The children's mural over the door says this is somewhere different. The pictures of "messy church" in the brightly coloured annual report tell the same story. And as the steel band nostalgia music of Pantastic starts up, you know that this is not your average Saturday morning church coffee morning.
It's the annual report coffee morning of the Grindon Church Community Project. Grindon is the newest of the six United Reformed Churches in the Sunderland area, having opened just fifty years ago in November 1957 on the new estate which welcomed people from urban clearance areas closer to the town centre. The intervening years have seen many ups and downs in both church and community; but things certainly began to look up with the establishment of the Community Project and commissioning of a Church Related Community worker in 2003.
The Project's annual report that was on every table in the hall in fact, as CRCW Helen Stephenson confessed, covers two years. Within that two year period Helen had been off on maternity leave, and then returned to find the projects that she had helped to set up were now going from strength. Her part of the report speaks of moving over this time from "settling and seeing" to "growth and development" - and that development has included the Craft Course run by WEA, the Grindon Family Zone (responsible for that outside mural), and now the church fellowship's own contribution in the form of Messy Church.
Messy Church is currently replacing traditional Sunday morning service once a month. People from all age groups and with different degrees of affiliation to the church gather for an afternoon of arts and crafts, worship, celebration and food. In Helen's words, "The concept appeals because it allows us to move further as church and community together."
The past year has also seen the revival of Rock Solid, run in association with Youth for Christ once a month for 11 year olds and above, and also the involvement of new community groups - including the noisy and enthusiastic Pantastic, whose leader appealed to the coffee drinkers to join the band.
Helen's brief welcome to everyone, and thanks to all who support the Grindon project, led to the presentation of flowers to the retiring Chair of the Project, Christine Hutchinson, and her replacement, Helen Sinclair. Both are serving elders of other churches in the Partnership, and a a reminder that what is done at Grindon is to be seen as part of the mission of the whole Church.
Christine's report focused on that wider dimension as she reflected on the findings of the Church in Taiwan, who seemed to discover much the same as people at Grindon:-
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