The Kairos Centre has opened its doors as a building for the community in Grange Park, Northampton. It's a dream come true for project chairman Charlie Nobbs and the start of another chapter in the story of Grange Park Church. Anglican minister Charlie tells the tale.
It has been such an interesting journey for us all at Grange Park Church. What started off as a germ of an idea has become a reality in the shape of a central place where people can get together from all walks of the community for all sorts of reasons at the same time.
We have worked with many people along the way but, most recently with South Northamptonshire Council, to transform an empty shell of a building into a much-needed facility. It is the vision of Grange Park Church to follow the call of Jesus to be the good news to Grange Park and beyond – and the Kairos Centre will certainly help us in that.
As an Anglican and Baptist Church Local Ecumenical Partnership we meet together on Sunday mornings in Grange Park Community Centre in a nearby part of the village but the Kairos building, in a parade of shops opposite a doctors' surgery, is the base for our church office and coffee shop.
The Kairos Centre is not a church – it’s a place where people can have 'kairos' moments. Kairos is ancient Greek for a critical moment in time, a moment when God draws near and the opportunity to take new direction or restoration is available. Jesus uses the word in Mark to announce the drawing close of the Kingdom as he starts his ministry.
Our vision is for a place that provides facilities and a home for the existing church family, provides services and relationships with the wider community and ultimately will be home to future fresh expressions of church. We are just relaunching a café style evening service and hope to develop an after-school club fresh expression and maybe even a film church – as and when we are able.
The larger meeting room can take about 60 people and there is also a quiet room; a place where people can have 'kairos' or just find some peace from the hectic pace of life. The lounge area also has a coffee shop currently open four mornings a week as well as a small meeting room and the church office. These rooms can also be used for affordable conference/meeting facilities.
Lots of people these days are concerned that new housing areas run the risk of becoming soulless dormitory estates, but we are working hard to combat that. We also hope to develop a menu of wellbeing and lifestyle events, such as advice on debt management, counselling, social events for adults and children's and youth activities.
Looking back, and I was just coming to the end of my curacy in 2001 at St Giles Northampton when it was suggested I could maybe do a church plant in this new housing area.
I gathered a few people together but the Baptists had beaten us to it! They felt that God had called them to plant a cell church at Grange Park and we had a similar sense of calling to what God was doing so we joined forces and started to gather a team.
Just a few hundred houses had been built at the time; you could walk around the place in an hour or so and knock on every door. I joined the parish council, while my Baptist colleague helped to set up Neighbourhood Watch in the area and got involved when the primary school was being built.
Initially we were church planting with a traditional Sunday service plus small groups model rather than a fresh expression, but we were keen to connect with those who might not usually attend a traditional church and focused on young families.
To launch the first public worship, we did a holiday club type 'thing' called Kidzone. There was no building to have anything in and all the issues with child protection were getting to be a bit of a nightmare so we set up a 'camp' around one of the school playgrounds – we had lots of gazebos and each gazebo was an activity zone. Naively we thought that all the children and parents who flocked to Kidzone would also flock to church the following week. That didn't happen but what we did notice was that groups of parents would be chatting together while waiting for their children and the conversations would be along the lines of 'Where do you live?', 'O I'm just round the corner from there, come and have a coffee.' We had stumbled upon community building as a means of being good news to Grange Park!
Kidzone has continued and grown as an annual event and we usually get 400 to 500 children over three days in the last week of the summer holidays. As our aim is to be good news in the community, Kidzone is something that has worked very well in letting people know there is a church, that it is good to have it and begin to build relationships.
The other area in which we have seen very encouraging results is through the work of health care professionals. We got to know one of the health visitors and she said that all of the doctors' surgeries were over-run with depressed new mums. We suggested she use our home for appointments with the mums and so Talking Point got up and running on Thursday mornings. My wife Charlotte has been very instrumental in helping to develop something that has become phenomenally successful.
Visitors are offered tea, coffee, cake and a warm welcome. They just meet and chat in our lounge, comparing birth experiences and sleep patterns. The Health Visitors love it because they can see eight or more at a time; the mums love it because they make friends and realise they are not alone. There aren't many babies born in Grange Park that haven't been through our house!
The good news is that the Health Visitors believe Talking Point has significantly improved the mental health of struggling mums as it is a network which picks up different people. We now have various Talking Point groups in and around Grange Park. We use cell principles and organise a social night for the parents without their kids; it welds them together as a cohesive group.
Midwives in the area have also picked up on Talking Point, telling mums-to-be about it as a place to go after the birth. Things shifted again when one of the people coming along to the sessions asked about getting their baby baptised; another wanted to do an Alpha course.
The upshot of that is a group called Stepping Stones which we now run fortnightly on Tuesday mornings in the Community Centre. We make it clear that it is run by the church but it is all very informal; we offer a breakfast of croissants and orange juice for carers, mums and children, hear stories told from the Bible in creative ways, and provide a craft activity. We say it's an opportunity to take a stepping stone towards God. I would say Stepping Stones is a fresh expression of church; it has been going for nearly four years and we regularly get about 50 mums and their children.
That in turn has developed because several mums said they wanted to find out more; their children were asking questions they didn't know the answer to and the parents also thought of the Bible stories as being a 'good thing' to teach the little ones.
To meet that need, we offer a five-week introduction to Christianity course through a DVD series called Journeys. As a result, a number of people have come to faith, some continue in that faith and others disappear.
The Kairos Centre now offers further possibilities in our life together in this community. I believe God wants us to be blessed through it and in turn bless Grange Park and beyond.
