival and arts and craft show for next year and more will be added to this site as and when we book them.

We are already working on converting the undercroft (the old vestry) into a meeting place for 14-18 year olds, something the young people have been asking for, for a long time. This will be opening soon.

If any of you reading this, was born in Welland, married in Welland, with any Welland connections at all, we would like to hear from you. Maybe you could also give a small donation to help us.

Just e-mail us at