Everyone wins when church and community work with each other, Laurence Wareing finds

As well as the winners of the URC’s 2024 Community Project Awards (profiled in the last three issues of Reform), three other projects also benefited from a decision by the awards’ sponsors, Congregational, to invest more money in this scheme. These were the runners up, who have each received £1,000 to help expand and improve their work of community engagement.

The Open Doors TAG Café, which runs out of Dorking URC, describes itself as a ‘nucleus’ for community focused initiatives, and the same may be said for the other two commended projects – Pod Church and Community Together in Sherborne, Dorset, and Open Church in Heaton Church, Stockport. The congregations supporting these projects have each looked outwards to see how they can make a difference for members of their neighbourhoods. The results are quite different but, as Dorking’s church community worker Chris Currie puts it, the task is to ‘listen, look, and sense what opportunities there are’…

The closing date for the 2025 United Reformed Church Community Project Awards, sponsored by Congregational, will be 21 February 2025. See urc.org.uk/awards for details

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This is an extract from an article published in the December 2024/January 2025 edition of Reform

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