December 2012 – Hope for Belper

Hope hampers add Christmas cheer

The Hope team were together again for Christmas Hamper packing on the weekend of the 8th December. In previous years, folks from the town lead by the Community Church have been out on a pre-Christmas shopping spree to put together a number of family Christmas hampers for families across the town who would otherwise struggle to celebrate in the traditional manner.

This year with extra funding from the Baptist congregation and the Community Church, Hope have been able to partner with the Belper Family Centre to supply 15 hampers this Christmas.

Most of us take for granted the ability to be able to put some kind of a festive feast on the table, but this is not necessarily the case for all our neighbours across Belper.

The Children’s Centre identified 15 families with whom they have had significant contact over the past year and for whom hosting a family Christmas day would be, to say the least, financially problematic. It is for these families that Hope were able to be a significant blessing this Christmas, by delivering a hamper of goodies including traditional favourites such as Yule logs, Christmas puds and stuffing etc along with a £20 Howarth’s meat voucher.

A great time was also had by all those spending time together on the Saturday, shopping and packing the colourful festive hampers. We pray that we all will continue to have compassion over 2013 towards those who are struggling financially in our community.

Time to catch up at Winter food festival

Belper’s 2nd Winter Food Festival went ahead with nearly double the number of stall holders participating – we enjoyed a very cold spell of seasonal weather that weekend, but it certainly didn’t stop neighbours from across the town and beyond, wrapping up and coming out to browse and enjoy meeting up with old friends.

In our busy lives, these communal dates in the calendar are certainly great opportunities not just to enjoy all that local traders and producers have to offer, but also a time to connect maybe even just once a year with old friends, catching up with their news in a kind of face to face round robin replacement! There is something that feels quite medieval about such a street scene.

The children’s activities that Hope for Belper provided were very busily taken up, especially over the morning and due to the nature of some of the craft options to hand meant that we were able to have some good conversations with parents – plenty of interest was shown in the display materials, with special interest in developments to both the Street Angels and The Basic Idea projects.

Personally, I fulfilled one of my ambitions, which was meeting someone who lives well ok, works) in Halfway in Sheffield – never take the tram it only promises to take you ‘Halfway’!

A message of Hope – five years on!

It is now five years since the first post on the then newly-launched Hope for Belper blog went live and H4B officially came into being.

Since then, it has grown from a small group of Christians praying and planning to a partnership of eight churches alongside schools, the Town Council, local police and many friends and neighbours.

More than 50 volunteers are regularly involved in delivering the two main projects, ‘The Basic Idea’ and ‘Street Angels’ with more interest being shown all the time.

Over 30 separate projects or events have been facilitated by Hope over the years, with more than 70 young people attending Dreamschemes, in excess of 400 children and parents enjoying a film at the Ritz, over 3,000 cups of hot chocolate given away and around 350 families provided with crisis food boxes.

Hope for Belper chair Gareth Greenwood said: “It has been a remarkable five years and (almost) entirely an absolute joy! It has felt like a town coming even closer together and a local church embracing an opportunity to love, and love being a part of its community.

“Hope for Belper has been and is an amazing opportunity for the local church to act in unity bringing the Gospel alive in our town; God’s Spirit is achieving much through this generative friendship. The message of the Gospel is one of grace and reconciliation spanning out of the millennia. Five years is actually a very small jot in the expanse of time, so we can look forward to enjoying bringing Hope to Belper for a long while yet.”

Here’s a pictorial reminder of some of the projects we have undertaken in the course of those five years from our very first project – handing out cups of hot chocolate in the Market Place on New Year’s Eve 2007.

What they all have in common is an element of celebration and a strong sense of community and shared experience.