Kerith Vision Fund
Helping people find their way back to God by generously giving our money to provide excellent meeting places where lives are changed
One of the things limiting our growth as a community is a lack of meeting places. That looks different on each of our sites:
- In Bracknell we have run out of space to grow on Sundays, space for midweek activities including courses and social justice, and office space for staff, volunteers and Academy students.
- In Sandhurst we need midweek space to run courses, parents and toddler groups, social justice initiatives and much more (in time as Sandhurst grows we will need a larger Sunday space, and eventually a permanent home for all that we do).
- In Windsor we plan to start meeting on Sundays in 2017 (possibly once a month initially) which will require a Sunday venue (and in time Windsor will hopefully follow a similar development path to Sandhurst).
On Tuesday night we launched our Kerith Vision Fund, with the goal of producing the finances to provide the meeting places we need. For more details take a look at my presentation from Tuesday night. We'll be talking about this more on Sundays over the next few weeks, but please take a look as it will give you a good idea of what we're intending to do on each of the sites.
As a first step we're going to have gift days on the 30th October and 6th November, with a goal of raising £200,000. This would allow us to:
- Significantly reduce the mortgage on the K2 house (currently around £180,000)
- Provide seed finance to start to redesign K2, look for a Sandhust midweek facility and identify an initial Windsor Sunday venue
- Give away £20,000 as a tithe which will go to churches we work with in other nations.
I'm asking whether there are ten people in our community with the gift of giving who could give £10,000 each, in order to give us half of the total, and then the rest of our community could take on the responsibility of giving the other half. I've already had one person come forward to give the first £10,000 which is brilliant, and would love to hear from anyone else who feels similarly inspired to give.
If you want to give before the gift days (always a huge encouragement to me as a leader) then you can do that online. We've already had people give both a one off gift, and set up regular giving, which is so exciting.
Prayer is going to be key to all this. As a first step we're going to have a week of 24/7 prayer from the 30th October to the 6th November, where we'll be praying for growth and health across every area of Kerith. We want to fill all 168 one hour slots across that week - I'll let you know when booking for the prayer room is open for November so we can start to fill those slots.
Hopefully none of us will feel anxious about this. Instead my prayer is that we'll be excited by the opportunity it presents for us to make a difference, not only in our generation but in the generations to come.
Much love,
Simon.