Cleaner: Margaret Sumner’s replacement, Stacey Blenkhorn, has been appointed. Margaret and the staff at the centre had a small celebration of her retirement. A ‘Thank You’ for her work in church will take place in a service sometime soon.
Windowsills: Regarding the lounge windowsills – with winter coming, most painters and decorators have finished outside jobs, so the windows may need to wait until spring.
Vicar’s Report: Services for the end of JSP and the Harvest Festival went well, although a storm meant for a lower than hoped for attendance at the former.
The churchyard was tidied at the weekend by a small team of volunteers and looks better for their hard work.
Children & Families Worker: The job description now has a clearer focus and will involve working within the Sunday School in addition to thinking about how we welcome and care for families. The post will include working on Sunday. We discussed the possibility for some flexibility over the number of hours and holiday entitlement. The advert will be sent to as many sources as possible, locally and potentially nationally.
Worship Pattern: Alastair proposed that from January there will be one service on the first Sunday of each month which will be a non-eucharistic all-age service, with Sunday School and choir. Karen noted that this was the most requested change in the recent audit, and the time of 10.00am was agreed.
Mission Giving: Alastair noted that we had not paid our usual subscription/mission giving for this year to Otley Christian Resources Hub and proposed that we pay our usual sum of £1000. We talked about how we might support impoverished places further as a church, perhaps by tithing our income from any church-related fundraising (e.g. for decorating or re-ordering) at 10%, with that portion being donated to help others such as the churches in Sudan. PCC members were invited to think about how they would like to see the remaining mission giving funds distributed and whether we should look more closely at tithing our future income. This will be discussed at the next PCC.
Parish Centre Co-ordinator : Alastair met with the staff at the centre to discuss the role of co-ordinator. Joyce has been doing a phenomenal job covering the work, but no volunteers have come forward in response to our advertising. Alastair proposed that we now offer this as a paid position of 8 hours with the post funded jointly by the Parish Centre and the Church. The office workers and church wardens were in favour of this approach.
Fabric Report: The glass from the East window has been removed to Cook’s workshop. The stone around the window inside the church has had paint removed allowing it to breathe and, internally the stone has been cleaned up to the hood moulding. There was less damage than feared externally, which has allowed for a better cleaning process and we are still on budget.
The heating system has been re-balanced and should be working well.
The decorator has also been contacted regarding the handrail.
AOB: Otley Parish Church have contacted us regarding a local event run by the Christian organisation, Spring Harvest. Lizzie will send an email to the PCC and any others interested and will book anyone who wishes to go. Leaflets are in the church porch.
Open Door will be a place where we can offer refills for water bottles, along with a national scheme for this. A sticker will go on the door of the centre indicating that we offer this service.
The meeting ended in the Grace.
Sally Weatherall