We have a large student population who are actively involved in the church and who we meet up with regularly and share the good news of Jesus with as part of our student ministry.

We often host events run by the Christian Union and support Chaplaincy.

We love to support the Chaplaincy team at the RHCH and have a really good relationship with the hospice next door. We host their annual ‘Light up a Life‘ service every Christmas.

We also offer bereavement support and visit those in both institutions.

We regularly contribute towards Sunday services for the prisoners as well as providing Prison Pastors to lend a listening ear. We also send a team to run Alpha in the Chapel.

We love writing cards to every prisoner at Christmas & give hampers to the staff.

We visit two local care homes every month to run a short service of worship, hear scripture read and pray together. We love to get to know the residents and have a natter after the service.

We also visit individuals pastorally in their rooms for a chat & a pray.

We send teams to different locations to deliver the Nurturing Programme, a 10-week course for parents. They teach about child development & parenting well.

This course is designed to build and sustain emotional health and relationships.

The chaplaincy visit many of the shops and workplaces in the City as well as the City Council, the Bus Station, the Police and the Law Court to provide a listening ear for those who need to talk.

They simply listen and signpost to help available from other organisations.

Several of our congregation volunteer with Street Pastors, helping to increase the safety and care of people at night in the city. They go out every weekend and are supported by Prayer Pastors.

As well as being out on the streets, they’ve recently launched ‘Schools Pastors’

We have committed to the A Rocha Eco Church Award Scheme. The scheme enables us to continuously assess our current efforts and activities across all aspects of church life: our worship and teaching, management of our church building and land, our community and global engagement and our personal lifestyles. The scheme also gives us clear direction on how to improve the ways that we care for God’s earth and reduce the environmental impact of our collective behaviours.

We have recently replaced the lighting in both the church and the upstairs rooms with LED lights that use 90% less energy. This provides several immediate improvements: it cuts our energy usage so reducing our fuel costs, it removes the need for older types of bulbs that contain harmful chemicals , and it saves money and resources because the new LED bulbs have a much longer lifespan than older style bulbs.

We will soon be installing solar panels on the church roof to start generating our own energy and reduce our carbon footprint further. These will cost in the region of £10-15k but will yield us a return of well over £100k over the lifetime of the panels. We will be the first parish church in the Diocese to install solar panels!

With so many people visiting the church over the course of a week, we provide a lot of refreshments from the kitchen and we do a lot of cleaning. So we make sure that we stock fairtrade products wherever possible – especially our tea and coffee. We also buy environmentally friendly cleaning products so they contain no harsh environment-damaging chemicals. Our cleaning cloths and mops are washable to reduce the amount of non-recyclable products we throw away. We can do better – and the next step is to ensure that our consumables fulfil all the LOAF requirement: local, organically grown, animal friendly and fairly traded.

Since 2020, the church’s food waste has been separately collected so that if we do have any leftover food products that cannot be used – such as coffee grounds and teabags, these are sent to an anaerobic digestion plant to be turned into green biogas energy. This reduces the amount of compostable rubbish going to landfill.

We look to bulk buy and avoid single-use plastics as much as possible but where we cannot, we continue to improve the ways that we recycle. We ensure that we separate our waste as fully as possible and now that local supermarkets provide soft plastics recycling, we separate out bread and fruit bags, crisp packets and biscuits wrappers and take them for recycling so they don’t contribute to landfill.

We encourage everyone in the congregation to be environmentally mindful of their own lifestyle choices. There are so many ways that we can all contribute to saving our planet, from where we spend our money, to how and where we travel, to choices we make around personal consumption and how we lobby our government and wider organisations to improve the environmental impact of our legislation and regulations. A good place to start is by signing up to the creationcare.org.uk website where you can review your own household focus on caring for God’s world and find lots of great information on how to be more environmentally aware and proactive.