Adrenalin reached the end of its 'life' in November 2007, and the group's founder Revd Phil White has now moved on to be associate vicar of Holy Trinity Leicester. Phil's successor as vicar of Hope Hamilton Church, Revd Liz Rawlings, has just taken up the post. The church is continuing to reach out to the community in a wide variety of ways, including through The Unit – a venue managed by the church on a Tesco's site nearby. Its manager, volunteer Ros Henwood, says a wide range of activities offers many opportunities for involvement in local life. She explains more.
Adrenalin was one of a number of things that the church did in the way of a fresh expression. In all honesty, it's difficult to say what's fresh about our church at times because some people call our whole church a fresh expression but sometimes it's just that we are a normal church doing things differently.
We consider our 'church' as such to be the small groups we have during the week. On Sunday mornings we meet for breakfast in Hope Hamilton School, it's all very informal and then, depending on which Sunday of the month it is, we will follow it up with prayer, teaching, or going out into the community to do a clean-up or remove graffiti.
Once a month we also have an afternoon café church which we call re.turn. That meets at the school at 4.30pm when we have worship, discussion, prayer, children's activities and a coffee bar.
Most of our energy over the past 18 months has been taken up establishing a venue for young people in the community. It had been an empty retail unit and we got it rent free from Tesco, we then raised funds and got The Unit fitted out.
It is really versatile in that it takes up to 59 people and sits next to a Tesco superstore. We are in a multi-cultural area, 70% Gujarati Hindu, and several Asian families have hired The Unit for big family gatherings so they can feed large numbers of people in one go.
Other things are Familyzone which is for families with primary age children and Tea at Tesco's (t@t) where about 10 women meet every Thursday for lunch, discussion and sometimes prayer at the Hamilton Tesco coffee shop. New Shoots Gardening Club has seen us work with the primary school to set up an allotment and involve the community in looking after it. It's a follow-on from what we have done as a church in planting bulbs around the estate.
The Taste and See café church in Kidsgrove appeared in expressions: the dvd – 1: stories of church for a changing culture. How have things moved on since then? Graham Harrison tells how things haven't quite gone 'according to plan'.
It's true that we are not doing what we aimed to do four-and-a-half years ago because we've had to adapt. As things are changing we have to be careful not to spend too much energy on mourning the past. We have been given a wonderful opportunity to show Christ's love in practical terms, and be a means to pray for – and with – people in the community.
In spite of that support, things are financially very tight and we could never be 100% self-sufficient. When the coffee shop started we were on declining grants for five years and the hard truth is that they will come to an end in September. We have a management committee to oversee what we do so there are some tough questions as to whether we can replace that funding.
We have also got our eye on other things we can do. We'll be organising more regular Saturday night events when people will have the chance to have an evening out for not a lot of money.