Wow, it’s been a busy couple of months and I’m feeling incredibly privileged to be in my new role as Community Pastor. There’s been lots to learn, lots of firsts and lots of exciting things happening. God is so good and I’m grateful for the opportunity to be serving our church and our community.
One of the most exciting things has been getting our Grace Advocacy ministry off the ground. We have a wonderful team of advocates from within Sutton Vineyard who completed extensive training and we’re raring to go! It’s been amazing to welcome 5 clients on Tuesdays since September, working with them all over a few Tuesdays. It’s been a mixture of challenges that our clients have needed support with and we are learning as we go, but it’s an absolute privilege to sit with clients, hear their stories and then find a way for us to step in and support them. We are building relationships with organisations in Sutton who can help us as we support our clients. Do pray for us as a team. It’s incredibly humbling to walk alongside our clients and a great way to extend the table.
In other news…..Christmas is fast approaching and as a church we would love to bless our local community! Once again we will be making hampers full of wonderful Christmas goodies to extend the table and show God’s love to the families we serve. We hope these hampers will bring some moments of joy this Christmas. We have focussed this year on creating hampers that a whole family can enjoy together, so as you can see from the photo each item is family sized so the family can share.
This year we are partnering again with Sutton Community Works and have committed to providing 75 hampers for their clients at the Community Food shop. We’d also like to extend this to all our clients that we see in our midweek community ministries. We know this will be such a blessing to them. This makes a total of 175 hampers, wow! We will be organising our hampers through small groups as we have the last few years, however if you aren’t in a small group please feel free to speak to me directly or email me on claire.dowdeswell@suttonvineyard.org to organise donating.
