With no space for the community to meet, have a coffee and chat in Madley Park, a small group of people from nearby St Mary’s Cogges, and living on the estate, started a free cafe to bring local people together.
The community cafe is open in the morning every second Sunday of the month at Madley Park Hall, on the north eastern side of Witney. Volunteers supply and serve free cake and hot drinks to the community, there is a craft and games table for children, and more recently one of the local residents has started a jigsaw exchange. It is a free space, meaning that it is accessible to everyone.
Margaret Biddlecombe and three other volunteers from St Mary’s spent time praying and discerning where God wanted to work in Madley and to find a way they could rebuild a sense of community that had been lost during the pandemic:
“We held the first community cafe in September and have grown our numbers to around 30 people every month with a mixture of church and non-churchgoers, families, and older people. Several local mums with young children really suffered during the lockdowns and have feared going out and meeting others, so the cafe has been a simple way they could begin to rebuild their connections.”
The Revd Andy McCulloch, Curate at St Mary’s Cogges, shares the aims of the cafe:
“We want to provide a space where all are welcomed personally, and local people can meet and form new friendships with their neighbours. We hope that by having a new visible church presence on the estate we can build bridges between the church and people in the community.
“The project is lay led by a group of fantastic volunteers. As a grassroots project, we recognise that it will evolve slowly, but this enables us to create a sustainable project which can exist for the long term. In the future we are planning to develop the discipleship aspect to the project and start a new missional community group from it where people can explore faith and bring the good news to people.”
A resourcing hub
St Mary’s Cogges is the first ‘market town’ resourcing hub in the Diocese of Oxford, planting a number of fresh expressions of church, equipping rural church mission and supporting church and congregation planting in the Cotswolds and beyond. Every second Sunday of the month at St Mary’s, the main morning service is paused, and the time is used to facilitate mission across different areas of the deanery.
Growing new congregations
The Madley community cafe is one of a number of Greenhouse projects in the St Mary’s Cogges resourcing hub and part of the common vision focus area of growing new congregations in the diocese. Greenhouse projects help us grow new worshipping communities of all shapes and sizes, acting as support communities for small teams of people from different parishes who want to see people from outside the church community come to know Jesus.